Ideas, Customers and Users | Product Managment

All products were once ideas born out of a need. These ideas have passed through certain stages and turned into products.

Where do Ideas come from?

Ideas can come from anywhere, internally or externally. Product Managers’ job is to choose the right idea and the right time to develop the product.

There 4 main sources that ideas come from:

Employees, Metrics, Users, Clients

1. Employees: Coworkers, management and yourself
2. Metrics: Problems and inefficiencies you find when you’re looking into how users use the product
3. Users: User feedbacks from Internet,emails, social media
4. Clients: This applies primarily to B2B product managers. In the rest of the article, I will talk about the main differences between Users and Clients

You know there is some different Product Management role depending the company’s area. Depending the Product Management role, ideas might come from different sources like this:

• Internal Product Manager: Stakeholders
• Business to Consumer PM: Users, metrics, coworkers
• Business to Business PM: Employees, clients

Users vs Customers

Sometimes, the people who pay for your product (customers) are not the same people that use it (users).

The significant difference between Users and Customers appears in the B2B business models.

When a business sells the product that they build to the different company. An example, a social media management product. Marketing managers in the company that bought the product will reviewed the product and will assign its sub-units to use the product. For example, Marketing manager will appoint a socail media manager.

The company that buys the product will give you feedback about general features that they need it to have.

the actual users will give you feedback about technical issues they encounter while acutally using the product

Note : These are the notes that i wrote while i learning product management