I will always choose to go out and interact.

One piece of paper with a prospect’s name and a few questions can communicate that you care about their perspective and have given some thought to making it a productive 10-20 minute conversation (if they want to talk longer you should let them, but you should be able to finish a short conversation in ten minutes or so).

In the early market this is can cause problems when interviewing prospects: focus on one conversation at a time. Don’t let one prospect’s perspective who speaks first on a topic inadvertently anchor the group somewhere. Instead ask open ended questions and listen, prepared to be surprised.

Consider an appreciative inquiry approach to understand the customer’s operating reality.

Customer groups are effective for feature planning but more problematic in determining product/market fit in the early market.

By the way, I visited your website and have no idea who is behind it or why I should trust your firm with a repository of confidential conversations. You really should put up an about page and explain who the team is and why they are trustworthy.

We live in an information society, work with information technology, sometimes call ourselves information workers, yet never really pay heed to understanding and truly using information across our organizations. Too often “systems” or “applications” are implement to “share” information, but without an information culture, all those tools will be of little use.

I’ve blogged about this concept myself. I call it an Information Supply Chain.

http://onproductmanagement.net/2008/01/11/product-manager-vs-product-management-part-4/