How to collect customer requirements

Collecting requirements from customers is a skillset. On the outside, it seems easy. Simply close your mouth and open your ears and listen...right? Well...not quite. Because we all suffer from this little problem called structural fixedness.

Structural Fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person's ability to view objects, concepts, or problems in ways other than their traditional use or form. Essentially, it's the mental constraint that prevents someone from thinking "outside the box" or seeing new possibilities for how something can function or be repurposed.

So, in effect, listening to your customers essentially tend to only provide feedback within the constraints of your current solution. And so what tends to happen when you collect customer feedback is that you get a list of ways that you can improve upon the current user experience of the application. If you spend all of your time on these requirements, eventually, you end up falling behind your competition and struggle to bring on new clients.

So, how do you lift your head from this and keep moving forward? There are two important questions to bring with you when collecting requirements.

1. What are you looking to accomplish? Usually you can express this in several ways, but your intent is to find the deeper business outcome with this question. What business outcome are they seeking?
2. Why? Really what you are looking for here is a deeper discussion about why they are providing the feedback. Again, attempting to understand the reasoning behind the change that they are requesting to the application.

Digging deeper on both of those questions when talking to the clients will actually uncover the deeper need that the customer is trying to express. Which will allow you to work on solving problems and not just fixing features.

Remember that taking feedback from clients is a conversation. As a product manager, you are not just taking orders and redefining them into Agile requirements. Your core role as a product manager is to properly define the problem that the clients are trying to solve for. If you can get there, then you have a way to help your company stay on top of the market.