Steve Johnson & Barbara Nelson Product managers need to intimately understand their markets in order to be effective. They must know the customer better than they know themselves. Yet meetings and administrivia fill their schedules. What's needed is a challenge for product managers to visit customers with specific tasks and tips to get started.

About the author:
Steve Johnson and Barbara Nelson are experts on product management and marketing in high-tech companies. They work for Pragmatic Marketing as instructors for the top-rated courses “Practical Product Management” and “Requirements That Work” as well as onsite workshops. Both have trained thousands of marketing professionals at hundreds of technology companies in the US and around the world. They are top-rated speakers at many marketing and technology conferences and authors of many articles on technology product management. Steve is the webmaster of http://www.ProductMarketing.com, a free resource for product managers.