How to connect back to your customers

If, like me, it takes a real dedicated effort to really understand customers' requirements and get quantitative and qualitative feedback (ie saying 'No' to lots of other things!), then this list of mechanisms from Product Focus is a good refresher, plus some new techniques that I wasn't aware of

1. Roadmap reviews –  face to face interview with customers
2. Focus groups – facilitated sessions to get in-depth insights about your product
3. Implementation and operational reviews - in-depth discussions about how your product works
4. Customer Surveys - invite your customers to give their views through online and product surveys 
5. User groups and user conferences - bring customers together to talk and listen
6. Observation – watch how customers behave    
7. Product usage analysis - get information from your product on how it’s being used  
8. Prototypes and Scrum product demos - let customers give feedback about your product as it’s being built
9. Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) - a structured questioning techniqueto understanding customer needs   
10. Kano analysis – how to decide what’s important for your next release
11. Conjoint analysis – using statistics to uncover customer preferences
12. Innovation games – using games to uncover customer requirements