Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Customer feedback in Barcelona

Last week, the 2008 European WebSphere Technical Conference and the 2008 European Transaction & Messaging Conference were held in Barcelona.

From 2008-November-Barcelona


Yes, there are worse things than spending a week in Barcelona. I've never been there before, and I definitely needed at least another week to see everything I wanted to see.

From 2008-November-Barcelona


I was there to run our Customer Feedback Program, which is a new track that debuted last spring at Impact 2008. The idea is that at most IBM conferences, the attendees naturally spend most of the week listening to IBMers speak. Where are we headed? What's new in the products? What's our newest three letter acronym? We wanted to turn this around and have sessions where the customers do the talking and the IBMers do the listening.

From 2008-November-Barcelona


These are small roundtable sessions with a couple of IBMers (usually a technical architect, designer, and/or product manager) and around four customers. After the sessions, we consistently hear from customers that they are the most valuable sessions of the week from their perspective, and the IBMers always walk away with great feedback about our products.

From 2008-November-Barcelona


We're trying to make these customer feedbacks sessions a staple for all of our conferences - so the next time you attend a conference (like Impact 2009 at the Venetion in Las Vegas) look for the feedback sessions. It's time well spent.

And if you ever get an opportunity to go to Barcelona, take it!

But watch out for the pigeons...
From 2008-November-Barcelona

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