{"id":934,"date":"2008-09-28T12:05:04","date_gmt":"2008-09-28T19:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.plm.automation.siemens.com\/t5\/Siemens-PLM-Corporate-Blog\/Getting-Input\/ba-p\/333782"},"modified":"2026-03-26T11:03:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T15:03:35","slug":"getting-input","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/getting-input\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Input"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><P><\/P><P>When one of my friends asks me what I do at Siemens and I know they have seen the movie  <A href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Office_Space\" title=\"Office Space\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Office Space<\/A>, I\u2019ll say, \u201cI take the specifications from the customer and bring them to the software engineers\u201d. <\/P><BR \/><BR \/><P> It would be nice if I could just take an email (or fax) from a customer, forward it to the software engineer and have them implement it in the next release.&nbsp; Unfortunately, there are many more inputs to this equation. Some things we have to think about are:<\/P><BR \/><BR \/><UL><BR \/><LI>What do current customers want?<BR \/><UL><BR \/><LI> Is this customer a full time user of our software, an occasional user, a manager, a business owner or an  IT manager?<BR \/> <\/LI><LI>How do you balance conflicting requirements from customers? Even users with the exact same job may have different ideas on how something should work.<BR \/><\/LI><\/UL><BR \/><\/LI><LI><P>What do prospective customers want?<BR \/><\/P><UL><BR \/><LI>Like any other business, we want to expand our market.<BR \/><\/LI><LI> What do the folks in the field (sales,&nbsp; training, marketing, application engineers) dealing with new and potential cusotmers everday say are good things? What do they say we should work on?<BR \/><\/LI><\/UL><BR \/><\/LI><LI><P>What new engineering, software, or hardware innovations can we take advantage of or even create in our product? Which ones do we need to prepare for?<BR \/><\/P><UL><BR \/><LI>These are the hard ones because it requires some future prediction.<BR \/> <\/LI><LI> Big innovations tend to be disruptive. How do we balance gain with impact to the customer?<BR \/><\/LI><\/UL><BR \/><\/LI><\/UL><BR \/><BR \/><P>We have processes in place for taking all these inputs and (hopefully) optimizing for the best possible product but as you see, its a bit more compliated that just forwarding email or taking a fax to a developer (note: I don\u2019t think we use faxes anymore\u2026that is just from the movie).<\/P><BR \/><BR \/><P>Now I\u2019m sure at least one person out there reading this is saying, \u201cThis is all nice, but all I really want is this little tweak to Solid Edge to make it better for me\u201d. Or, \u201cI\u2019ve got some great idea for your product.&nbsp; How do I get it to you?\u201d&nbsp; <A href=\"http:\/\/siemens.pmhclients.com\/index.php\/site\/getting-input\/\" title=\"I\u2019ll talk about this next blog.\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">I\u2019ll talk about this next blog.<\/A><BR \/><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When one of my friends asks me what I do at Siemens and I know they have seen the movie  Office Space, I\u2019ll say, \u201cI take the specifications from the customer and bring them to the software engineers\u201d&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54987,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54987"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":935,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}