According to some practitioners of VoC, they will tell you that the entire product development team is responsible for VoC, that it takes a cross-functional team to sustain the integrity of VoC for the duration of the product cycle. They will put the responsibility on a cross-functional core team, tiger team, or VoC steering committee of 5–7 individuals from marketing, engineering, manufacturing, service and repair, and finance to ensure that the VoC is obtained, processed, and included in your new product.

While I applaud their desire to make sure that VoC is everyone's responsibility, what I have found in most organizations is that when something is "everyone's responsibility", no one ends up being "responsible".

I believe the responsibility of VoC falls squarely on whoever is responsible for product management. That could be a product manager, it could be a product marketing manager, or it could be a marketing manager. It could also be the owner of the business, depending on how big the organization is. The point is, when you are responsible for the product, you are responsible for the product research that includes VoC.

But that does not mean that the rest of the organization can ignore VoC, nor does it mean that only the product manager can play a role in the VoC. What it means is that the product manager is the quarterback in ensuring that the VoC is obtained and included into the product. He/she must organize the activities within the organization to ensure that VoC is being collected and incorporated into the product decisions. He/she must be the one to "sell" the validity of the VoC to the senior staff and the engineering team. He/she must also be the one to bring in other people from other disciplines and make them experience the customer input, which will greatly speed the development process, and make it more likely that a successful product is created. I will talk about this more in Chapter 6, The Interview Process – The Interview, but a huge discovery for me was how much better a development team could perform if you made the engineering team participate in each and every one of the interviews in the interview process. Ultimately, the product manager must be the customer "champion" throughout the development!