It’s common sense that products need to satisfy customers expectations and needs. But how to know about those? It’s natural to sit with your first 5 customers, but how to manage the customer engagement with a growing number of customers, growing number of products, customers in all regions of the world? The sessions describes how SAPs approach for engaging with customers matured over time, into a systematic approach for involving customers in strategic discussions and development of new products / product versions, as well as feeding experience from usage of the software back into product improvements. Legal aspects are covered, as well as newest processes to cope with challenges from Cloud customers.

Dr. Guido Menkhaus and Dr. Heinz Haefner – SAP SE
Dr. Guido Menkhaus received a diploma degree in computer science and chemistry from the University of Bielefeld, Germany and a PhD from the University of Salzburg, Austria. At that time he was working on neural networks, image recognition and adaptive user interfaces. He then developed billing systems for telecommunication companies and provided consulting for software intensive systems in the automotive industry before he moved his focus to customer centric supply chain planning in the retail industry for SAF and SAP. Guido Menkhaus is a lecturer and trainer in the field of software engineering and software product management.

Dr. Heinz Haefner has a PhD in business economics from the University of Mannheim, Germany. He joined SAP in 1991 and worked in software product management and line management positions. His career led to him being the SVP responsible for Customer Engagement. He serves as a lecturer at several German universities.