Product Management 2.0: Smart Help Systems

I recently gave the keynote presentation at the AIPMM 2007 PMEC (Product Management Education Conference), and the topic was Product Management 2.0. In it I summed up where Product Management is as a discipline and added some ideas about where it might be headed in the future. I'll be sharing some of these ideas in this blog over the coming months and would love to get some feedback and opinions.

The first topic is smart help systems. Why don't help systems keep track of all of the most popular searches, questions and topics and then provide information back to the Product Manager about what is being asked? Imagine if you could have a detailed report that showed what capabilities people are asking for (both the ones already in the product and the ones not yet part of it). This would take user interface design to the next level, and would also give us all much better insight into use cases for our products. To that end, why not have a simple survey built into the help system that is on all the time (similar to what the folks at Orasi offer) so that you can ask users to quickly rank possible new features?

It's possible this is already being implemented by Google, eBay and others, since the web-based nature of their help systems allows for capturing the data and aggregating it. If not, I certainly hope that they and others (are you listening Microsoft?) build an efficient engine and let the software world out there tap into it. Maybe there is even a market for someone to build this for SaaS offerings? Does anyone know of any efforts like this that are underway?