There is a good discussion going on at the Ask A Good Product Manager blog run by Jeff Lash on the topic of how a Product Manager who doesn’t have direct access to customers can gather feedback to help define product requirements. Adam Bullied (of Write That Down blog) has a great, detailed post on this.
We agree with Adam’s points in his post about the importance of getting customer feedback. We are very strong believers in getting direct customer feedback, and using it to drive product requirements & feature enhancements. As a matter of fact, our own product roadmap for Accompa is >80% driven by direct feature requests from our customers.