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A lot of companies seem to forget they have a whole team, and sometimes more than one, whose whole job is to talk to customers. Maybe you have one whose job is

by smeej 3y ago

A lot of companies seem to forget they have a whole team, and sometimes more than one, whose whole job is to talk to customers. Maybe you have one whose job is to convince new people to be customers. Maybe you have one who helps your customers with the parts of your product that are so broken or unintuitive that people have to ask a human for help when they get stuck. Maybe you have one whose job is to keep your customers happy enough to renew their contracts. I can guarantee these people are frustrated up to their eyeballs that nobody gives any weight to the feedback they have about the product. Their whole job is to understand the customer experience, and feature development is planned by teams of people who don't even use the product themselves, never mind do they know how thousands of people use it. You're sitting on a gold mine of insight about your customers. Ask the people you hired to talk to them what they need.

drsim 3y ago
Yes. And be sure to follow up with a robust customer interview to discover the why. Executing a customer interview discovers the why behind feature requests. If you leave it at the Sales and CS level you can end up with requests like I want to export to Excel. Sure, build that feature, but you risk missing the bigger picture. Why does the customer want to do that? What’s their pain/problem/opportunity/JTBD? You may uncover it is to integrate with another system, to give their boss a report, or to do some data analysis. As a PM your job is to not build what customers are asking for, it is to solve the underlying need in line with your product vision and company strategy.
- smeej 3y ago
  There's a big difference between "a customer asked for this once" and "people need actual human help to accomplish X, because it's not working nearly as well as we advertise it to work, and we're spending a huge chunk of our time compensating for a design flaw with human intervention."

by smeej 3y ago

drsim 3y ago

Yes. And be sure to follow up with a robust customer interview to discover the why. Executing a customer interview discovers the why behind feature requests. If you leave it at the Sales and CS level you can end up with requests like I want to export to Excel. Sure, build that feature, but you risk missing the bigger picture. Why does the customer want to do that? What’s their pain/problem/opportunity/JTBD? You may uncover it is to integrate with another system, to give their boss a report, or to do some data analysis. As a PM your job is to not build what customers are asking for, it is to solve the underlying need in line with your product vision and company strategy.

smeej 3y ago
There's a big difference between "a customer asked for this once" and "people need actual human help to accomplish X, because it's not working nearly as well as we advertise it to work, and we're spending a huge chunk of our time compensating for a design flaw with human intervention."