The Product Team or
Our Product Team
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There's a difference between using "the" and "our".
"Our" is personal. Part of a tribe. A feeling of belonging.
"The" is distant. Them. Those people. Almost cold.
Years ago, I started a new job as head of product. Part of my mandate was to instill good product management.
Throughout my meet-and-greet tour, I heard the same thing over and over:
"The Product Managers don't understand our customers."
From Sales. From Marketing. From Customer Success. From Client Implementation. From Support. From Operations. From Engineering. From Finance. From HR. Heck, even from the Office Manager.
At one point, I half expected the janitor to say this to me.
Fast forward almost a year later, and this is what I heard:
"Our Product Managers totally get our customers."
Did you pick up on the difference?
"The" vs "our".
It's not just a feeling. Let's talk real impact:
- $5M of customer revenue migrated to a new platform in 9 months.
- $5M in additional new customer accounts booked on the new platform.
- A new version of our B2B2C mobile app launched. 100% of users migrated.
- A new B2B mobile app launched with adoption rates exceeding goal.
- A total of 170 customer impacting items released in less than 2 months.
Impressive results.
All because of 1 fundamental change.
We prioritized customer engagement.
Why Customer Engagement Matters
I'm always surprised by how many product teams don't spend time engaging with customers. Both existing customers and prospective ones.
Or, sometimes, I'll find they're mainly getting tactical, low order feedback from daily users - low level requirements, bug fixes, button colors, etc.
They're not getting - and worse - not seeking business impacting insights.
(Often times, they don't know the difference between users and buyers!)
How are we supposed to make our product better if we're not doing that?
If we're not engaging with our customers, we're just guessing what they want. And guessing is not how great products are built.
I recently spoke with a Chief Product Officer who made his team do a review of all features launched in the previous 12 months. He wanted to identify how many features had a net impact on the company.
They found 75% was waste.
Direct insights from customers allow us to adjust our priorities to solve the right problems.
This allows us to do everything from devise better solutions, optimize pricing, better position ourselves against competitors, and get our messaging right.
I give a bit of a pass to newly minted PMs. Most were previously in an engineer, business systems analyst, project manager, designer, or some other technical role. They just moved into a PM role, so are still learning the ropes.
This is where their manager needs to help them with mentorship and coaching.
But, sadly, I've met experienced PMs (and "product owners") who spend barely any time with customers.
This is appalling.
Barriers
Back at that new job, I spent time with the PMs who now reported to me. I wanted to understand their point of view.
Why weren't they spending time with customers?
"We don't have access to them."
Elaborate:
"We have to go through the sales and customer teams, and they never want to invite us to a customer call unless it's to do a technical demo or for a technical call."
Culture
I relayed this back to certain key stakeholders. Here's what I heard back:
- "We've had them on customer calls before. They don't know how to have customer conversations."
- "On sales calls, they get too deep into the technical weeds too fast."
- "They speak in a lot of technical jargon, which goes over our customers' heads. It goes over my head!"
- "They go too deep into features, which leaves our customers confused. Our Customer Success team does a much better job of showing how our product solves customers' problems."
- "They're always quick to say no, or point out how something can't be done or is too complicated to do. Our customers are looking to us to provide solutions! If we can't show how we can solve their problems, why would they want to do business with us?"
- "They get flustered the moment a customer asks a curve ball question."
- "I don't like to invite them, because I don't want to risk the customer relationship."
I then got to see this in action first hand (after begging one customer team to invite the PMs to a customer call).
Yep, they were right. My PMs were bad on customer calls.
Root Problem
On the one hand, there was a hunger across the organization for the PM team to be customer-centric.
But past experienced had caused them to stop inviting the PMs to customer calls.
On the other hand, the PMs faced organizational roadblocks in getting access to customers.
They also needed guidance on how to properly engage with customers.
Two sides of the same coin.
Action
To solve this double-sided problem, I pursued a 5 step plan.
1. Set Customer Engagement as a Goal
One of my responsibilities was to establish KPIs for the department that aligned with the company goals.
Knowing how imperative it was for my PMs to get exposure to customers, I set the following goals:
- Participate in 5 roadmap conversations with customers per quarter.
- Each PM participates in 2 demos a month.
- Each PM visits 1 customer on-site per quarter.
Note that these goals included me as well. I had to walk the talk.
I aligned these under the company's bookings objective. The rationale was simple:
- We were a growth company.
- Growth was mainly to come from acquiring new customers.
- Winning those customers required development of many new solutions.
- So, the more the PMs engaged with customers, the more likely we'd develop customer-centric roadmaps and solutions that would help win that new business, resulting in increased bookings.
The executive committee loved this and were highly supportive. I had two asks:
- Budget for the onsite visits. The COO approved the budget.
- Support for championing the team getting access to customers.
Given the cultural resistance within the organization to inviting the PMs to customer calls, the second ask was important to have available as an escalation path.
To track progress, I created a simple Google Sheet where the PMs could log their customer interactions. Every month, I reported progress back to the executive committee.
2. Advocacy & Empowerment
I shared these goals broadly across the organization. Everyone understood the value of the PMs engaging with customers. This wasn't a hard sell.
The resistance was based on the PMs' historical performance on customer calls.
Advertising it as an official goal being tracked at the executive level, did 2 things:
- It told everyone that Product Management was committed to walking the talk on being customer-focused.
- It made it more difficult for any group or person to be an obstacle to making it happen.
This empowered the PMs when they reached out to the customer teams to for invitations. They could point to these goals.
For added support and air cover, I championed these goals with my counterpart cross-departmental heads. Getting this alignment was crucial to head off any resistance my PMs could have faced from individuals on their teams.
This also created a helpful escalation path:
- If a PM faced intransigence from a customer team member, they could escalate it to me. Leveraging my relationship with their boss, I'd then reach out to solicit their help.
- Failing that, I had multiple executives I could escalate the issue to.
- Since progress was being reported in our monthly executive updates, that provided another opportunity to ask for help.
This created a blanket of support for the PMs. They had the goals. They had my backing. And they had broad management support all the way up to the executive level.
3. Expectations
It was important to set the right expectations with the customer teams for these engagements:
- They were not meant to be requirements gathering sessions - as in, "Tell us what you want us to build."
- No delivery commitments would be made on these calls unless it was about something that was currently in development and had a committed date.
- No promises would be made live to adding something to the roadmap.
- Every request would be taken through our Request Intake and Triage Process and our Roadmap Planning Cycle.
- The later PM was brought into customer threads, the more we may have to backtrack over older discussions so the PMs could have the right context. (Avoid folks "throwing requests over the wall.")
4. Lose the Battle, Win the War
Sales and Customer Success were using our CRM system to record all customer calls. Sales maintained a calendar of upcoming customer demos. I wanted my team to get access to these.
I had to make some compromises, though.
Our CRM had limited seats. I was the only one in my team who was able to get access.
So, I dedicated 1-2 hours every 2 weeks to listening in on recorded customer calls. This helped me be customer-focused. Furthermore, if there was one in particular I thought would be valuable for my PMs, I'd have to request the ability to download it from the Sales Ops team. Then I'd share the downloaded recording with the PMs.
Every few weeks, I'd also download the latest customer and sales report from the CRM and share it with my PMs.
For the demo calendar, I asked for read-only access for my PMs and offered that they would then be responsible for asking to be invited to any sales demos.
Instead, for reasons I still don't understand to this day, those responsible for managing the calendar offered one of their team members to email my team a list of upcoming demos on a weekly basis.
Feels like more work for your team. But, ok, if that's what you want to do, cool. (I guess it made them feel like they had a measure of control.)
Fortunately, I was able to wrangle read-only access for myself. That visibility allowed me to alert my team to any important upcoming demos.
Finally, I offered to the Sales team that, unless PM was to be officially part of a demo call, the PMs would participate as "flies on the wall" - A/V mute. The Sales team could mention to the customer, "We have members of our Product team listening in on this call," for transparency. This approach was agreeable to them.
These compromises were necessary in the short-term to build credibility and momentum. Over time, they were relaxed and we made it better. Lose the battle, win the war.
5. Training
There was limited to no training budget for the PM team, unfortunately. This meant more direct engagement by me in terms of mentorship and coaching.
(Frankly, I would have done this anyway even if we had a training budget. It was part of my job as team leader.)
- We would discuss expectations prior to important customer calls.
- Debrief post-call.
- I held brown bag sessions where I shared my customer interview tactics.
- Allocated time during our team meetings for the PMs to share tactics and learnings with each other.
- Provided constant feedback via formal 1:1s and informally.
Each PM was also required to document their key learnings after each customer engagement and share them in our team Slack channel.
That generated a lot of the right customer-oriented conversations within the team.
And it gave me a pulse check on their growth and another avenue for me to provide guidance.
Finally, I joined them on the calls so they could see me use the strategies to illicit the right kinds of customer insights, as well as to demonstrate the expected behavior with customers.
In Conclusion
Are you "The Product team" or "Our Product team"?
When you actually spend time talking to customers, you're going to have a much better chance at building products that people really want and that will drive business outcomes that matter.
The tough part? You have to execute on it.
Product Leaders need to champion and empower their teams' ability to engage with customers. Not just leave it to the PMs to figure out how.
- Advocate for it. Promote for it. Fight for it.
- Create the relevant relationships, structures, systems, and channels for their PMs to be able to do this.
- Support, coach, mentor, and train their PMs on best practices.
- Advertise the impact of this customer engagement across the org.
Failure to do this is a dereliction of duty.
Product Managers need to be accountable for engaging with customers.
Certainly, leadership and cross-organizational support helps.
But don't wait for that.
Sometimes it takes asking, pushing, and shoving. Be resourceful. Get guerilla, if necessary.
Advertise how many customer interactions you've had in the last year, quarter, month, week.
Just imagine - if you have just 4 customer interactions in a month, you'll have had 48 in a year.
I promise you will see a difference in how you think about your work.
If you need help on how to engage with customers, download my Customer Discovery Toolkit. It gives you the customer discovery tactics I've used to grow my products to $100M+. A complete playbook of practical and immediately implementable strategies to develop your own game plan to extract maximum customer insights. Download it here.
That's how you shift the conversation from "the Product team" to "our Product team".
What are you waiting for?
Start today.
