I had another visit with one of my customers the other day (I know, I’ve been writing a lot of posts about customer visits, but they are important and I learn a lot from them). I call them MY customer, because they are using a product that I am responsible for. It’s important to view yourself as one of the “owners” of the customer because as the Product Manager, you are responsible for their satisfaction, currently and in the future. If you are not getting out into the field to talk to your customers, both satisfied and frustrated ones, then you are missing out on valuable feedback on how to improve your product.
This particular visit was coordinated by our Account Executive at the request the VP of Engineering. He (the VP) wanted to talk to technology-savvy customers and invited me along, as I have been pestering just about everyone to go with them on customer and prospect calls.
The purpose of the discussion was two-fold:
- A knowledge exchange about each of our product roadmaps and how the customer plans to use our product
- The opportunity to hear first hand about some of the challenges (and successes) that the customer has had with the product
Part 1 was pretty straightforward. They presented the overview of their operations and how they planned to integrate our product. I then gave them a view of our product roadmap.
I call it a view, because when I present the product roadmap to customers and prospects (under NDA, of course), I don’t show them the raw version that I use to prioritize and work with Engineering on. Not because I have something to hide from them, but because for folks who are not intimately involved in the roadmap process, there is a lot of noise in the document that would likely cause confusion and/or would not be useful. There is also some customer information in it that I use for tracking purposes that I don’t feel comfortable sharing with other customers, even under NDA.
The view that I let them see is one that highlights features and capabilities with a long view. The goal is not to show them what is in any particular release, although I do share what is going in to the current and next major releases, but rather the long view.
The long view is a window into where the product is going. For an enterprise infrastructure product like mine, that means identifying how customers are going to be using the product over the next 4 years because unlike software or Web services, they are not likely to abandon the purchase without a truly significant reason.
Our customers don’t say, “We like your product, but a competitor of yours has a new feature/lower price/new UI, so we are switching.” Instead, they say things like, “We paid $X for your product and we expect it to be able to do Y” or “We like the core feature set of the product, but we plan on doing X in the future and we want the product to enable/support that.”
To answer inquiries like that, I have to be able to show them where my product is going in the future. I use the roadmap as a tool for communicating that with them. As part of that discussion, I can solicit the prospect or customer on what they view as important, which helps me understand their real-world needs.
Part 2 of the discussion involved listening to their problems with my product. As easy as it sounds, this is a challenge for many Product Managers. Product Managers are sensitive to criticism of their product (I’m as guilty of this as the next PM). We instantly try to frame any problems as “workable,” by which I mean that we try to identify ways that the user could achieve their goal within the current product framework. This sometimes helps in the short-term, but it precludes you and the customer from thinking about the real solution.
Instead of trying to whitewash the situation, a technique that I use is one that I learned back in grad school when I was studying Counseling Psychology–Active Listening. This suite of listening skills allows you to be more engaged in hearing what the other person is saying rather than debating points back and forth. It is very validating for customers when you, as the Product Manager, just acknowledge the issue that they are having and listen to what they have to say about it.
Lack of defensiveness on the part of the Product Manager creates an environment where the customer is more likely to provide you with valuable input, because they don’t have to waste time and effort in arguing their point.
I won’t kid you, it’s a LOT HARDER than it sounds and the first few times you try it, it’s not only painful, hearing all of that “feedback,” but it takes a lot of effort not to respond. But, I promise that if you keep at it, you will get so much great information that you can use to improve your product that you’ll wonder how you ever collected any useful user feedback without it.