Get out of the building

Context

A PM believes they know exactly what needs to be done. Their roadmap is full of features. But they’re complaining that sales and other stakeholders are constantly interrupting them with ‘random’ demands.

Play

Get your PMs of the building. Every 1-2 months, each PM goes and meet your customers where they are doing their thing, to observe and ask questions.

Discussion

Customer empathy has a half-life of 30 days. (This made-up science-y law means that if you have 100 units of customer empathy and go 3 months without visiting customers, you lose 87% of your customer empathy.) The only way to recharge this is to go see your customers, ideally in the place where they are using your product, and talk to them about what they are doing.

You can do some of this through calls, but they are not as impactful as seeing a customer in person. For B2B, that means going to their office. For B2C, this means meeting them in the place where they use your product.

Smart PMs naturally think about the problems they need to solve and use their team’s knowledge to come up with good things for the customer. The result is a plausible product that completely fails to take into account what the customers are actually trying to do.

This is because the inputs that come to PMs are often poor quality. For example, salespeople often share feature requests that the customer has reported are needed to advance a deal. It’s not that these ideas are always total bullshit, but rather that they emerge as a byproduct of negotiation, and may reflect more political and ego needs of the parties involved than actual real customer needs. That doesn’t mean you can ignore direct requests coming in through sales! But if you use these inputs as your primary way to understand customer needs, you will build a product tailored to close deals. This is not necessarily a product that solves customer problems well enough to create lasting competitive advantage

The problem is that most PMs lack evidence to defend an alternate set of priorities. A PM using their own gut feel to prioritize does not have standing to push back on customer requests.

When a PM starts to get out of the building every month or two and talk to customers in their own world, they develop a lived understanding for the problem space that gives two benefits:

1. The PM sees that the context in which their product is used is not what they believed.
2. The PM meets specific people whose names can be used to drive storytelling about priorities.
3. The PM develops a more emotionally resonant story inside themself that supports the narrative they are pursuing.

Great product management is, in part, about storytelling - to the team, to the customers, to your stakeholders. If a PM's story is not real and resonant, it won’t be convincing to any of those people.

Cautions and Caveats

Do not outsource this work to your UX team. Bring them along on the visits, yes. And continue doing UX research activities in addition to your customer visits. But PMs need to personally be having the conversations and asking the quesitons too.

Don’t replace visits entirely with calls. Customer calls can be super helpful as well - whether that’s UX studies, everyday sales calls, informal catchups with key customers, or structured workshops. But if you do not get out from behind your computer and meet your customers in person, your view of them will remain 2-dimensional.

It’s the questions that get asked before and after the ‘official’ meetings that often lead to the best insights. If you can have lunch or coffee with your customers you'll learn even more.