Good Product Managers always ensure they are in contact with their customers. The type of product you manage will definitely change how accessible your customers are. Managing a consumer product might mean it’ll be harder to talk to customers in a sustainable manner. If your business line is huge and if you have quite a few customers – that’ll have an effect too. You might be focusing on a vertical where customers won’t or can’t talk to you due to multiple reasons (regulatory, confidentiality…) However, a good Product Manager would ALWAYS ensure they have good customer visibility. Getting information from multiple stakeholders is definitely part product management best practices, this post mainly focuses on internal stakeholders which are critical to your success.
You should, actually – YOU MUST be obsessed with listening to your customers. Remember this though – customers are not the only ones you should consult, validate against, and cater for.
An Act of Balance
Don’t get me wrong – if you’re not serving your customers, you have a very little chance of succeeding as a PM. However, it is YOUR responsibility to be able to serve them while maximizing the interests of the company for which you work.
While this sounds obvious, PMs sometimes find it perplexing. There are often conflicts between what the business needs and what the customers want. The most common and extreme example – the customer wants to pay as little as possible, not at all, if possible. The business, on the other hand, would like to maximize the monetization of the products and services it sells. Customers don’t always understand the relationship between paying more and getting that extra feature they asked for, so don’t assume they do!
Mr. Product Manager, it is YOU who is responsible for making it right for both. You need to balance the customers’ needs with the business needs. If there’s a conflict – it is yours to solve. If you can’t solve it, you are in trouble.
The Seven Ps of PM Friends
As a Product Manager, you’re probably very well acquainted with “The 7 Ps of Marketing”. Let’s take a look at which friends can help you with what “Ps”. This post will NOT focus on interacting with customers. It will, instead, focus on everyone else you want to interact with to become the most successful Product Manager possible.
In “The Great PM: A Complete Picture Product Manager” and “Are Product Managers REALLY the Product’s CEO?” I’ve discussed the importance of looking at the product from multiple views, a lot of them are related to most of the “Ps” here – and this post is all about how to get these different perspectives. You can’t even start discussing product management best practices without talking about how critical it is to understand how these different “Ps” look from different stances – of different people.
Your Three Customer-facing Friends
Overall, there are three general types of people your customer interacts with on a regular basis – two are of the sales side. The technical sales people, also referred to as Pre-Sales Engineers or Systems Engineers (SEs) are one type. The second type would be Account Managers or Sales Managers / Salespeople. Last but not least – those who need to take care of stuff when it breaks – Field Engineers, Support Engineers and Customer Success people.
Great SEs will become Trusted Advisors to their customers. They will gain access to the real deal when it comes to sensitive information – what their customers really care for. When you make good friends with these great SEs, they’ll share your customers’ most frightening problems. Some of these are neither technical nor technological. Some of them are “just” part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Solving them will show your customers they’re important and you’ll make your System Engineer friend a hero.
The patronizing type Product Managers will refer to salespeople as the shaved apes of the company. “They’ll sell everything we’ll tell them to”, some Product Managers pontificate. This is definitely not true for most if not all salespeople, definitely not the good ones in your company. On the contrary, salespeople will be the ones that will tell YOU what to make, so they can sell.
Last but definitely not least, the people who support your product are as important as the others – these are the people who are in the first line of fire when something goes wrong. And when it goes wrong multiple times – it might be something that you ought to think about.
Trust the Trusted Advisor
Coming from a Systems Engineering background myself, I know how close an SE can become with a customer. I remember the day I felt “I nailed it” as a trusted advisor. When I was an SE, a customer with which I had a great relationship called me. She asked me to help them select a technology that my company wasn’t even selling. “I know this has nothing to do with what you’re selling”, she said, “but I appreciate your opinion”.
Use your relationship with SEs to validate your strategy, your sales pitch, your technology direction – can they sell it? Can they convey the message? Does the strategy make sense? Does it really solve what the customer needs? How well does it fit within the larger company strategy across other products and product lines? Out of the 7Ps of Marketing, SEs will be able to validate your People who are going to use your Product, bring Physical Evidence, share where the Process works and where it doesn’t, and will allow you to really focus on the right Place. 5 out 7 Ps – awesome, right?!
It's a Give and Take Thing
How do you make friends with SEs? Technical people are motivated by being the smartest guy in the room – make them such. Give them early access to information before everyone else, share with them your concerns in a vulnerable way to consult with them, connect them to someone in your team that can provide them with the answers they need when they have a problem. Suggest to help them when they have a “customer down” situation and help them escalate with support. What do you mean you have no control of support? No one asks for control – but when the PM of a product sends an email to the support team and asks for some extra care for a customer, it makes a difference.
You are helping your SEs to be more successful, and they will help you in return by making you successful. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone has interests and a good relationship is when both interests are fulfilled.
Make sure you have System Engineering friends across every vertical / segment you cater for – or else you’ll get only a one-sided set of answers, relevant for a specific market but not for others. I’m sure you understand that, for example, security requirements that come from financial entities or DoD customers aren’t relevant when you’re talking to a hi-tech company, large as it may be.
Helping those who Bring You Business
Most of the good Account Managers are ego-less people, focusing on closing deals and bringing you more business. They are even closer to paying your paycheck than most of your customers. Be appreciative.
Account Managers are very different, both in what motivates them and in what information they can provide you with. Account Managers are motivated by winning deals – help them win their current deal, help them position themselves so they’ll win the next deal (even if they don’t about this deal yet) – and you’ve served them well.
Jump on a call with an angry customer to explain how the product team is committed to improving the product or just to listen to some feedback about the product, bring competitive SMEs to a competitive discussion with the customer to show how important to you is the customer (and the Account Manager).
Fly half a continent to shake hands with a customer, thank them for their business and give them a roadmap presentation – and you made the Account Manager who made this happen the hero of the day. Remember that being to grasp both the business side and the technical is considered part of Product Management best practices, and the salespeople are the ones who will help you validate the business side of things.
But wait – what kind of information can you get from Account Managers? Remember the 7Ps? They are the ones to validate if your Pricing strategy works, if your Promotions are relevant and if the Process is not too tedious. They’ll make sure for you that the Place is relevant for your product. They’ll also ensure that from a People’s perspective, your message makes sense to the non-technical decision makers they work with.
Support your Supporters
Customer Success and Support people are usually considered as relevant only for bug fixes. However, these people usually use your product more than anyone else – even a single customer doesn’t use the product from so many angles.
Don’t miss the opportunity to consult the support personnel. Don’t miss the opportunity to show gratitude. Often I have discussions with support personnel that ask questions like “what if we could…” and by doing so, provide me with the best ideas we ever had.
Your Customer Success Managers will be able to help you getting the yet another important, if not crucial, P validated – the Physical Evidence, usually talking about customer recommendations, etc.
Any additional friends you believe I missed? Any product management best practices that you believe are relevant here? Any success stories or miserable fails around these friends? Don’t be a stranger – leave a comment below!
One response to “The People Product Managers Just Can’t Succeed Without”
Love it, Yuval.
More so if in your terminology, SEs are similar in function, knowledge, and direct customer interaction to pre-sales engineers.
Trained to carefully listen to the customers, setting demos and proof of concept to win a deal – they have hands-on experience using the product and delighting customers – they master workarounds for issues and challenges QA may have missed, or worse, half-baked features PM didn’t think through…
The rise of Customer Success teams offers another priceless source of insights about how well our product fare in the hands of our customers. Better yet, they are mastering analytics which we, PMs, can use to improve our products, prioritize bug fixes and features…
PMs must be big on listening and small on ego.