5 Practical Tips to Level up as a Customer-Focused Product Manager from Tamar Yehoshua

Welcome to the latest issue of the Product Management Learning Series - a series of live streaming events and newsletter articles to help you level up your product career! ??

In our third installment, our speaker was Tamar Yehoshua, Chief Product Officer of Slack. She oversees Slack’s product strategy and development, design, and research. Previously Tamar was a vice president at Google in product and engineering leadership roles on Google’s most important products, including Search, Identity and Privacy. Prior to that, Tamar was the vice president of advertising technologies at Amazon’s A9. Tamar is also on the board of tech companies Yext and Snyk.

If you missed the event, you can watch the full event recording here.

Below are the main takeaways from my conversation with Tamar:

Be customer-focused and put the right processes in place to build for scale.

Tamar shared her best lessons from working at Amazon and Google during the hyper growth phase of both companies. At Amazon, Tamar learned how to be truly customer focused. She shared that Jeff Bezos was known for asking “How is this relevant to the customer?” And if Bezos had a printout with him during a review meeting, it was a sign that he would have a question about a particular product feature and how it impacted the customer.

At Google, Tamar learned to be conscious of scale and how one change could impact billions of users. To make sure features can be launched smoothly, Google put in place a robust weekly review process: where any experiment was reviewed by a set of experts who had been in their roles long enough to understand the real impact and help PMs with varying degrees of expertise to better grasp how the dynamics work together and catch bugs early.

Capture feedback from multiple sources and iterate fast.

At Slack, Tamar shared that there are different processes to capture feedback from different sources: Product Specialists are connected to the Customer Experience team that manages Twitter tweets, Zendesk support tickets, and feedback across the web. Slack has a Voice of the Customer program where Customer Success Managers (CSMs) come up with a list of product gaps from working with the enterprise customers. Slack employees use? their own product to collect internal feedback before releasing it externally. Slack also has a robust pilot program and uses Slack Connect to connect with “champions” to ask questions and gather feedback on early prototypes. Great PMs understand how different programs come together to form a complete view of the customer, and know which programs to lean on the most, depending on the situation.

Tamar shared an example of how they built huddles: a frictionless audio conversation feature inside a Slack channel or direct message. Slack huddles started with a prototype and had internal teams use it to collect feedback. The team then conducted rounds of user research with enterprise pilot customers to better understand the user needs and tweak the product accordingly. The key is fast and frequent iterations with customer needs in the front and center of every step of the process.?

Know how your product is uniquely solving a problem for your customers.

With so many streams of feedback, it’s important to keep in mind that customers will ask for features based on what they know and have seen in the market, but not necessarily in ways that propel leapforward innovations. Therefore, PMs need to listen to all the feedback, but also know which ones to act on.??

When it comes to prioritizing customer feedback, Tamar advises PMs to clearly understand what problems the product is trying to solve and why your product is uniquely equipped to solve these problems. “You want to make sure you’re adding enough value for the customers by putting it in your product,” said Tamar, and this will guide you on what type of feedback to listen to. ?

Active listening and transparency are key to building customer empathy and world-class product teams.

According to Tamar, the hardest part of being a great PM is consistently putting yourself in the shoes of the customer and holding a high bar for customer-centricity. PMs are often power users of our own products, but we can’t build the product for ourselves. It is crucial that we continuously ground ourselves on who the customer actually is and what their needs are.?

There are a lot of overlaps between building customer empathy and building product teams. You have to listen very attentively and be transparent in your thinking. There will always be times where you get to make decisions that people don’t like, cancel projects that hurt morale, and make organizational changes that upset some people. While you can’t win everyone over all the time, the best you can do is be transparent. Don’t just say it’s being decided, show people your thinking. People will respect why you made the decision.?

Own your work and your mistakes.

As a PM, you have to wear a lot of hats. Tamar said PMs have to be nimble and align skills to the job at hand in order to get the product out the door. PMs must take ownership and be resourceful to move the needle of the business. “If you’re not an expert in what it is you need to do, instead of saying that’s not my job, take ownership of the project, and find the resources you need,” said Tamar.

Everybody has failures and Tamar is no exception. The key isn’t to avoid failure, but to make the painful decisions swiftly when you know you’ve made a mistake. Ask yourself: what did I do wrong? What could I have done to set this person up better? How do I correct my mistakes early and fast? Own your mistakes and fix them.

?? Watch the full event recording here.

Next up,

• June 17: Creating Habit-Forming Products and Becoming Indistractable with Nir Eyal
• June 24: Product Team Rituals & Growth Lessons with Shishir Mehrotra
• July 15: Product Strategy, Systems, and Frameworks with Sachin Rekhi

More sessions to be added later… subscribe to stay tuned!?

Learn more about the Product Management Learning Series and view past recordings?here.

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