Beyond the Voice of Customer: A Balanced Approach to Product Management

I recently had a discussion with the CPO of an early-stage start-up about the confidence level one can get from conversations with prospects and customers. He shared with me the challenge of finding these interactions and maximizing their value when managing a premature product. Even after investing in the effort, his company will still take a huge risk when deciding to build certain features as part of their journey to find product-market fit. The reason behind this is that while the 'voice of the customer' (VoC) is a crucial element of product management, relying on it exclusively can lead to missed opportunities and suboptimal solutions. This article explores the limitations of customer feedback and the importance of balancing it with insights from other sources.

The Role of Customer Feedback in Product Management

Capturing accurate and genuine customer feedback is considered the holy grail of product management. PMs, analysts, and researchers invest time and effort in engaging with customers in different forms - 1:1 interviews, advisory boards, focus groups, surveys, design partner programs, customer communities, and more. They do so with a main goal in mind - understanding what features should be built to maximize adoption. Managing these interactions is an art. One needs to know how to attract users, ask the right questions, navigate discussions to relevant areas, and carefully test customers' reactions to ideas that can sometimes be challenging to grasp. While the potential value of doing the right work is big, there are some pitfalls to be aware of.???

The Limitations of Customer Feedback

The first limitation is users' tendency to talk about desired solutions. I specifically remember an experienced user from a corporate customer, asking for more UI configuration options to tailor their experience. Instead of asking what options, I asked: “Why do you need it?”. The answer was that our product forces him to change the way he works, which is not easy. Indeed, ease of use should be top of mind for PMs but adding new features isn’t always the right solution, especially when they clash with organizational goals like streamlining processes through automation. Apart from new features, the PM can consider plenty of tools to support change management such as onboarding and training, knowledge articles, videos, product walkthroughs, UX improvements, etc. Another example is a customer who requested a specific feature they’d seen elsewhere, without understanding its broader impact or relevance to their own needs. Both scenarios show that while customers can articulate their pain points, they aren’t always equipped to suggest the best solutions. The PM should focus discussions on problems to be solved rather than feature requests. The feedback they collect can be later analyzed, enabling them to come up with solutions based on brainstorming with R&D and UX. After they have a solid concept in mind, they can go back to customers for validation.

Another limitation is the need to estimate the priority of the stated problem. As PMs we aim for adoption but in the B2B world, user adoption isn’t necessarily aligned with conversion. The person who makes the buying decision is probably not the person who will be using the system, so before satisfying the user, we need to satisfy the buyer. Only then, we can focus on users' adoption that will help us deliver our promise and help the buyer understand that they made a good purchasing decision. When we identify a pain point of one customer, not only that we need to weigh it against other customers’ pains, but we also need to understand who is experiencing it and how critical the issue is for the organization. Avoiding the bias of remembering the louder and most recent feedback is key.?

Understanding the Bigger Picture

In order to understand how to best utilize the Voice of Customer, we need to be familiar with other tools in our toolbox - domain experts and competitors. When defining our roadmap or even trying to understand how to design the next feature on our list, there are many options in front of us. Obviously, we consult with internal stakeholders and look for insights based on analytics, but when we look for external validation there are usually 3 categories of inputs: Customers (both existing and potential), Competitors, and Experts. If we want to use them wisely we should get familiar with the value we can generate from each and the process of working with them.?

Experts are individuals deeply familiar with our market and the technological solutions it requires. They can be consultants in research services firms such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, ISV (Independent Software Vendors) C-level such as CEOs, CPOs and CROs, customers’ CIOs, VC partners, etc. While talking with an ISV CPO is not something that any PM can easily do, especially if they work for a competitor, reaching out to a Gartner consultant or a customer CIO is more feasible. Sometimes we tend to forget that we can learn a lot just by reading the relevant materials. For example, spending one hour reading the latest Gartner report will tell us a lot about our positioning in the market, competition, and core capabilities that should be included in our product. Before talking with a customer’s CIO, we can read RFIs and RFPs to see what capabilities are critical for different segments and organizations.?

Competitors are anyone we might lose a deal for. It means that a partner that has some overlap of features with our company, can also be considered as a competitor. Having said that, it is essential to focus on the relevant competitor’s capabilities, meaning the ones that are solving the same problem we are aiming to solve, for the same target audience. There is no point in developing upstream swimming capabilities just because we know a salmon can do it, especially if we plan to stay in saltwater.?

How can we learn from competitors? We can go to their website to see how they position themselves, follow them on social media, watch videos they publish online, and go to their help center to do a deep dive about their product. If we plan to develop a new feature, searching for relevant keywords in competitors' help centers will give us a quick answer about whether they have this feature and how it works. Another way to learn about the competitive landscape is by having conversations with AEs and Sales Engineers. When they meet with prospects they hear about the competition either directly or by interpreting the questions they are being asked. In some cases, their prospect is looking to replace an existing solution and will be happy to share their frustration with it.

How to Effectively Balance Different Sources of Input

Balancing between all sources and deciding where to invest efforts should create a clear and detailed picture for the PM with a higher confidence level. The below diagram shows how it works. When we start a new venture, and we don’t even have a beta version to sell, engaging with customers is a challenge. We don’t have anything to offer them in return for their feedback and have to rely on their goodwill or personal connections. At this stage, we can start by working with experts and exploring our potential competitors. The interactions with experts have the best ROI as the engagement effort is not significant and one can learn much from each interaction. Since they know the market well, any feedback provides a high confidence level about our next step. However, they usually don’t provide the required level of detail to understand how a certain feature should be built or what would be an intuitive UI for the customer’s users. Researching about competitors on the other hand, requires more legwork. It will provide more details since one can learn about specific capabilities and even see them in action, but the drawn picture will be partial for two reasons: first, not all information is available to us, and second, we won’t be able to tell how customers respond to the solutions unless we hear directly from their users. This is why on the confidence scale, competitors are lower than experts.??

The third layer in the diagram is customers. When engaging with users we should guide them to raise pain points instead of offering solutions. Then we’ll need to process all inputs and give them the right weight based on the persona we are talking with, the type of customer, and its size. If we want to reach the same level of insights we are getting from experts we’ll need to talk with many customers. On the other hand, with customers, we can be very specific. We can pay attention to how they talk about their experience and what they complain about, we can use analytics to track their adoption, and we can test solutions with them either by working with design partners or by running A/B testing. We can experiment and validate to get more and more details, so even though we need to take any user feedback with a grain of salt, this is not something we can skip or ignore.

As our product becomes more mature, and our customer base grows, the process of engaging with customers is becoming easier and more natural. Users realize the value they get from our product and they want to engage with us to maximize this value. Talking with experts and exploring the competition should still be part of the ongoing process but the balance between all sources changes.?

Conclusion: A Holistic Approach to Product Management

Some may worry that not acting directly on customer feedback could lead to dissatisfaction or lost business. While customer input is vital, it’s crucial to remember that feedback should guide rather than dictate decisions. The goal is to integrate customer insights into a broader strategy that also considers market trends, expert advice, and competitive positioning.

Let’s put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and ask what vendor they prefer to work with - the one that does exactly what they want or the one that offers thought leadership and constantly thinks about their success.?