Talking to your customers is a learning experience

Product people are wired to solve problems. C’mon, admit it, when you see a customer pain point, aren’t you tempted to brainstorm a slew of elegant solutions that will wow users and make their lives easier? Problem is, even the most “brilliant” solution is meaningless if it doesn’t solve the right problem. Before you build and ship, you need to deeply understand your customers’ needs, desires, and struggles. This week we’re sharing some resources on how to do that.

Meanwhile, in product news, Meta implies it really wasn’t a B2B company, Sony wants tech companies to “Show Me the Money”, Microsoft realized why it occasionally makes sense to go in the office, and the answer to too many Slack channels is another chat app.

Why learning from customers will get your startup farther than any best practice or playbook. In this article from the folks at Bessemer Venture Partners s, founders of Zola, BlackLine, Zoom, and Twilio discuss the rigorous customer focus inside their companies and how they used feedback and data to transform their product and businesses. You’ll also get the story of Procore’s unconventional two decade journey to IPO from Bessemer Partner Brian Feinstein.

Learning from your customers: Why Bob matters. Your customers can tell you everything you need to know to build your business, says?Professor Frédéric Dalsace of IMD, provided you pick the right ones to learn from. You want to talk to Bobbs (”best of business but small”).

5 things you can do to learn more about customer’s buyer’s journey. If you’d like to maximize sales of your product, it’s helpful to understand your customer’s buyer’s journey. This journey is a framework that follows your customer's progression from a curious visitor on your site to an eager buyer by researching problems and solutions until they decide to buy. Jennifer Ravenscroft describes steps you can take to learn more about your customers' buying journey and helps them along from the initial interaction to conversion.

7 Lessons to learn from unhappy customers. For startups and small business owners, every customer matters. And although you may try to meet their needs, the occasional unhappy customer is inevitable. Instead of becoming defensive or burying your head in the sand, it’s important to see these complaints as an opportunity for your business to learn and grow. Raúl G. shares seven lessons that unhappy customers can teach you if you allow them.

Do you like what you see?

If you like what you're reading, go to ProductCollective.com and subscribe. That way, you can get this newsletter in your inbox every Friday before everyone else.

This week’s Video

Customer obsession: Satisfying needs. Find out how to move beyond customer focus to “customer obsession” via consumer science to discover what delights customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. Learn how to get insight from four sources of consumer insight, then evaluate these ideas through various research techniques. Gibson Biddle, Former VP of Product at Netflix, illustrates these tactics using examples from Netflix, then, puts the techniques into practice with a highly interactive, modern-day Netflix case.

This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free.

Product Management News: Week of May 20, 2024

Was Meta ever serious about B2B? Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015 called Workplace. Meta pulled the plug on the enterprise product last week, bringing the curtain down on the enterprise experiment nine years after it launched. It’s worth noting that there was some skepticism from the start that a company like Facebook could pull this off. The enterprise is a different animal from the consumer world. It values privacy and security and requires a set of back-end tools that are purpose-built for the enterprise.

Does Scarlett Johansson have an album out? Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without permission. Sony Music says it has “reason to believe” those companies “may already have made unauthorized uses” of its content. In case you wondering “without permission” really means without a licensing agreement.

Microsoft thinks it might have cracked making workers come back to the office — but will employees buy it? Microsoft released Places to help companies and their employees get the most out of office days while also enabling remote working. The platform uses AI (there’s a surprise) to help workers coordinate the best time to come to the office (ie when the rest of your team will also be there) as well as enable more in-person connections. Places also integrates desk booking with other services, such as Calendar markers to notify you that an office space is fully booked. If the tool works as promised, it could bring some sanity to the decision about when to come into the office and also answer that unanswerable question about office life - is that conference room really open?

Former CEO of Yammer tries to take on Slack, again. Description.

David Sacks, former CEO of Yammer, and Evan Owner, former VP of engineering at a collaboration app, believe they’ve solved the incessant proliferation of Slack channels. They’ve added to the proliferation of chat apps by creating Glue, an employee chat app that is designed around topic based threads and uses, you guessed it, GenAI. How it competes with Slack depends on how willing people are to switch over and how much they value have AI pop in and out of their workplace chats.

Resources and news curated by Kent J McDonald