Why Aligning PMs with Customer Support Teams is Key to Creating Successful Products

Have you ever taken part in a tug-of-war?

If so, there’s a good chance it happened during one of those “team-building” exercises — and there’s a good reason for that. The tug-of-war is an excellent metaphor for what happens when teams come together to pull in the same direction. 

(Well, if you’re on the winning side, at least).

It’s this sense of teamwork that we’re going to focus on in this article, answering a simple — but all-important — question:

Do digital products perform better when the product management team works closely with customer support?

It’s a biggie, we know. So we’d better get started.

The conventional disconnect (or, where it’s all been going wrong)

Before we get into the how of aligning PMs and customer-facing teams, let’s first look at the why.

This all begins with the deeply rooted conventions present in many SaaS and tech companies across the world.

Put simply, it’s a silo problem.

Almost by default — and through no mal-intent — both product teams and customer teams have become isolated. It’s only natural, of course, because historically there was no real reason for the two teams to interact.

Customer support teams are there to delight customers with their levels of service and the capabilities of the product. Product management, on the other hand, exists to develop new features and improve the product experience for the customer behind the scenes.  

This is the high-level stuff, so let’s get more specific and see if we can identify any crossover between these two departments.

Customer Support / Customer Success is responsible for:

• Investigating and solving customers’ issues with the product
• Ensuring the product’s current features are meeting the needs of customers
• Answering questions and advising best practices for using the product

Product Management is responsible for:

• Maintaining a long-term roadmap of upcoming features
• Predicting which features will best solve customer’s problems in the future
• Developing new features and fixing bugs with existing ones, to ensure a great customer experience

And the answer’s right there, isn’t it? There’s a common thread right under our noses.

Both of these groups have a common goal: to solve a customer’s problem and give them a great experience.

Sure, each team will have different priorities. And there’ll be little overlap in their day-to-day activities. But could it be that there’s more crossover here than many SaaS companies have realized? And, by extension, could it also be that aligning these two teams more closely will result in a better customer experience and a better product?

Yes. Yes, it could.

Why alignment works — and what the customer gets out of it

We’ve got some recommendations on which strategies work best to bring PMs and customer support teams together within an organization. But before that, let’s look at the benefits of doing so in your business.

More so, what does the end-user stand to gain from a little extra alignment between your teams? 

Well, believe it or not, siloed working can create such a strong feeling of disconnect, that it does indeed trickle down to reach the customer.

This manifests in surprising ways, but some of the most common are: product design choices that seem counterintuitive (they work on paper, but not so much in reality), workflows that seem long and convoluted (this can be the result of legacy design), or drawn out time between customer feedback and improvement.

But potential negative outcomes aside, there are plenty of other great reasons to bring your product teams and customer service support closer together:

• Leadership will find it easier to steer the ship. When different teams within a business have different expectations about where the company is headed, it’ll come as no surprise that tension is often the result. By aligning PMs with customer teams, the business leaders will find it easier to bring everyone together on the overall vision.
• User-centric design at the fore. While PMs and their product teams will do their very best to stay in-tune with customer needs, no one knows more about the thoughts, feelings, behaviors and actions of the end user than those who speak to them every day. Customer support agents are on the front line, 24/7. If product teams are serious about user-centric design, then customer support teams should be in the fold.
• Product development becomes more democratic. Historically, some Product Managers can be a little bit precious about “their” product. When their team is the only group working on it directly, that makes sense. But this is also why it’s good practice to bring another team into the discussion. This democratizes the product — opening the door to new, more innovative features, with other expert insight feeding in.
• Greater team cohesion, great team morale. Another big issue with siloed teams — and one that isn’t always too apparent — is that morale can be weakened by a great divide. As much as people gripe about team-building exercises, they work, and a team that knows one another well will produce better results. Bringing PMs and customer support representatives together sets the stage for higher team cohesion and better results.

Learn more about Richard's tricks to effectively run remote sprint planning, in his blog article.

---

airfocus.com — Build outstanding products with powerful prioritization and clear roadmaps