In my previous life at Microsoft we had a mandate to be customer focused and very few people knew what it meant. So, every dev, PM, GM and tester would focus on the usual suspects: Usability studies, customer surveys, customer feedback/support, etc.
But I think Jon misses an even bigger point. Whenever you talk about customer you have to define "what a customer is". Let me be clear, is Kevin talking about "existing customers" or "prospect customers" ("desired customers")?.
The problem with listening to your existing customer base if you are a consumer startup is that you are not listening to the other tens of thousands of people that decided *not* to use your product. Or to the millions of people that are part of your target audience and that are not aware of your product yet.
The big issue with existing early stage consumer startup customers is that they are early adopters (ahead of the curve) and they are using a product that is likely to shift directions significantly over its initial 2-3 years of life. So why on Earth are their opinion so important?
Listening to existing customer base is only worth if you already have a established business and is shipping version 3 or later of your product. Ok, maybe I'm being to radical by saying that, but you should discount your existing customer feedback by 10. And discount voluntary customer feedback (a.k.a. support or feedback emails from customer) by another factor of 10. (Thanks to Dave, our VP of Marketing, to make that clear on my mind)
At Sampa, we pissed off users more than once. Heck, we dropped features that were critical to a huge part of our most avid customers. Why? Because they are not representative of the customer we want our product to have.
I think good product managers will understand and avoid confirmation bias, but great product managers (and marketers) will go beyond that and try to really understand what is the need your product is trying to solve and which persons she should be asking for feedback and suggestions.
I think the key lessons are to not be afraid to drop your entire customer base in favor of a different set of customers. That's what startup is all about, adapting to the market needs.
Right on. We spend a reasonable amount time segmenting feature set based stage of adoption and ultimate usage profile. BTW-Congrats on being a new daddy!
By Arne-Per Heurberg - 8/6/2008 12:52 AM
Often the greatest wealth and shareholder value is created through disruptive technologies (aka discontinuous innovation). Customers will only provide you feedback along the "continuous innovation" curve. They seldom point out to you the itch they didn't know they had, they will only point out to you incremental improvements.
Listening to your customer is essential for user interface/experience design, but for your product roadmap I believe as you do that it ought to be influenced only partially by customer feedback and mostly by market intuition.
Great points Jordan. I actually thought a bit of Others Online while writing this. If you had obsessed by your existing customers after the first few beta months of OO it probably would have taken you to a very different (and potentially worse) path.
Hi Marcelo. Good points all around. I just wanted to give credit where credit is due. That post was written by Jon Byrum, our phenomenal senior product manager, not me personally.
I've learned a lot from customers and value their feedback. My first company was in the crowded email archiving space. Every vendor focused on the back-end - archiving and indexing messages. When we started we didn't know what else the application should do, so we unashamedly asked our customers. It wasn't a mandate by our senior leadership. It was just the right and natural thing to do. Among some bad ideas were some good ones. Our customers told us that the real key for email archiving from their perspective was workflow around the regulatory obligations to review a sample of the emails. We focused there and it gave us a clear differentiation from all our competitors. Our demo to close rate was over 80%. That email archiving service, now part of Microsoft, is now used by more companies than any other archiving service in the world. It all started by simply asking our early customers to help shape the product.
@Kevin Sorry for the author mistake. Somewhat the blist blog got blurred w/ early posts of Kevin's personal blog.
I've made sure to be explicit about *consumer* products, not B2B or Enterprise because those are different beasts and I know little about it.
@Jon Byrum - The third person commenting is not so cute, but anyway, I can't see how you were targetting the right audience. Are there different truths about being a great PM? Maybe there are not, but you were writing about being a "bad PM" and we all probably know what that looks like. After 7 years at Microsoft I had the joy of working with about 25 bad PMs and 3 good ones.
Most PMs should be working at MacDonalds, not Microsoft. They have no real understanding of computer science and are generally bozos with degrees in accounting, finance, history, psychology, languages, etc. In fact I feel they should be paid less than testers.
By PM - 8/7/2008 6:15 AM
Sorry -- i don't follow your comment. I wasn't writing about being a bad PM. I wrote a lesson on complementing qualitative 1:1 customer experience with quantitative research to understand how representative the customer feedback is of the entire segment population (whether that segment is your full user base or a target segment of customers). I also added that the research can potentially minimize personal bias.
Of course if the research isn't executed with the right target audience, it won't be very valuable.
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Comments (8) for "When I stopped listening to ...
January, 2008