Help Your Product Managers Talk to More Customers

There are certain things in life you can never have enough of — ice cream, days at the beach, Jason Bourne sequels, and conversations with customers. But it’s not always easy to create a culture within your product team of constantly interviewing customers, and it’s not always easy to find customers who will talk to you.

At my current company, our product and design teams have had 990 customer interactions during the last six months. That averages out to 99 per person over 6 months or 3.8 per person per week. This is up from last year’s average of 1.5 per person per week.

We can always do more and we I’m sure we can improve on the quality and outcome of those interactions, but this is more than any product team I’ve been a part of so far in my career. Here are several strategies and tactics we use to drive customer interactions.

Creating a Culture of Customer Interactions

Measure it

We have a scorecard that we review weekly with key metrics and goals for our team. One of the metrics we measure is weekly customer interactions. It is reported in a Google Sheet per team member, so we can see who is and isn’t talking to customers.

Share it

• We use Confluence for shared documentation and we have a customer research section where PMs store notes. Admittedly, this is an area where we can improve. It can be hit or miss on notes being stored in the shared space and notes that are stored there are sometimes lengthy and hard to consume. Something we are testing is putting key insights and requested features gathered during customer conversations directly into UserVoice by the product manager. UserVoice is the tool we use to gather customer product feedback inside our product (more to come on that) and is better at categorizing data and reporting.
• We have a section of our agenda in our weekly team meeting where we share customer insights. Also, after PMs do onsite customer visits we have them share their key findings and takeaways.
• At the company level, we focus heavily on the customer. We have weekly company all-hands meetings and once a month the meeting is focused on user stories. Various departments take turns presenting user stories in that meeting.

Reward it

• Our company uses a tool called Motivosity for employees to give other employees recognition and praise. We use this tool to recognize team members who are listening to customers and and focused on deliver them value.
• The Product Team has a “King’s To You Award” (an oversized chess piece based on the Count of Monte Cristo) that is given out every month or two based on delivering customer value and making an impact. We accompany this with a small gift card within Motivosity.
• When discussing roadmap ideas or reviewing product designs, we constantly ask how many customers they have talked to or shown the designs. We push for decisions to be made based on customer feedback and not our own opinions. And by we, I mean me (VP of Product), our CEO, and our VP of Engineering.

Ways to get more Customer Interactions

• Control your own destiny. First and foremost, your PMs should not be beholden to other departments for customer connections. You can definitely leverage other departments for help, but your PMs need direct access to customers.
• Surveys. Every time you send a survey you should ALWAYS end with the question, “Are you willing to talk with us more about this?” and capture their contact info. This method can often generate more people willing to talk than you even have capacity to talk to.
• NPS follow up. If your company uses Net Promoter Score surveys they can be a gold mine for customer outreach. We have a Slack channel that feeds in all NPS responses in real time and our product team monitors that channel daily/weekly. We reach out to customers who leave intriguing comments where we feel we could mine gold. Don’t confuse this with a proactive outreach strategy to all detractors — our customer success team has responsibility for that strategy. Our approach is more of a sniper tactic targeting who we want to talk to.
• In-product feedback. We have a link in our product — both web and mobile — where users can submit product ideas and feature requests. This info flows into UserVoice and gives us a database of potential customers to contact. You can schedule calls to discuss the feature idea the customer submitted and then use that opportunity to pivot the conversation to other research as well.

In-product feedback link

• Events. Our sales team attends industry events and trade shows. We send PMs to most of the larger events where they can not only help close deals, but they can also pick the brains of prospects and current customers on potential product offerings.
• Bring customers to you. We host a monthly customer event in our office. Customers pay to attend and fly in (on their own dime) for a two-day workshop with best practices, networking, one-on-one configuration help, and product feedback. As a product team we spend about four hours over those two days with 20–50 customers playing corn hole, getting feedback on their business needs, product feedback, and doing user testing. I know this isn’t feasible for all companies and execution of a motion like this goes well beyond just the Product Team, but for us it has been extremely effective.

Bringing customers to our office for product feedback and user testing

• Customer advisory group. We have built an opt-in group of customers who are on our advisory panel. We have about 70 customers on the list. We don’t have tons of structured engagement with them, but we do use them as our “hot list” for one-on-one customer feedback. I suggest avoiding focus group type meetings with these folks because the train can get off the rails real quick and groupthink takes over.
• Emails and Calendly. Our PMs also go the direct route and target lists of customers by sending emails with Calendly links. An effective and free tool for sending emails is Yet Another Mail Merge (yamm.com). These meetings can be for feedback around specific features that PMs are working on or just for general feedback.
• Recorded calls. Beyond the primary research of having direct conversations with customers, our product team also listens to recorded Zoom meetings between customers and other departments — sales calls, onboarding calls, support calls, customer success calls. We do this individually and also weekly as a product team in what we call “Feedback Friday”. We get popcorn and treats and enjoy the show — while we take notes and pause the recording to discuss.

A customer talking with our product team for Feedback Friday

• Leads from other departments. And finally (and deliberately last), we partner with other departments to feed us customers. Our customer success team connects us with customers who want to cancel or have valuable product feedback, and sales pulls us into deals as appropriate (especially for larger deals).

I couldn’t possibly overstate how important it is to be customer focused and constantly talking to customers. Customer interaction should be like oxygen to your Product Team. As an example, when we have a product manager who is struggling in their role, the first thing we tell them is to talk to as many customers as possible. This is something within their control, and being an expert on the customer and their pain points can help PMs close many other performance gaps.

There are so many creative ways to access customers, but as the ancient Greek god Nike would say, the most important thing is to just do it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go talk with a customer.