Break the Biggest Taboo in Product Management

In this article I will to discuss how you can – and should – break one of the biggest taboos in product management. What’s the big taboo you ask? It’s customers. More specifically, the taboo of not listening to your customers. Don’t start canceling those customer meetings yet – hear me out. You need to know why first or else you’ll become the most unpopular product manager in the room.

Amazon is wrong

Listening to your customers to find out what you should do with your product in the future can seem like the most sensible thing you could do. Just look around. Many of the most successful companies seem to proclaim that the customer is holy and that they’ll do anything to please the customer. For example, Amazon’s leadership principle is “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.” Obviously Amazon isn’t the textbook example of a failed startup, so why am I contradicting what they say? It is because there’s a big difference between what you state in external communications about customers versus how customers (and the things you learn from them) are treated internally - within product management. The point I’m making in this article refers to how you should take your customer into account as you evolve, manage, your product.

Don’t listen to your customers

I am saying that you should not listen to customers to decide where to take you product next. The reason for that is pretty easy. For the vast majority of vendors out there the number of current customers they have is only a fraction of the total of potential customers. The customers you have today are the result of the work you have done in the past. If you base the future of your product on those customers – by asking them about their problems, or things they would like to see improved in your product, you’re effectively selling again to the same customer. This usually only adds incremental improvements to your product and as such will not allow you to tap into that vast collection of potential customers. It’s your job as a Product Manager to understand from potential customers what unsolved problems they have. Only then will you be able create compelling solutions that will allow you to turn these potential customers into actual customers. You have to keep repeating this cycle and never rest because if you don’t, your growth will stagnate and your innovative competitor will land those potential customers and make you a distant memory ( RIP RIM).

Wait, NEVER listen to your customers?

No! It is important to listen to your existing customers. They are a great source of inspiration to see how you can improve your existing capabilities – polishing the proverbial diamond. But you can only polish a diamond so much. At some point you will have to find the next diamond. Great product managers know that the time spent on finding the next diamond should take up the bulk of their resources because, again, it is very likely that the number of current customers you have is only a fraction of the total of potential customers out there for you.

It’s not so simple as it sounds though because for many companies there is a very clear financial incentive to retain existing customers. For example, in more traditional software companies it is common for customers to pay a yearly fee (a percentage of the initial purchase price) to buy the right to upgrade to the latest version. It is even more apparent for vendors that have a subscription based model. Failing to please existing customers can have a severe negative (financial) impact on the business.

Innovate. Ship. Repeat.

As you can read, and as you’ve probably experienced in your work as a product manager, this is not an easy balance to maintain. Well, no one said product management was going to be easy. No matter how hard it is, you owe it to your product to break the taboo of not making happy customer the holy grail. Make sure you spend the most important part of your resources figuring out from potential customers what problems and face those. Innovate. Ship. Repeat.