Why are you sabotaging your customer interviews?

As a product manager you engage with customers on a daily basis, if you aren’t you should be. Keeping the customer feedback loop tight, including points of contact in success, service, and sales is quite possibly the most important activity you can do on a daily basis. Of course it requires you identify who your customer is, but that is a topic for another time.

Everyone of these interactions with the customer feedback loop is a customer “interview”. The goal of the customer interview is to discover the jobs to be done that will have the greatest impact on your customers. You may however, be unintentionally sabotaging these interactions and hampering your ability to get at those little gems.

Here are a few ways PM’s sabotage customer interviews that I have observed watching countless customer interactions from the freshly minted product manager to the seasoned VP of product.

1. Not recognizing your own bias

This is probably the most difficult self destructive behavior to overcome as a product manager. There are lot’s of ways that bias can influence us, but sticking to the theme, I want to just point out one — Criticizing your own product.

When talking to customers, you may feel the need to acknowledge “known” weaknesses in the product, whether to move past these to what you think you really want to know, or to dodge the blow of the customer pointing them out for you. This is a bad habit I have observed much more than you would think. Here’s the thing. You are assuming they are “known”.

In a former life I owned a small contracting company. We did commercial remodels. We were meticulous about our work, which was one of the things our customers loved about us; but, we had a motto, “No one will ever look as close as you.” Customer’s don’t see what you do. We needed to look at the product of our work from their perspective. You would never stand in front of a finished project and point out all the flaws you see to the customer and then ask “Well, what do you think?” You just told them what to think.

To truly understand the job’s left to be done by your product you have to understand the job the product is already doing. If you think you know and you tell them so, you will miss value the product is adding you didn’t even know about. Don’t criticize your product, just listen, don’t narrate.

2. Not selling the customer on the product.

The best sales people understand exactly what job the customer needs done and how the product can do that job better than anything else. If that rings true than this should as well. You are probably the most qualified sales person in your organization.

Think about it. How often does your sales team come to you when they have a really hard problem or a product knowledge gap that would get a prospect across the line? Selling shouldn’t be a bad word in product, after all it’s the intended outcome of all your hard work for someone to go and sell it. Selling is understanding the customer’s needs and aligning the products function with the job to be done. Product management is refining that alignment or as it’s more commonly known finding product market fit. Selling is also the single best test you can employ for testing the fit of your solution to the customers needs. If they will buy what you are selling, and you are selling only what you do, then you are onto something.

So why are we afraid to sell our customers? Why do we always say, “Well I’m not a sales guy, so . . .”
Sometimes we, as product managers, are so concerned with differentiating ourselves from sales, (for fear of influencing the customer?), that we fail to restate how our product may solve a customers pain. Making a statement about how the product might do a job well for the customer is a good practice.

Attempting to “sell” the product will spark the customers thinking about how to: (1) apply the product — the thing you know best, (2) to the job to be done — the thing they know best; and any misalignment will stand out like a sore thumb. You will also have a more holistic view of the customer experience. The solution may not be a new feature but a refined UI or sales enablement tool but you won’t know unless you try and sell it.

TLDR; Don’t preface your interviews with everything YOU know is wrong with the product, don’t discount it, don’t belittle your own product. It’s bad for moral and it taints your interviews. If you are talking to a customer it’s doing something for them. Just listen. Try to sell your solutions to really test your fit. Did they “buy” part of it? What are they quite sold on? This will further inform your roadmap.