Where do product managers get ideas from?

Product managers have to set a vision for their teams to achieve. But where does that vision come from? It’s full of ideas, but where do PMs get those ideas from?

Answer: from the customers they serve, though with a caveat. We’ve all heard the quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

In other words, we don’t rely on customers to propose the solution to their problems, since they may well overlook the best solution. Indeed, the best solution, like cars in the late 1800s, may not even exist yet.

However, we do rely on customers to tell us what their problems are.

So, what does that look like in practice?

Basically, you ask them.

Below, I present three basic sources of direct customer feedback, with pros and cons for each.

In-person meetings

Pros: It’s wonderful when you can actually sit down with a customer and ask them what problems they’re having in their business. You can really dive deep with them and ask as many questions as you need to get to the bottom of what they’re dealing with.

On top of that, you can build a relationship with them and come back to them for follow-up questions, demos of mocks, demos of prototypes, etc., to get further feedback.

These meetings don’t have to be in the same physical space, though it’s nice if you can arrange that (in a pandemic-free world). Obviously, phone calls and video conferences also work.

Cons: Face-to-face meetings (literal or figurative) often don’t scale as well as you’d like. They go deep but not broad: you understand in detail what a few of your customers want, but not necessarily what the majority of them want. You can try to correct for this by segmenting your market and talking to representatives of each segment, and/or by also using surveys (see below).

These meetings can also be hard to get. In some industries, customers are used to dealing with dozens of different tech vendors for a myriad of solutions. The prospect of talking to yet another one may fill them with dread. You can try to overcome this by offering them something in exchange for their time: a look at your roadmap, a demo of your upcoming products, a presentation on some general trend facing your industry that you happen to have some expertise in. (I’m a big fan of that last one, as it feels the least “sales-y” and is more likely to get you a meeting.)

Warning: Be careful about having too many voices in the room when you have these meetings. It’s a well-known danger of focus groups that they can be dominated by one or two people in the room who end up monopolizing the discussion. The result: you build a product that suits one person’s agenda, but doesn’t have any other fans at that company. If you have multiple stakeholders to talk to, meet with them individually if you can.

Surveys

Pros: When there are a few questions you want to ask as many people in your market as possible, why not package them in a survey to your customer base? Even if your response rate is only 10%, if you’ve got 200 customer contacts, that’s still 20 people you could be getting important feedback from. And all without trying to get onto 20 different people’s calendars for a face-to-face meeting.

Cons: Surveys are the exact counterpart of in-person meetings: they scale very nicely, though they don’t go deep. You won’t be there to ask the survey-taker any follow-up questions, so be sure to make your questions as clear as possible – you don’t want to have to guess why they answered the way they did afterwards.

Warning: People… kind of hate surveys. Don’t send them out too often, and don’t make them too long. I like to limit mine to three multiple-choice questions, with a final text box for people to put in any thoughts they may have. (And there are always at least a few passionate people who want to sound off about something or other.)

User data

Pros: You don’t have to worry about customers asking you for that faster horse if you just mine the data they’re giving you every time they use your system. And this data is arguably more reliable than any answers your users may give you face-to-face or on a survey because, after all, everybody lies.

And now you can avoid the headache of getting onto calendars for face-to-face meetings, while effectively getting a response rate of 100%, so to speak. (Everyone’s data is in your system, so everyone is being considered.)

Cons: This does presuppose, of course, that you’ve got a product in market that people are using at a scale sufficient to give you some insights. If you’re launching a brand-new product, you may initially need to buy the data you need in order to complete the picture you have of your market.

Also, usage of your product can tell you only so much. Seeing which buttons in your UI people click on may not end up giving you any insight into, for instance, the politics back in their offices that are driving their purchase decisions.

Finally, usage of your product can only tell you about the users you already have, not the ones you don’t.

Warning: Existing products (especially B2B ones) often have UIs that don’t capture any analytics or insights on user behavior. If you’re the PM of such a product – fix that!

Conclusion

In-person meetings are more of a thing for B2B than B2C. Relationships with individual consumers tend not to be as strong (or to exist at all) compared with the relationships an enterprise software company has with its customers. For this reason, B2C apps often rely more on querying their own user data than anything else to steer their product development.

Both kinds of companies can give their users surveys, again with the caveat that people in general kind of hate surveys, so these surveys need to be as painless as possible.

These are the ways of asking customers yourself about their problems in order to get product ideas. Next time, I’ll discuss getting ideas from other stakeholders in your org.