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Talking to your customers is a learning experience.
Product people are wired to solve problems. C’mon, admit it: when you see a customer pain point, aren’t you tempted to brainstorm a slew of elegant solutions that will wow users and make their lives easier? The problem is that even the most “brilliant” solution is meaningless if it doesn’t solve the right problem. Before you build and ship, you must deeply understand your customers’ needs, desires, and struggles. This week, we’re sharing some resources on how to do that.
Meanwhile, in product news, Meta implies it really wasn’t a B2B company; Sony wants tech companies to “Show Me the Money,” Microsoft realizes why it occasionally makes sense to go to the office, and the answer to too many Slack channels is another chat app.
Learning from customers will get your startup farther than any best practice or playbook. In this article from the folks at Bessemer Venture Partners, founders of Zola, BlackLine, Zoom, and Twilio discuss the rigorous customer focus inside their companies and how they used feedback and data to transform their product and businesses. You’ll also get the story of Procore’s unconventional two-decade journey to IPO from Bessemer Partner Brian Feinstein.
Learning from your customers: Why Bob matters. Your customers can tell you everything you need to know to build your business, says Professor Frédéric Dalsace of IMD, provided you pick the right ones to learn from. You want to talk to Bobbs (”best of business but small”).
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This Week’s Interview:
Customer obsession: Satisfying needs.
Find out how to move beyond customer focus to “customer obsession” via consumer science to discover what delights customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. Learn how to get insight from four sources of consumer insight, then evaluate these ideas through various research techniques. Gibson Biddle, Former VP of Product at Netflix, illustrates these tactics using examples from Netflix, then, puts the techniques into practice with a highly interactive, modern-day Netflix case.
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This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free.
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INDUSTRY: The Product Conference returns to Cleveland in September, with over 700 other product people from across the globe attending. You'll be inspired and challenged during this two-day (three-day for Conference Plus and Superpass ticket holders) retreat from your desk. Ultimately, you'll return to your workplace with ready-to-implement strategies and the confidence that you are doing things right.
Speakers include Bob Moesta (Co-Architect of the JTBD framework), Melika Hope (Director of Product Management at Spotify), Matt LeMay (Author of Product Management in Practice), Cassidy Fein (Principal Group Product Manager at Microsoft), and many others.
Register by May 31st, and save $200 -- plus get a special bonus!
You'll save $200 if you register this month before prices increase... plus you'll receive our INDUSTRY Greatest Hits Keynote Collection (value $99) featuring Marty Cagan, Lenny Rachitsky, April Dunford, and others as a special bonus! But it's only included if you register this month.
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Slack feedback
As product leaders, we always look for ways to improve our offerings and deliver more value to our customers. One powerful tool at our disposal is machine learning, which can help us personalize experiences, streamline workflows, and uncover valuable insights. However, as the recent controversy surrounding Slack's use of customer data for AI training demonstrates, we must tread carefully when leveraging this technology.
Slack's decision to use customer data to train its machine learning models, unless explicitly told not to, has sparked outrage among users who feel their privacy has been violated. While Slack maintains that the data never leaves its platform and isn't used to train third-party models, the fact remains that many customers were unaware their data was being used in this way.
This incident highlights the importance of transparency and consent when using customer data for AI training. As product leaders, we are responsible for communicating how we intend to use our customers' data and allowing them to opt out if they're uncomfortable with it. Burying this information in dense terms of service agreements or making it difficult for customers to opt out is unethical and erodes trust in our products and brands.
Even with the best intentions, sensitive information could be leaked; our models could perpetuate biases or produce harmful outputs.
Ultimately, learning from customers is essential to building great products, but we must do so in a way that respects their privacy and earns their trust. By being transparent about our data practices, giving customers control over how their data is used, and prioritizing ethics and safety in our AI initiatives, we can harness the power of machine learning while maintaining the integrity of our relationships with those we serve.
Mike Belsito
Co-founder, Product Collective
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Was Meta ever serious about B2B? Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015 called Workplace. Meta pulled the plug on the enterprise product last week, bringing the curtain down on the enterprise experiment nine years after it launched. It’s worth noting that there was some skepticism from the start that a company like Facebook could pull this off. The enterprise is a different animal from the consumer world. It values privacy and security and requires a set of back-end tools that are purpose-built for the enterprise.
Does Scarlett Johansson have an album out? Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without permission. Sony Music says it has “reason to believe” those companies “may already have made unauthorized uses” of its content. If you are wondering, “without permission” means without a licensing agreement.
Microsoft thinks it might have cracked, making workers return to the office — but will employees buy it? Microsoft released Places to help companies and their employees get the most out of office days while also enabling remote working. The platform uses AI (there’s a surprise) to help workers coordinate the best time to come to the office (i.e., when the rest of your team will also be there) and enable more in-person connections. Places also integrates desk booking with other services, such as Calendar markers, to notify you that an office space is fully booked. If the tool works as promised, it could bring some sanity to the decision about when to come into the office and answer that unanswerable question about office life - is that conference room really open?
Former CEO of Yammer tries to take on Slack, again. David Sacks, former CEO of Yammer, and Evan Owner, former VP of engineering at a collaboration app, believe they’ve solved the incessant proliferation of Slack channels. They’ve added to the proliferation of chat apps by creating Glue, an employee chat app designed around topic-based threads and uses, you guessed it, GenAI. How it competes with Slack depends on how willing people are to switch over and how much they value having AI pop in and out of their workplace chats.
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Five things you can do to learn more about your customers' buyer’s journey. If you’d like to maximize product sales, it’s helpful to understand your customers' buyer’s journey. This journey is a framework that follows your customer's progression from a curious visitor on your site to an eager buyer by researching problems and solutions until they decide to buy. Jennifer Ravenscroft describes steps you can take to learn more about your customers' buying journey and helps them along from the initial interaction to conversion.
7 Lessons to learn from unhappy customers. For startups and small business owners, every customer matters. And although you may try to meet their needs, the occasional unhappy customer is inevitable. Instead of becoming defensive or burying your head in the sand, seeing these complaints as an opportunity for your business to learn and grow is important. Raul Galera shares seven lessons that unhappy customers can teach you if you allow them.
Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald.
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