Better Product Managers, and Product Management

No one answers the questions you don’t ask

September 15th, 2008

The meeting was going well.  I had met the general manager and day-to-day project manager at our customer company, and their feedback on our product was fairly positive.  Usage was within their expectations, and they were open to doing some tweaking to get better performance.

“I’m glad to hear the product is performing for you,” I said.  “But stepping back for a moment from our current product, I’m curious – if our product could address any one pain point, your biggest pain point, what would that be?”

The response was a pause, then a surprised look.

“You help us do “X” better,” said the general manager, “and that’s great.  But our biggest source of revenues is “Y”.  I mean, “Y” probably accounts for 20x as much value as “X”.   That’s our biggest problem to solve… is there any way you could help us with that?”

The answer was yes.  “Y” is actually a fairly logical extension of our technology.  The only reason we hadn’t built it is that we didn’t know the demand was there.  A few more phone calls confirmed: we had multiple customers, happy customers, who were secretly wanting a product that we could build, but it had never occurred to them to suggest it.

There’s two important concepts here, I think.  One, it’s not your customers’ job to tell you what they want.  You need to ask open-ended questions, listen to what they’re saying and what they’re not saying, and stop framing things in terms of existing solutions.  Two, being asked for your opinion is a pleasant surprise.  You never know what people might say as thanks for being asked!

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  • http://artvankilmer.wordpress.com/ Arthur Klepchukov

    “…and stop framing things in terms of existing solutions”

    This was my biggest issue in my first attempts at doing successful customer interviews. It's hard to pull yourself out of the trenches to a higher level because you just want *this* solution to be the one. But it's important to realize that you're searching for the best possible solution (as defined by your exit criteria for customer discovery and validation and for your company as a whole). As you point out, that search shouldn't stop just because you have something that works.

    I think you explicitly saying “But stepping back for a moment from our current product” helped both you and the person you were interviewing make the transition from existing solution details to the realm of bigger, broader ideas.

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