we’re going to get some real talk we’re going to talk about  how to build product for the market  how to get get a product to market the  right way  and how listening to your customers in a  genuine  and honest way can really help you  change  your product strategy for the better

The Real Job of Product Managers

Human Centricity in the Age of Data

Building a Love for Customers

Investing in Conversations and Insights

The Power of Return on Customer Relationships

Introduction

shauna wolverton  is senior vice president of products at  zendesk  and manages their global product teams  to deliver  thoughtfully designed market changing  products. one of our founding principles at zendesk is  that we design  software for humans and so we’re going  to talk a little bit today about  how you can put those humans at  the center  of everything you do. So I’m shauna building software for  humans.

The Real Job of Product Managers

when you think about the  pain in your customer base and solving  that pain  finding it turns out to be very easy. Who amongst us is not carrying around  a backlog of voice of the customer  feature request probably from your sales  team.  probably in a spreadsheet not a story  center  but that’s fine right we’re carrying it  around from release planning to release  planning. we know what the pain is but  our job  as product people is actually bigger than that.

we do not  take the requirements from the customers  and give them  to the engineers. We really have to know  and understand all of those humans to  make sure  we’re building the right things because when you do make assumptions  that can sometimes go wrong and we are  absolutely hardwired to do this.

If we had to wake up every morning  and make every decision from scratch,   we would be duped, we’d be paralyzed and unable to  leave the house.  It’s really important that we make  sure we check those  assumptions every once in a while and i really think that the best way to do this is to actually  know  the humans.

Human Centricity in the Age of Data

i mean i think when i  think about one of my first  pm jobs i was doing this work. It happened   with these plastic  manufacturers. i thought  who wants to fax things who wants to  hand write i’m going to build this  killer portal online and they can log in  and they can fill out the forms  and then i actually went to visit them  there was one computer  in the plastics manufacturing plant and  it was in the back office  and no one who had paid was like where  they did their finances  right turns out they loved the faxes. it’s really kind of checking those  assumptions and really  understanding and watching those people work  is where you start to get  those kinds  of insights 

i actually think you know that  knowing of people really  is the discipline right we live in an  age  of an overwhelming amount of data  about what our customers are doing on  our websites in our products on their  phones  but it’s not enough it really was not  that long ago  that we used to put software in a box  and ship it and  wait right and that insight we have has  absolutely  revolutionized the way  you know the  sort of craft of product management.

Data points and those graphs  and those user journey  flows don’t tell you the whole  picture and so I actually  have a whole thing about sort of getting  to know  some of those data points right. i think  one of the first places you can get  real exposure to real customers i call  it the pm  torture chamber when you’re  sitting and you have to be very quiet well user testing is happening and that  disembodied voice is saying horrible  things about the beautiful feature  that you just poured your entire life  into.  I think  you know getting out in  the world  sharing meals, having a beer, right you  can’t beat all of them.  you have to know a  sampling of them   have a beer ask them about  their kids and watch them work.

Building a Love for Customers

understand  their lives. when you understand that people who are  using your software are fundamentally dependent on you for  their careers.  Often they are relying on the things you do  and they have lives and they have goals. when you understand that full  picture  and you sort of find it.

It does get tricky right because you  know we talked about one of our founding  principles being designing  software for the humans who use it. turns  out the humans who use it  aren’t always the people who buy it and  your users  often are someone else’s customers.  So really understanding and sort of  putting yourself in the shoes  of both of those people is important.

No  one in the history of youtube ever wanted youtube to start playing  videos in the middle  of their ads in the middle of their  videos right. That’s not  a thing that a user of youtube really  wants but that person isn’t really youtube’s  customer. you have to make these balances  about how we can  serve the people who are funding us and  making sure that we have   developers and product managers to  build great things   but aren’t alienating or being too  aggressive  with the actual people who are actually  using our products.

This is not a big truth bomb here.  Hopefully we all sort of know this, but  asking questions is great when you  get the chance  to meet your customers. Truly  listening  turns out to be a lot harder I think. we’re all sort of tuned to listen for  the things we want to hear. It’s really easy to miss out  on the bigger picture.

Investing in Conversations and Insights

Before I was at zendesk I spent   years at salesforce and my pm job there  was  managing custom schema and if you can  imagine  very few sales people called me and said shawna come to  my sales meeting and talk about  custom schema. so meeting customers  turned out  to be tricky in that  position right. we’re not always  invited to the meetings, we’re not always   able to sort of be where the customers are. what i did was i sort of learned how  to pitch  the bigger  platform story it turns  out  customers came to our executive briefing  center four or five a day  and people were my peers were not so  excited about doing those briefings 

 so as a bonus i got really good at  giving presentations to customers. Fundamentally what i got out of that  was a whole new  observation of what happened when I watched customers talk to each other.  in that conference room when the cio was  talking to the business analyst  about what the struggles were and it  turned out  you know i had really  got it wrong. Right, we had this history  of small and medium-sized businesses.  i was designing all of these things  understanding how that part of the  business worked  and when you got into the cio and the IT  department it was  fundamentally different. there was a  whole new set of tools and a whole new  way of thinking about how product  development happened.

It wouldn’t have gotten if I hadn’t  actually taken that  time  and spent the time with those  customers and really listened to what they were saying. you know incremental product   addition sort of new features making  a bunch of changes. Those are really great when  you talk to customers. There’s a fundamentally  different motion  when you’re thinking about actually  bringing something entirely new  to market and you know we just did this  at zendesk we decided after a lot of  years of thinking. our strong suit being convention over  configuration  that we needed a platform and some of  this was from customers we’d heard  that they wanted a few  platform-like  features but we knew we had to do it in  a zendesk  way. 

We kind of did that whole  pain point thing. disconnected  customer data. it’s in a thousand places.  but we know that the whole customer  is  the great white unicorn of the north. It’s just you’re never gonna  really get that all in one place.A lot of  this idea of people being really  frustrated and this was fun to find. go out and look at other  people’s forums. where are people complaining about the  other offerings that are in the market  to really understand  the kinds of things  that we could do  differently. We launched our platform  really as  it allowed us  to sort of go into the market with this  other founding principle of ours which  is to be the company  your customers want you to be.

The Power of Return on Customer Relationships

 i think  product  plays a really tremendous role in this  but it’s often a whole company motion if  you think about  what it’s like for your customers to buy  from you to get service from you  and to use your product and how is the  product sort of helping all of those  different functions  to really bring this idea of what are  the pain points across the customer  journey  and how as a product are you starting to  think about solving some of those pain  points. 

One of the  biggest things we heard from everyone  was around  closed systems and proprietary systems  and so the first  real big part of this was about being  open, being in the public cloud, not  proprietary languages, no lock-in.  fundamentally it was about bringing a  product to market  that is appropriate for the time. It was really  great for us to be able to solve a lot  of pain points. if it had to be done 10 years ago  or  even  five years ago that would have been much more  difficult.  So once you have those products in the market it turns out  sometimes  you know you might blow it  right. The feature you designed that you  think  was amazing and will delight your  customers turns out to frustrate them.  your service may go down.

I think when you invest in these relationships  with the people who use  your products it pays a tremendous amount of dividends. i don’t know if  anyone saw a few months ago  salesforce was down for three days and  if you went on twitter there were of  course a lot of people who were very  grumpy and grouchy and  there was all of these people who were  thanking salesforce  for communicating with them for  being transparent about what was going  on. all of the developers who were working  on the weekend to get it fixed.

 It is not a thing you get for free, you don’t get that just by being good  right, that is a whole way of thinking  about  investing in really deep, really  meaningful relationships  with your customers.  Those kinds of things will pay a lot of dividends. at the end  of the day you get the it’s not you it’s me  those misses added up  the customer leaves maybe they go out of  business you don’t  often know but. These are tremendous  opportunities to talk to customers who for whatever  reason  decided to leave you. It’s very sad but  so often we find customers leaving. they think the grass is greener and they  come back.

 So when you sort of take that  emotional investment and you follow it  all the way through the journey  you have a much better chance of sort of  getting those customers to consider you  in the future and it can really tell you  some important things. I think there is an airing  of grievances that can happen when you’re no longer in a  relationship and you sometimes get a lot  more  truth when  you know a customer is on their way out and you know that  transparency  is huge. I think when you listen to  customers and you understand their pain  and you really know who they are, you have to do work to show them that  you’re listening. i have a fun feature as part  of every event that we do.   Internally I call it the airing of  grievances.  externally it’s our voice of the  customer feedback

when i get on stage with all of my  product managers and  anyone who’s at our free events you can  be the tiniest customer  or the biggest customer we have. You can  ask us  absolutely anything about the roadmap,  about a feature that’s bothering you.  it’s you know  it’s tech support, it’s therapy  and it’s a way for all of us  to put a human face on our customers and  for our customers  to put a human face on us.  

Summary

As you think about  solving pain,  there’s a lot of easy ways  to find the kind of top that  you know skim the cream off the top of  pain but it’s these deeper relationships.  

this idea of  loving them. I think it’s really really  difficult to do wrong by your customers  when you have a love and respect for  them  and not the sort of you know teenage  butterfly in the stomach love. It’s like making weird noises  when you eat dinner and i’m gonna stay  married to you for  years anyway  it’s that kind of love.

It’s easy to be bewildered as you watch them in those user  journeys and they’re falling off right  before the great thing  that you built and data will never  be enough  for you to really uncover what’s going  on there.