Customer insights, part two: listening and ignoring.
Or, how to meditate during important customer meetings.
Welcome to the second article in a series about customer insights, how to get them, and things that go wrong when you try.
Part one explored the pitfalls of talking AT your customers. You visit customers, talk at them incessantly, never pause to listen, rarely ask questions, fear their feedback, and are blindsided when you get it. Product managers occupy an educator’s mindset and make the honest mistake of exclusively teaching and spreading knowledge about their product. After all, who knows the product better than the product manager?
Honest mistakes sometimes carry disastrous consequences. Or, you might get lucky.
As product managers develop, most realize how important listening and learning are to the success of their product. As with most complex skills, knowing and doing are two different things.
What happens when you listen but ignore what you hear?
Lessons from a roadshow.
The pilot taxied us to the tarmac, where we idled twenty-fifth in line for takeoff. This was going to take a while, the pilot informed us, an hour delay. He promised they’d try to make up in flight. I sat in my cramped economy seat near the back of the plane, crunching numbers and collating feedback from a week’s worth of customer meetings and interviews.
I was exhausted from the whirlwind. I’d scheduled a readout for the following Monday and wanted to be ready to present my findings and prepared for questions from my product and engineering counterparts.
My team had prepared me with questions designed to gather specific, targeted feedback about product plans we’d put together after a contentious customer advisory board meeting. With the best intentions, I’d determined to learn what customers thought about our plans, test some assumptions, and gather design feedback.
I’d brought a helper to each meeting to take notes so I could focus on asking my questions systematically and listen closely to each customer’s input. I read through the notes from the first meeting and was puzzled. Had I asked the questions poorly, or had my helper recorded the notes inaccurately? The answers seemed off, not what I expected, and not what I remembered from the meeting.
Had I met with the wrong person? Should I have sent more detailed materials so the customer was more prepared for my questions?
As I read through the rest of the notes, a pattern emerged. The customers I’d met with clearly misunderstood what we were trying to do. Later, I’d get with my team to work out what we’d done wrong and how we could better structure our feedback sessions in the future. In the meantime, I had some findings and recommendations to write up. My conclusion? Our customers didn’t grasp our strategy or the problem we were trying to solve, and we should proceed as planned.
Crazy feedback or the hubris of expertise?
“A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful — while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with — he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?”
Henry David Thoreau warned us against the hubris of our expertise.
Sometimes, feedback is crazy, and you really should ignore it. Two common ways this feedback manifests: an outlier customer not in your ideal profile wants something esoteric the rest of your market doesn’t care about; a customer is using you as a foil for another vendor.
Such circumstances aren’t rare. Careful development and validation of your ideal customer profile should make them obvious. Snipe hunting is only funny to jokesters.
Sometimes, however, our core flagship customers tell us exactly what they want, why it’s important to them, and what will happen if we don’t deliver it. And that feedback doesn’t align with our carefully crafted plans. So we don’t hear it. Why?
We study the market, interrogate our customers, trade insights with industry experts, and conspire with our engineering counterparts to formulate an ironclad product plan. We’ve planted a seed and want to see the tree grow.
Because of that perfectly reasonable desire to nurture our seedling into reality, our industriousness settles into an imagined genius, the plan calcifies, and the product organization runs full speed toward a dead end. Sales slow, customers leave for more interesting competitors, and leadership demands answers and progress.
Missing out on good feedback.
I made the mistake of believing in my hubris. Instead of hearing the feedback for what it was–a clear, market-driven need for a solution to a common real-world problem–I blamed myself for not presenting a compelling case for our product plan and then shifted that blame onto my customers. The plan hatched from my introspection looked like, “When I finish this road trip, I’ll work on my communication skills and how to better present a compelling case,” when it should have been, “Work on improving my active listening skills and pausing before reacting.”
Whether you recognize the difference between contradicting feedback and your inability to explain the plan effectively depends on factors entirely within your control. Does the company’s culture encourage listening and learning? Is listening with curiosity and openness a core value that everyone understands? Are you living those core values as an example to the rest of the product organization?
Eventually, during a 360 review, a brave soul on my team offered the insight I needed to improve my listening skills and develop empathy for my customers. I stormed around, outraged, utterly ignorant of the irony of my reaction.
Does your team have permission to give you candid feedback?
This team member, a person I’d committed to mentor and coach, had tried to warn me that I was passing on good feedback. She had correctly identified that our customers understood what we were doing and simply wanted something else. When she raised the concern in the follow-up meeting, I imagined I was acting bravely to take the blame for fumbling the communication with the customers.
She gave my words back to me, “Before we take action, we must always take the time to listen, analyze, and validate our assumptions.”
Humbled, I had the presence of mind to ask her how she would get and understand the feedback. She formulated and executed a plan I couldn’t, gathered the needed input, and righted the ship.
Learning to listen.
I’d like to say what I learned from my botched roadshow experience immediately honed my listening skills and helped me develop empathy. Truthfully, I found myself stuck in the same pattern years later. As I developed more experience, my sense of being an expert strengthened, and my propensity to talk at customers and talk with them without really listening increased.
What can I say? I’m human.
In part one, I talked about a technique for asking a question or proposing a topic and then not speaking for a minute. The tactic helped with the ‘talking at’ problem. I needed another technique to really listen to feedback.
The first thing I had to do was stop planning what to say next. I assigned a scribe in each meeting to capture detailed notes, and I also developed the habit of writing two or three keywords so I could reflect what I‘d heard and ask for clarification. Then, I’d repeat what I thought I’d heard.
That repetition turned into a startling insight. Most of the time, I’d already started analyzing and forming an opinion before I’d heard everything. I was trying to listen and process simultaneously, and I can’t multitask. I was optimizing for processing, which meant I was using data and information I already had rather than trying to absorb the new information being presented to me.
Conversations became like meditations. I had to focus intently on the speaker and let the distracting thoughts–my expert’s interior monologue–come into my mind and then fade away like a passing cloud. Before meetings, I would say little mantras to myself: "None of us is as smart as all of us.” Trite, perhaps, but better preparation than practicing the entire conversation to ensure my version happened during the meeting. Talk about planning what to say!
I took my team member’s advice to heart and set aside every conversation for a day before starting my analysis. The first step was to write on a whiteboard what the customer was going through in their own voice. What were their motivations, hopes, and fears? Why did they say what they said? When I didn’t understand, the exercise gave me clues for follow-up questions.
Finally, I realized I was missing the most crucial part of the conversation. Once I’d heard everything the customer had to say, repeated what I thought I’d heard, and we’d had a chance to clarify together, I’d finish with the simple but powerful question from part one, “How can I help?”