Managing product requests from customer-facing teams

Re:Managing product requests from customer-facing teams by dchuk on Monday January 06, 2020 @11:06AM (#21970180)

It's not about what they want typically, it's what they need. Most customers/users aren't incentivized to solve upstream problems for themselves, instead they just need to use the tools they're given to do their job (at least in B2B area).

Product people should rarely if ever react directly to WHAT customers ask for, but instead dig in and understand WHY this ask is coming up. Then you'll get to the good stuff.

EDIT: For clarity, I fully agree that product people must learn the customer's problems. Just be careful responding to what they ask for when doing so.

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Re:Managing product requests from customer-facing teams by brettcvz on Monday January 06, 2020 @11:14AM (#21970250)

Okay I think we’re saying pretty similar things then!

The “top two” technique works particularly well for addressing “performance” type features for products already in market. Most customer requests, and most of the things that my stakeholders come to me with, are around ways the current product could better address the existing problem it’s trying to solve, rather than finding whole new customer pain points.

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