PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Customer Satisfaction First: Mastering the Art of Prioritizing Customers over Stakeholder Satisfaction
Shift your focus from keeping your Stakeholders satisfied to solving customer pain points.
Product & Leadership Playbook
Play 11/196 — Your priority is your customer, period.
One of the most difficult situations for a product manager, especially somebody who is new to the field, is to navigate between customer needs and problems versus what the Stakeholders are pushing for. In today's fast-paced world, the first to release is the winner, usually. When companies like Netflix and Facebook went global in just a couple of years, now we are experiencing ChatGPT breaking records with less than 5 days to reach 1 million users.
And this is why this topic a very difficult to master. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the demands of stakeholders and lose sight of the most essential aspect of any business: the end customer. While stakeholder interests are certainly important, ultimately, it’s the customer who determines whether a business thrives or fails.
So one can raise the very important question, how to balance in product management the customer needs (get their problems solved) and the stakeholder needs and their influence on the product?
“The customer’s perception is your reality.” — Kate Zabriskie
As the quote states, your business’s success ultimately heavily relies on the perception of your customers. It does not matter what the company or its stakeholders believe about their product or service; what truly matters is how the customers perceive it. I have seen it way too often, that stakeholders, even C-level use their political power to get what they want and build products, which is great for the company itself but repelling the customers rapidly from it. If customers perceive a product or service as poor, even if the company believes it is excellent, that negative perception becomes the reality for the company. Therefore, a business’s success depends on its ability to understand and respond to the needs and perceptions of its customers.
To achieve this balance, product managers should take the following steps:
- Define and prioritize customer needs: Leverage the power of a cross-functional team and reach out to your Ux-Ui Researcher or hop on the task yourself to conduct research to understand your customer's needs, prioritize them, and develop a roadmap that addresses those needs. Having your customer funnel and user journey should help you tremendously to mark where you need to put your focus to.
- Identify and engage stakeholders: Identify all the stakeholders who have an interest in your product, and engage them early in the product development process. Make it a collaboration, not a fight. It's going to be the key to understanding their needs, motivations, and expectations, and keeping them informed throughout the product development cycle. The goal is to get it right, not be right.
- Communicate regularly: A product manager, simply cannot over-communicate roadmaps, priorities, and releases. The most optimal way is to keep your communication with both customers and stakeholders. Share updates on the product roadmap, highlight key milestones, and gather both customer and stakeholder feedback regularly.
- Align with company strategy: It is, one of the most basic product essentials, however, you need to ensure that your product strategy is aligned with the overall company strategy. Since there are multiple ways to solve a problem, keeping the business strategy in mind will most likely help to guide the product decisions to the right path. Here is an article I wrote earlier on how to achieve that.
- Make data-driven decisions: Use data to guide your decisions. Analyze customer and market data to validate product ideas and make data-supported decisions that balance customer and stakeholder needs.
- Avoid wish-concerts, rather focus on solving problems: The more people you introduce your product ideas, the more two cents you will get, however, you need to keep this in mind: at the end, the product manager makes the call on what's going to be built, carrying the responsibility as well. While everyone else will try to help you with ideas, it's the product manager's job to have a proper plan, which is going to be capable to succeed.
All in all, product managers can create products that meet both customer and stakeholder needs, ensuring long-term success for the product and the company, however, it is not essential that in the end, everyone is going to be satisfied. Remember, winning ugly is still winning, and delivering continuous value to customers will diminish conflicts along the way.
About the author:
Hi, I’m Lehel. I became a product manager to fuel my curiosity in technology and business management by creating digital products. My journey allowed me to dive deep into product design, user experience, business administration, and learning multiple programming languages. I have been fortunate to lead programs for successful Startups and Fortune 500 companies whereas a leader, my focus is on establishing a great product culture to help people strive by following servant leadership and radical candor principles. In my free time, I write about product management & leadership topics to document the learnings of my past 15 years in the field.
It starts with:
- How People Analytics helps to empower and manage tech teams?
- How to map business value with human capital?
- The 5 pillars of scaling cross-functional teams
- 12 Best Books to read in 2023 as a Product Leader
- How to set crystal clear goals as a Leader?
- How to Master the Art of Product Planning?
- The most important job of a Product Leader.
- Discovering the Right Course of Action: How to Make Tough Decisions
- 12 reasons, why successful product leaders regularly collaborate with their team members.
- Gather facts, not just opinions, to make informed decisions.
- Your failures will make you beyond successful if you follow this simple process.
- Product Manager Hiring: The Decision-Making Engine.
- Get better at decision-making, by following this one trend.
You can find me at lehelkakonyi.com as well.
