PM Bootcamp — Customers

Customers.

It doesn’t matter how you feel about them, whether you like them, hate them, think they don’t understand your product, or think their requests are unreasonable. You cannot be in business without them.

More than that, the customer is the single biggest determining factor for whether your product or feature will be wildly successful or an utter failure.

It’s worth restating.

The customer is the single biggest determining factor for whether your product or feature will be wildly successful or an utter failure.

I’m going to walk you through a few questions for how you better understand your customer and some best practices to make sure you are building things people love rather than things people never even bother to use.

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Who Is Your PRIMARY Customer?

I’ve noticed that in the PM world you have people that are obsessed with the “Customer” but add zero nuance to it.

Peter Drucker calls this out in his book The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization (you should read it if you haven’t) and creates a distinction that we will build off of. Primary Customer (Note the singular) and Supporting Customers.

Your PRIMARY customer is the one who will actually be using, advocating for, and benefiting from your product or feature.

In order to figure out and define who this person or organization is here are some questions you can ask:

• Who is actually using this product the most?
• Who do we want using this product the most? (Hopefully it’s the same answer as the question above)
• Whose life is changed (even if it’s in a small way) the most through this product?
• Who would suffer the most if this product disappeared?

The answers to these questions will begin to paint a picture of who your Primary customer is, and who, once identified, will become a key pillar of your entire product development lifecycle.

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Who Are Your SUPPORTING Customers?

While you should only have ONE Primary Customer. You will almost certainly have multiple supporting customers that you need to make sure are accounted for, but not necessarily prioritized.

A supporting customer is one who has a stake in your product but doesn’t necessarily use it, especially not to the extent of your primary customer.

Some examples of supporting customers:

Internal

• Marketing Teams
• Sales Teams
• Support
• Investors

External

• The Customer VP who agrees to buy your product for a different department
• Your content creators or suppliers (in a market place product)
• A team lead for a group using your product.

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Why Should You Care or Make This Distinction?

This is a fair question. You’ve identified the difference between your Primary and Supporting customers.

So what?

I would argue this is one of the most critical things you can do for your entire Product Development Lifecycle. If you have an excellent picture of your Customers then you should easily be able to identify:

• WHO you are mainly building for (PRIMARY) AND who you need to make sure you are accounting for (SUPPORTING).
• WHAT they care about AND Don’t care about.
• WHY they are using your product at all.

With this info in hand the risk associated with determining what to add and how to build something is reduced dramatically, the actual development efficiency skyrockets because you don’t have to wonder about use cases, and you are able to pinpoint the main items that your customer cares about the most.

An Example:

Let’s do a quick case study to see this in action. Let’s pick the wildly successful and popular design product Figma (I don’t work for and have no stake in Figma whatsoever).

Primary Customer: Designers, largely product designers

Supporting Customers: Internal marketing and sales teams, Product Design directors, product teams seeing Figma designs etc.

Areas Primary Customer cares about: time to create a design, access to library, ease of sharing, ease of receiving and parsing feedback, version control etc.

Next Product Initiative?

This info took minutes to put together, but with it in had we know that the next area to focus on should be something that:

• Decreases time to design
• Increases Collaboration
• Increases ease of the creation process.

We have literally saved hours and hours of risk and cost with an exercise that took minutes.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

What Now?

Just a few action items for you to start implementing TODAY

• Find out who your PRIMARY Customer is
• List your SUPPORTING Customers
• Determine what your customers value (Why are they using the product at all)
• TALK to THEM! If you don’t already, schedule at least 2 customer calls in the next week and just talk to them about how and why they are using your product.

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Let me know your Customer experience in the comments.