You’re Talking to Customers Wrong
The chorus of voices telling product people to talk to customers has been loud lately. Certainly the undercurrent has been there a long time — well before Jeff Bezos told us all to be customer obsessed (at the same time, notably, as he said “internet schminternet” on national television). But perhaps the volume’s been cranked up as product is enduring the same existential crisis as many other tech disciplines (see, e.g. this & this & this.)
Let’s be clear, talking to customers is beautiful. It’s necessary. But two crucial things are lost in the current discussion, and they can turn a driver of product impact into a waste of time:
Talking to customers is a waste unless you take the right actions.
Product people themselves are usually the biggest barrier to taking the right actions.
No amount of customer interviews will save you from yourself.
Good news, though. Keep talking to customers. You can check yourself in a way that restores the connection with product and business impact. Here’s how to do it.
Talk Talk Talk
It seems like product people around the world are asking themselves the same set of questions right now:
How can we have more impact on the business? How can we build better products? How can we keep our jobs, given economic uncertainty and tight purse strings?
One common answer, it seems — talk to customers.
This is great advice.
Terrible things happen to product people (and their companies) when they get stuck in the dank caves of their own guts. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t repeat. But suffice it to say that when leaders get too far from their users, well, that’s how companies get driven confidently off a cliff.
So I am deeply in love with the idea of product people talking to customers. Anyone talking to customers, really. I’m focused on product people here, but this advice applies to literally anyone involved in developing any kind of product or service.
If you’re looking for productive examples of how to do it well, you could do worse than Teresa Torres’ excellent book Continuous Discovery Habits. Torres gives us a simple, diverse set of practical techniques for structuring customer input.
Other good examples come from Stripe Product Lead Jeff Weinstein, who recently went on Lenny’s Podcast largely to extoll the virtues of talking to customers and suggest a bunch of ways to do it. Some are hokey (definitely don’t start “Study Groups”), but most are great.
In my consulting practice, one of the most common practices I run into is weekly interview quotas — PMs who are required to talk to customers regularly. It becomes part of the cadence of work — every Wednesday we do our customer interviews… fun and profit (sarcasm AND foreshadowing!).
All this sounds great. But as you might have guessed, there’s a problem. Kind of a big one, actually, and we won’t solve it by talking to more customers:
It’s you. (Hi.) You’re the problem.
You’re the Problem (and the Solution)
If you consistently talk to customers, the idea goes, you’ll never stop discovering their needs and pain points. You’ll keep your finger on the pulse, and make better decisions about… well, everything.
Lovely. Except the talking part isn’t what really matters. Neither is the listening part, actually. It’s all about taking action.
Certainly it matters whether you take any action at all. I was struck by recent Gartner research which shows how damaging it is inside companies when leaders listen but do nothing. Just like HR leaders confuse talking to employees as the point of the exercise, product people sometimes forget that talking to customers is a means to an end.
Unfortunately, all that listening doesn’t always lead to action. Very often talking to customers is just a thin veneer on top of product people listening to their guts. It’s cover for doing what they were going to do anyway. That’s a form of user-centered performance, and it’s a waste of time.
Worse than doing nothing, though, can be doing the wrong thing. This is really devious. You feel righteous about the work you did to stay connected to your customers, but you didn’t do the work to understand how your own perspective led you to the wrong conclusion.
GI Joe got it right — knowing IS half the battle. But you also need to change. If you’re really committed to turning customer listening into business impact (instead of just warm fuzzies), then there are three big issues you need to solve. And you’re right at the meaty center of all of them.
You’re Doing it Wrong
The most common critique of customer listening is that it’s superficial. It’s easy enough to listen, learn about a need or problem, and fire it into your spreadsheet. Draw another bubble on your opportunity diagram. Add it to the backlog. But making lists is hardly the most important part of talking to users. You have to go deeper.
Product people are (reasonably), don’t usually have the expertise needed to extract deeper insights that drive business impact. So they’re stuck in a superficial zone that’s only marginally useful. This is, perhaps, why many product folks fall back on apocryphal Henry Ford quotes and incomplete references to Steve Jobs to justify not talking to customers. They don’t know how to do better.
It takes training and practice to see the forest and the trees, to find the underlying insight behind whatever customers express. That’s why a great solution is usually to find a researcher to be your partner in listening. But you can improve, too.
What a researcher does differently is partly about the interaction with the customer. Interviewing is really freaking hard, but I think many well-meaning product folks convince themselves otherwise (how hard could it be to talk to customers?) rather than investing in their interviewing technique. As a start, books like Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users and Rubin & Rubin’s Qualitative Interviewing are incredible resources.
But you also need to internalize something that good researchers do instinctively: we’re looking for patterns, not instances.
Racking up lists of needs, pain points, and opportunities feels good. It looks awesome in a spreadsheet or in Jira (You uncovered 26 bugs and pain points. Gold star!). But it’s usually the wrong approach. Instead ask yourself — what does this all add up to? What are the themes across customers? What unspoken attitudes and behaviors are driving all this feedback, and how can I address those? This is the meat of analysis, and it’s a key thing that turns customer listening into business impact.
You’re Talking to the Wrong Customers
Recently I was on UserTesting’s Insights Unlocked podcast. I had a great chat with CEO Andy MacMillan, so I’ll just give him the mic to drop:
I think most people don’t listen to their actual customers. They listen to the people in their circle who happen to be customers.
So when you talk to a CEO, they say — “I talk to people who use our bank all the time.” Yeah, but they’re talking to their high net worth friends at their family barbecue… Or they’re talking to the CEO, or the CMO, or the Head of Sales at their customer. They’re not talking to the people that actually use their products.
So… yes, I’m listening to a few people but I’m listening to the voices closest to me. And I’m listening to the people who are like me.
(Check out the full podcast here.)
There are two powerful forces working against you here, and Andy nailed both of them. The first is convenience — the tendency to talk to whichever customers are nearest or easiest to access. If I had a nickel for every time I heard what some member of the Zuckerberg or Chesky family thought about the product, I’d have… well, a lot of nickels. A few dollars’ worth at least. (This doesn’t sound as impressive as I’d hoped.)
The second force working against you creates the powerful and unseen social gravity of your life — homophily. Homophily is the tendency to associate and form connections with people who are similar to you, and it constantly twists who and what you listen to. It can fool you into making the wrong decisions, and justifying them on the basis of a broken sample.
Solving for this takes real work. Certainly you want to seek out customers who are representative. But make sure you’re covering key segments, cohorts, and geographies. Find the people who actually use your product. Take inspiration from IDEO’s approach of finding “extreme” users — people whose behavior falls at the logical extremes on one or several dimensions. And most of all, seek out the customers you don’t normally hear from, not just the loud ones.
Doing this well requires you to be self-critical about who you’re biased towards. Who you want to listen to and who you don’t. The best way to do this is with the help of a researcher or a data scientist. Create a smart sampling plan which gets you talking to a wide set of customers. In the aggregate, these folks are going to deliver more of the insight you need.
You’re Making the Wrong Conclusions
I saved the most important, most pervasive, and most devious problem for last. Confirmation bias — the secret saboteur of customer listening.
Confirmation bias is actually three distinct but related things. It’s the tendency to disproportionately (1) seek out, (2) remember, and (3) interpret information in ways that confirm things you already believe. It exists in everyone, largely because of our innate tendency as humans to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Hopefully you’re seeing the problem already, but if not I’ll lay it out for you. You’re committed to talking to customers. You dutifully look for deeper, unspoken insights. You seek out diverse customers, not just the convenient or familiar ones… And then you cherry pick the insights that confirm what you already believe, what you want to believe, what you were going to do anyway.
If you think you’ve never done this, you’re lying to yourself. You have. I have. Everyone who has a brain is affected by confirmation bias. And so, this is the most important thing every product person needs to do to make talking to customers more than just theater:
Approach customer listening as an exercise in bubble bursting. Don’t just look for new ideas, actively try to disconfirm your existing ideas. Don’t validate, falsify.
Talking to customers becomes a waste of time if you’re not genuinely open to new ideas. And let’s be honest, it sucks to find out you may be wrong. I’ve seen colleagues (and leaders, even CEOs) in every discipline twist themselves into a pretzel to avoid facing the truth. You put a lot of energy into your idea. You may already have built around it, socialized it. It takes a lot of humility and openness to enter a customer conversation with a willingness to be wrong.
But that’s science (Karl Popper’s Theory of Falsification, to be specific)! And talking to customers scientifically can’t be a bad idea. Consider it this way too — if you’re aware of confirmation bias, you enter conversations with a desire to be wrong, looking for disconfirming evidence, and you don’t find it? Nothing should give you more confidence.
Keep Listening, Do Better
In light of the challenges I laid out above, there are plenty of UX folks who would say — leave this to the professionals. And I agree that’s the right approach in some situations. Go give your friendly local researcher or designer a hug.
But there’s room for both. And the genie is out of the bottle. It’s easier than ever to talk to customers. Product people will keep doing it no matter what anyone says. And they should!
But hopefully you’re convinced by now that there’s more to it than just talking and listening. To turn all that feedback into insights that drive impact, it’s not just about the customer it’s about you. Solve for your own blinds spots and biases, and the …profit won’t be just for the gnomes anymore.
I’m an executive coach — feel free to reach out! Send me an email at judd@onebigthought.com. I write about leadership, product, design, and management. Check out my newsletter One Big Thought. Sign up to get email updates here. And Remember that No One Has Any Idea What They’re Doing.
