Onboarding → Product Management: How my CX experience shaped my product management style
In July 2021, I packed everything I owned into a Prius and moved to Boston to join Paperless Parts’s team as a customer implementation manager (CIM). As a recent college graduate with no clear vision for my professional career, I was motivated to move across the country by a picture of a company I had pieced together over several weeks of Zoom interviews: a flexible, gritty environment that would allow me to figure out what I was good at and what I liked doing.
Over the last 3 years, that’s held even more true than I imagined it would on that long drive to New England. I’ve held 3 titles since starting at this company, and though I didn’t know it at the time, my earliest experiences — 15 months in onboarding and 9 in customer enablement — were essentially a boot camp for where I ended up: product management.
Simply having held a role on the Customer Experience (CX) team certainly isn’t enough to turn a person into a good product manager, but I can point to a few clear ways in which the skill sets and relationships I got from my experience have directly benefited me in my current role. Here are a couple of examples of how my CX experiences helped me develop as a PM and continue to fuel me every single day.
Telling the story of the product
While Paperless had secured our Series B funding when I started in CX, we were still a young startup and it would have been fair to describe our product as being in its early stages. Paperless just hadn’t existed for that long, and as a result there were pretty obvious gaps in the product that I, as a CIM, was tasked with working around to get customers bought in and make them successful. I was 22 with no industry experience, and I knew this would be a challenge.
To learn the ropes I watched recordings of our CEO, Jason Ray, demoing the product to prospects and customers — over, and over, and over again. It immediately became clear that his superpower was telling the story of each feature. This button is here for X reason and will have Y impact on your shop. I wrote down the stories that resonated most with me and relentlessly practiced telling them until I felt fluent in the language of Paperless Parts. I didn’t just know how each feature worked — I knew why we had chosen to build it and what it could do for manufacturers.
This may sound like a skillset that belongs in sales more so than implementation, but it came to feel like my superpower in onboarding. Like I said, being a young company meant that our product was far from perfect at the time, and it was common for customers to get hung up on a product gap, leading to delayed onboardings (or even churn). But being young also meant that our customers were early adopters. When I put my newfound superpower to work and walked them through the story of our product, time and again they demonstrated to me that they were open to changing and putting in effort so long as they understood how it would benefit their business. And if a talk track didn’t land, I would ask why and report the reason back to our product team.
I started to feel good at my job, and more importantly, I felt motivated. This was something I was good at and that I liked to do.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was my first taste of Product Management. At first, I translated this to customer enablement, spending months incorporating my talk tracks into how-to articles and feature narratives for new releases. Now, as I write and rewrite Product Requirement Docs (PRDS) and user stories to internally sell the vision of a product that doesn’t exist yet, I can directly trace back to where that skill came from. I had to learn how to sell to our customers first.
Seeing the whole picture
Anybody who works with me knows that I have an enormous amount of pride in our product and our company, almost to a fault. They might even tell you that I “bleed orange” (our company color). Maybe as a result, since becoming a Product Manager, I’ve heard my colleagues — especially in leadership positions — express surprise when I speak negatively about certain areas of our platform. The truth is that repeatedly going through the onboarding process enables you to hold conflicting perspectives of the product at once in your head, with personal memories of both success and failure (and all the accompanying emotions) attached.
As a best-in-class software system in our industry, Paperless Parts has a massive impact on our users’ shops, careers, and lives. A customer I onboarded once showed me that adopting our expedite feature had introduced a revenue stream that had earned back the cost of Paperless and more within a year. We were essentially giving him the freedom to continue investing in front-office technology which, for a small business like his, could be transformative. We have done this time and again for job shops across the country, directly positively impacting real people, and we can only do that because of the product that we sell, market, and train on every single day.
We are also, like all software systems, imperfect. And as a natural byproduct of the type of work our customers do, our end users have an obsessive attention to detail. A mistake that doesn’t get caught during the quoting process can result in lost profit or actual physical risk to someone on the shop floor. This attitude carries over to how they view our product — seemingly “small” perceived gaps or deficiencies (at least against the backdrop of the entire platform) can do serious damage to a shop’s trust and buy-in of our platform. This can be especially tough when it undermines the persistence and dedicated attention that members of our go-to-market (GTM) and CX organizations put into customer accounts.
One of the first pieces of advice I got when I started in Product was that the highs would be very high and the lows would be very low. Your entire team and customer base is dependent on your success, and on you doing good, diligent work. When you win, everybody wins with you. If you fail, and you will, you may hurt a teammate or a customer. Having these multi-faceted perspectives on the product to pull from has helped me stay motivated through these moments. Whenever I celebrate a new feature’s success, I remember the pain points we still haven’t resolved, and I know that there is more work to be done. When I am processing something that didn’t go the way I wanted it to, I’m motivated to keep going because I have seen firsthand the enormous amount of value that our product can and will continue to provide to thousands of customers around the country.
Growing your product sense
Toward the end of my time in onboarding, I went onsite with one of the biggest, most important accounts I had been given to date. Things went well — the shop agreed to go live, and we had forged strong relationships with our primary stakeholders — but shortly after our return flight touched down in Boston, I got a call from the champion. While he believed in what we were doing as a company, he told me that they had spoken as a team after the onsite and decided to terminate their subscription. I took it pretty hard.
The official churn reason that made its way up to our leadership team and into our records was that the customer just didn’t see enough value from the product in its current state. Our champion told us directly that it was simply a “cost-benefit question” for them, from their perspective we were not solving any one of their problems meaningfully enough to be worth our monthly rate. While I had captured their product feedback throughout the onboarding and shared it directly with our PMs, there was no specific gap anyone could point to as the culprit for this churn.
Yet, every time I have written a discovery document since starting as a PM, I have included a reference to this customer. Yes, the issue was cost-benefit, but I can still clearly recall the moments when I trained them on a workflow and sensed their lack of enthusiasm, witnessing exactly where we weren’t meeting their expectations. “Not seeing the value” was just a different way to say that this customer had identified a kaleidoscope of opportunities for improvement for our product. As much pain as this churn caused me then, it’s something I can regularly draw from now, especially when I want to convey the importance of work whose priority might not be obvious from a 10,000-foot view.
When I hold a discovery call and another team member tells me they “never would have thought to ask that question”, I know that’s not something I can attribute to my inherent detective skills — it’s because I have so many memories of customers that I watched draw value from the platform throughout their implementation and customers who it just never clicked for. Onboarding customers, especially when you are responsible for training them in the platform, lends depth to terms like “Not seeing the value” that can help you identify when and where to dig in with users and truly understand their feedback.
We are a team
No matter how much time you spend working in CX, the well of experience that you develop and draw from is finite and will dry up some period of time after you leave. The product will change, your customer base will change, and you yourself will likely change too.
As a product manager, the core task of your job is to identify and execute on the highest value thing that your engineers can be working on at any given time. Working in this high-level mindset creates an inherent distance between you and the product. There were dozens of small changes I wanted to make to the platform when I was in CX, and they were (mostly) good ideas, but being a PM means dealing with engineering capacity constraints. You want to make dozens of small, seemingly simple changes, but with all the maintenance and long-term feature work your team is doing, you may only be able to make a few at a time. That requires you to objectively evaluate and say no to dozens of really good ideas.
Having strong, trusting relationships with customer-facing teammates can be crucial in these moments. Who is the voice that can punch through the noise and flag that that “low priority” bug is introducing significant friction when customers open the app in their first training? Or the requirement you cut because it wasn’t a “must have” has been requested by every customer they’ve trained on your new feature? There is immeasurable value in having teammates you trust to let you know when you’re hitting the mark and when you’re not.
I formed many of these relationships during my time in onboarding, but there are plenty of other ways to do so. I like to grab lunch with CX friends in the kitchen and have helped formalize a subject matter expert (SME) program to loop customer-facing employees in on new features. No matter how you connect with them, building trust and getting their honest feedback may mean the difference between launching a feature that is good and a feature that delights users.
Every Product Manager has their own unique style, shaped by their experiences and personality, and I personally feel lucky that I can credit some of mine to the time I spent onboarding customers. If I had to boil it down to one word, time spent in onboarding is a crash course in empathy — for your users, for your teammates on CX, for your R&D team, and for yourself.
