A Decade of Product Management: Three Lessons from Sales that will make you a better PM

It’s more than “what our customers want”

If you asked a hundred Product Managers what they can learn from Sales, I’d bet that 95 of them would say something about understanding customer needs.

I was fortunate to work with some excellent salespeople in the years leading up to and during my PM career, and there’s a lot more I’ve learned from sales than the latest list of feature requests. Lessons from my sales colleagues about communication, framing, and listening have shaped and accelerated my last decade in product management.

Here are just three of the things I learned when I worked daily with Sales that have helped me as a PM.

#1 — Painkillers, not vitamins

In my first job out of business school, my skip-level manager impressed upon me in our first meeting that I had to ensure that we sold painkillers, not vitamins.

The idea is simple: pain creates urgency and helps define a clear and immediate need. People will take risks and spend a lot of money to end or avoid the pain they’ve experienced or can vividly imagine. Vitamins are “nice to haves; we can all agree they have benefits but don’t solve an immediate problem.

If your customer’s #1 problem is losing share to a competitor, a painkiller product will help them regain that share, while a vitamin would help them increase their satisfaction…