Product People, Consider Spending Time in Business Development & Customer Success

In the last two months, I’ve spent my time working on getting businesses to adopt our pilot product, Warble. While I don’t have a background in business development, I’ve learned a lot about setting a sales strategy, managing a sales process, and striking strategic partnerships. Above all, as a product person, I’ve come to realize that the sales process provides me with unparalleled empathy and understanding of customer needs and wants.

Our team like many other startup studios and associated upstarts is small. Size and lack of heads requires everyone to pitch-in to get shit done, regardless of how boring or mundane the task might be. Business development activities such as cold calling, and endless pitches might seem like a nuisance but are important to the product cycle. Similarly, customer success initiatives such as support, troubleshooting, help desk, and on-boarding yield countless insights otherwise only received during preplanned, sometimes costly user interviews.

There’s value in listening first-hand to unfiltered feedback from potential and exiting clients. When else can you build empathy so efficiently as an organization? It’s not easy to get candid information/insights on competitive products, pricing intelligence, and the expectations customers have for the products and services they subscribe to. Such interactions allow a product manager among other things, to better focus on the value proposition as it relates to:

• planning upcoming features
• honing/revising existing features
• design as it relates to creating new and revising existing user experience/interactions
• backlog prioritization
• technology-related concerns

From my experience, it would be beneficial to be purposeful and spend time shadowing with a business development or customer success representative to augment your product management decision making. While the empirical information is valuable to validate/invalidate assumptions, it will also turn you into a better, more well-rounded business leader.

Picture: From Flickr via Sean MacEntree.
Originally published on Dynamic Thoughts for an Evolving World.