Why customers should be at the heart of any Product Management process

You might be wondering, is this another another PM article talking about the venn diagram?

Ref: What, exactly, is a Product Manager?

Yes, but only so that we can not-so-cleverly pivot into talking about customers. As Product Managers, we talk to engineers to learn about the technology, and read up our financials and competitors to understand the business, but how do we find the customers to drive the user experience?

I stumbled into Product Management, not unlike many of my fellow PMs, and discovered my passion for designing products that delighted and solved user pain points. My early career focused on Enterprise B2B customers who could be exacting in what they demanded and far removed from the end user. Imagine my excitement upon joining Klaviyo (shameless plug, we’re hiring!) and being presented with tens of thousands of customers, each representing a unique perspective on the product I was now managing. Within my first week, I dove straight into our help documentation, hoping to learn everything about the product inside and out, ready to hit the ground running. Spending time in our chat queues was hugely beneficial in supplementing my “book smarts” with real example “street smarts”, but I felt a large gap in only reading about what our customers do and not experiencing it for myself.

A perfect opportunity arose in the format of a new fashion ecommerce brand who needed some help transitioning from a competitor. I jumped at this opportunity to go on-site and spend some facetime with this customer. Before the meeting, I read up on the company’s background, prepared an agenda and familiarized myself with their account. Arriving at their office in New York’s trendy SOHO, there was inspiration all around for products, marketing materials, etc. I could begin to put myself in my customer’s shoes and imagine what it is like to come to work in a neighborhood of up and coming fashion brands every day. As we settled into chatting about the list of required tasks needed to complete the migration, I was impressed by how such a small team needed to handle all the business logistics and humbled by how they were able to grow their business and put out little fires everywhere.

That experience has stuck with me and continues to pay dividends whenever I’m brainstorming ideas, whiteboarding solutions or considering how to make decisions that are best for my customers. It was essential to my unconventional onboarding by teaching me about the ecommerce industry, and has remained an important part of my product workflow when starting with a problem, turning it into a solution and shepherding it through to release.

As I spent more time with customers, I started to catalog the types of customer interactions and where each was most useful. Turns out, the specific methods of engaging with customers maps nicely to the traditional product process. Here are 5 ideas for how to spend time with and learn from customers:

On-site Visits

Product Managers at Klaviyo are encouraged to visit our customers in-person (in pre-COVID times). Not only does it help us understand what our customers face day-to-day, it also kicks off a symbiotic relationship whereby the customer gains insights on how to get more value out of the product and what might be upcoming, and we can dig into what is most important to our customers and their biggest pain points.

How can you apply this to your product?

• Reach out to a customer (check with any sales or account management colleagues first, if applicable) to schedule some time for a “virtual visit”.
• Offer your expertise so it doesn’t feel like you’re just asking for their time with nothing in return; maybe a mini-consulting setup makes sense.
• Leave room for the conversation to be open ended, but prepare some questions to get the conversation going. You might be surprised by where the discussion leads you.

Outreach by problem

After you’ve collected a set of ideas as candidates for your next project, how can we narrow down the selection to focus on a single idea framed as jobs-to-be-done? There are a variety of prioritization methods to inform on the best opportunities and many of those involve looking at customer feedback data as an input. At Klaviyo we can identify customers who may be interested in a specific problem we’re considering based on feedback previously collected and/or product usage. By targeting these customers, we can ask for relevant detailed feedback that confirms the importance of addressing that problem and begins to shape your MVP (minimum viable product) solution.

How can you apply this to your product?

• Consider what data you have available to find your target audience. Is there a collection of customers who have mentioned this pain point before?
• Draft a set of questions to learn about your customer’s current workflow, understand any workarounds and confirm use cases. What a customer does before and after using your product is just as important to understand!
• Be sure to involve a variety of customers so as not to bias your findings.

Usability Testing

Before finalizing a spec or slotting feature work into a sprint, I consider if the proposed solution could benefit from a usability test. Hint: Most of the time, the answer is yes! Mapping out the user workflow helps to catch edge cases, but nothing beats getting designs in front of customers. This way, we can iterate on the prototype and avoid rework down the line. Remember that usability tests don’t need to be an hour long to be effective and as a bonus, every customer that has participated in my usability tests has loved the experience!

How can you apply this to your product?

• Don’t let a lack of access to users prevent you from getting started. Specific customers with context for your product are good candidates, but it is just as easy to practice with friends or coworkers, and a great way to meet new colleagues.
• Partner with your design counterpart and invite your teammates to observe so that the entire team benefits from these insights. Your engineers might feel more inspired knowing first hand who they’re building for!
• For the test itself, come up with some tasks that follow the use cases you’re looking to solve for and see if users can complete those with a low or high fidelity prototype. Continue tweaking your prototype until the majority of users can complete your tasks easily.

Limited Availability

For certain launches at Klaviyo, we make use of a limited availability (LA) to general availability (GA) approach that allows us to confirm the viability of a solution before bringing ramping up usage. I like to think of this step as embarking on a partnership with key customers since you are relying on them for feedback while allowing them to start benefiting from the product before anyone else. Not only does it build excitement for your product, but it also reduces the overall risk of your launch by giving you extra time to address any small bugs or usability issues, paving the way to a great first impression for the majority of your customers.

How can you apply this to your product?

• Determine if a limited availability would benefit your GTM (go-to-market). What criteria makes for a good limited availability partner and what are you hoping to get out of limited availability such that you’ll have confidence in moving to general availability?
• Invite customers to participate and set clear expectations on how you’ll be asking them for involvement. Stay responsive to any feedback you receive and prioritize fixes accordingly.

NPS surveys

Congrats, you’ve launched a feature! Before we celebrate though, let’s measure the impact to consider whether a feature was truly successful. NPS (net promoter score) is one method of doing so by gathering customer sentiment after they’ve had a chance to use your product. Klaviyo employs a generic NPS survey to keep a pulse on whether we’ve been able to delight our customers and reach out to those who haven’t had a great experience. In the future, we hope to use NPS, or something similar, more widely to capture sentiment on specific areas within the product.

How can you apply this to your product?

• Do you have any tools to serve in-product content and collect responses today? Specific apps like Delighted, Promoter.io and Nicereply are built to facilitate gathering NPS data in case you don’t want to build in-house.
• You could even use Klaviyo to send an NPS survey in an email for a low-tech solution. The goal here is to ask for a rating in a timely manner so that the feedback collected corresponds to what you’re asking the customer to evaluate.
• Use these scores to help determine additional potential improvements to drive your score up over time. Don’t be discouraged by low scores; instead, treat those as an opportunity to save or improve the relationship and show customers that you care.

As Product Managers, what differentiates product managers who get the job done from those who excel at the craft is the ability to not only understand our customers, but also to empathize with and advocate on behalf of our customers. Knowing customers’ underlying motivations of why they want something will unlock and simplify everything from prioritization to delivering impact. The best part is that the skills to engage with customers can be practiced and learned over time, and applied to just about any product.

While you might think that by working on a backend team, your product doesn’t have any customer-facing impact. It’s the opposite — every product has a user implication whether directly or indirectly. Thus, maybe not every method described above is relevant, but gaining context can only help you craft better solutions.

This is best summarized in one of our core values at Klaviyo — We are Customer First. It’s baked into how we invite customers to teach us at Lunch & Learns, how we seek to share our customer’s stories with ourselves and the world, and how we model our success metrics after our customers’ growth. Despite the long to-do lists that every PM is constantly juggling, Klaviyo PMs make time for our customers. By focusing on our customers, we have conviction in our decisions and reduce risk.

So I ask, what’s holding you back taking time to learn from your customers?

If you want to learn more about Product at Klaviyo or share your customer relationship experiences, tweet us @wholeprodteam