Decades ago, product management wasn’t a typical career path as we know it now. However, as the product-led movement continues to gain ground, the tables are turning. Users have become the heroes of a product’s success story, while internal teams collaborate to help the heroes succeed. Companies that once prioritized business growth over customer success, are now focused on delighting users and growing the business in the process.
So, how can one go from being competitor-obsessed to customer-obsessed? We gathered expert insights from 50 product leaders for a comprehensive product manager playbook to help you focus on solving customer pain points. From defining product success to developing customer-centric products to optimizing workflows, you'll find practical advice to help you succeed in your career as a product manager.
The shift from business-centric to customer-centric approaches to product management
While the goal of creating any product has always been to make customers happy, there’s been a significant shift toward product managers explicitly putting themselves in the user's mindset. Much of this has happened in tandem with the rise of data-driven decision-making. Since the 2010s, it’s become clear that user experience and feedback can be the make-or-break factors of product success. So, it’s best to keep the user in mind from the beginning.
Customer-centric product managers focus on what users need and developing those solutions. They start by asking what a user wants to accomplish with their product. What solution is the user looking for? Are there existing pain points with previous products that would improve user experience? These are the kinds of questions a user-focused product manager asks at the onset of a product’s life cycle.
What does success look like for a customer-obsessed product manager?
Customer-centric product managers know that success happens when users are happy. This means resolving the pain points they’ve expressed and providing tangible solutions to their issues. These leaders give product teams direction, offer support, and build bridges for productive collaboration, all in the spirit of putting customers first.
- Focusing on customers instead of competitors
Great PMs don't get too obsessed with copying competitors. It might work for a little while, but it's not a long-term strategy. Instead, they strike a balance between monitoring the competition and listening to customers. The end result is a product that truly solves users’ pain points and remains competitive.
- Balancing company and customer goals
Aligning company objectives with user satisfaction is meant to be a symbiotic relationship. While the ultimate goal is to keep users happy, your company will likely have other objectives it needs to achieve that customers are less aware of. The best place to start is to see where company objectives and customer needs overlap. This cross-functional approach ensures nothing slips through the cracks.
As you identify company goals and customer needs, it’s also vital to prioritize communication throughout the process, both internally and externally. When your team makes a change, it’s important for customers to know about it. This also helps with gathering continuous, regular feedback to ensure that product updates are indeed meeting user expectations.
- Using data to make customer-focused decisions
Outstanding product managers don’t rely on guesses to make decisions. They ask questions, listen to feedback, and take action when it matters. They work closely with their team to create better products and services, which leads to more revenue and happier customers.
Given that most customer bases aren’t monolithic, it can help to target your user surveys to specific segments for the most detailed insights. Focusing on targeted groups helps you understand what motivates certain demographics and which customers are experiencing the most obstacles when using your product. After gathering targeted feedback, tools such as Sprig AI automatically analyze and highlight the most important findings. This way, you know exactly when and where to apply this feedback in the next stage of product development.
“Product success should be defined by whether you achieved what you set out to accomplish in the first place.
When we define the product before defining the impact we’re seeking, how do we know where our galloping product is heading? The success of the product should be defined by whether you achieved what you set out to accomplish in the first place.” - Radhika Dutt, Product Leader & Author
The foundations of developing a customer-centric product
A customer-focused company makes users its north star and invests time getting to know them. This process puts users at the center of its efforts, leading to greater short-term and long-term success. Those efforts are at the very heart of the customer-obsessed product manager playbook.
Start by building trust and loyalty
If you’ve already got processes in place for gathering user feedback, you’re halfway there in terms of increasing user loyalty. The next step is taking action on those responses: users want to know that their feedback is being taken seriously and that their input isn’t just a one-sided transaction. Keep communication open and frequent, and be sure to acknowledge the feedback you’ve received. Users who feel heard and valued are more likely to keep using your product.
Focus on early adopters
Before you can move on to bigger markets, it’s important to ensure your first users are satisfied with your product’s end result. Gathering their feedback before you attempt to scale any further is a must — both for knowing whether you’ve met their needs and if you’re actually ready to keep growing. If they express any problems, it’s important to address them before moving on to expansion. And if early adopters praise any particular feature of your product, you’ll know that’s an area of value to reinforce with future product updates.
“Focus on delighting the Early Adopters before moving onto opportunities to expand further.
It’s critical to know what your customer is hiring you for on that first use case, and make sure you delight them before moving on to sort of adjacent markets or problems.” - Dan Slate, Senior Director of Product Management at Wealthfront
Using the right tools
Users are at the core of a customer-centric product, and the right tools can seamlessly harness and integrate their feedback. Tools such as Sprig In-Product Surveys catch users in the actual moment of experiencing your product, so you get honest feedback when all of their concerns and delights are top of mind. Heatmaps that visualize user activity can also be particularly helpful for discovering bottlenecks and pain points.
Building a customer-informed product roadmap
Turning your dreams of transitioning to a customer-centric organization starts with drawing your roadmap. This should be informed heavily by user feedback.
Get constructive feedback on user pain points for existing products or take a temperature check on how well your offerings are working with a product sense survey. To get started, Sprig’s survey templates help you hone in on the information you need.
Dynamic product roadmaps
Effective roadmaps spell out where your product is headed and track its progress, but it’s important to remember that it's not set in stone. Great product managers see roadmaps more like a compass, but they know that things can change as the project progresses. Craft your product roadmap so that it can be updated as you become aware of new stakeholder feedback and user priorities.
Cross-functional alignment
After gathering user insights to help focus their efforts, product managers need to get everyone on the same page. Work with the whole team — users, support, engineering, operations, sales, marketing, and partners — to make sure everyone’s on the same track to customer success.
“Prioritize roadmap based on customer insights.
Customer support is an amazing reservoir of insights into what needs to change about the product. We prioritize our roadmap directly based on these insights. This has helped us to evolve our product and release features which we know in advance people will love.” - Joel Gascoigne, Founder & CEO at Buffer
Optimizing collaboration on cross-functional teams
Delivering products that people love is the heart of a product manager's role. Building bridges that allow engineering, sales, marketing, support, and other teams to collaborate effectively advances that goal.
Successful product managers prioritize those internal relationships. That means making information readily available, supporting instead of commanding, empathizing with your team, and answering questions without showing irritation. These qualities form a solid foundation for creating value-driven products for users.
Reducing silos
Product managers can help fill the gap between user desires and internal processes by implementing a SEER Framework. You’ll start by “sensing” or identifying a user-based issue, then “explore” all user-related details in this area. After “evaluating” potential solutions, you’ll work across teams to “refine” your answer to those pain points. Setting up a streamlined framework helps keep your team aligned and on track.
“Build trust and transparency to reduce silos.
One lesson I keep having to re-learn is that the most effective product development teams have the best collaboration skills. When effective communication breaks down, so does the pace of value delivery. Products that break down “information silos” are going to rise and win.” - Jeremy Wight, VP of Product and Engineering at BaseHQ
Developing a winning product strategy
A clear and effective product strategy is a PM’s secret sauce. It gives you an overview of your product’s development phases, provides its future direction, and guides product investment and planning efforts.
While a product roadmap details the steps the team must follow to achieve the set goal, a product strategy helps PMs envision the final product before it’s built. With a well-defined product strategy, you can tell what the product will look like, who your target market is, how it will fit into the market, how it will add value to your customers, and how it will hit business and company goals.
Since product strategy plays a critical role in strategic business planning, decision-making, and defining direction, PMs must understand how to create a product strategy that sets customers and the company up for success from the get-go.
Collecting and acting on user feedback is one piece of that puzzle. Your team should have a system in place for identifying patterns within your feedback results and determining which issues are having the greatest impact. AI analysis tools such as Sprig take the manual work out of this process, automatically identifying trends among users and offering suggestions for product improvement.
Continuous product discovery and growth
There’s always room for improvement and this is especially true in product management. Continuous product improvement establishes a process for assessing, evaluating, and improving the user experience. Adopting an iterative improvement process allows for refinement, inviting you and your team to resolve problems and offer new and exciting product features.
Product managers should apply this mindset in all aspects of their work, including their own professional growth. Prioritizing technical skills training and keeping up to date on the latest industry trends and tools is a great first step. Since collaboration is central to product management, strengthening your relationship with your team is also a necessity for continued success. Similar to establishing trust with your users, proving that you’re receptive to feedback is a great way to build trust with your team.
A product manager’s work is never done
The world of product management truly is about the journey over the destination because your work is never fully finished. Keeping users happy with your product offerings requires a continuous feedback loop. And with the right tools in place, you’ll set everyone up for success.
Sprig’s feedback and analytic tools are designed to empower customer-centric product managers. If you want to deliver the best results to your users, start your Sprig free trial today.