The shift from business-centric to customer-centric approaches to product management
While the goal of a product has always been to make customers happy, the shift to a customer-centric approach is now stronger than ever.
Data-driven decision-making has reinforced the importance of understanding the user’s mindset, and it has 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. 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 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 their pain points and providing tangible solutions. This approach gives product teams a clear direction for product development, iteration, and problem-solving.
1. 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.
2. Balancing company and customer goals
Aligning company objectives with user satisfaction is a symbiotic relationship. While the ultimate goal is to keep users happy, your company will likely have other objectives it needs to achieve. 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 helps you gather continuous, regular feedback to ensure product updates are indeed effectively responding to user needs and expectations.
3. Using data to make customer-focused decisions
“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.
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. Using Sprig to gather feedback based on specific user attributes can help you identify their motivations and the obstacles they face with your product.
After gathering targeted feedback, Sprig AI automatically analyzes and highlights the most important findings. This way, you know exactly when and where to apply feedback in the next stage of product development.
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 management playbook.
1. 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.
2. Focusing on early adopters
“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.
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.
3. Using the right tools
Users are at the core of a customer-centric product, and the right tools harness and integrate user feedback.
Solutions such as Sprig In-Product Surveys catch users at critical moments 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.
Sprig Heatmaps tell you exactly what elements your users interact with and where they get stuck.4. Building resilient product development processes
User feedback must be at the center of the product development process but you need an efficient, painless way to gather insights and understand the user experience.
Agile and Lean practices can help you strike the right balance between continuous delivery of product iterations as you minimize the time and effort required to process that qualitative data.
Putting these principles into practice requires more than just changes in your procedures and workflows, though; it demands a cultural shift within the organization. Product teams need to develop a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, which is crucial if they’re to embrace feedback as a vital tool for constant improvement.
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, use Sprig’s survey templates to help you home in on the information you need.
Get templates for all common use cases. Customize them according to your requirements and set triggers to automatically gather feedback based on specific user actions and attributes.
Sprig survey templates cover the most common SaaS use cases so you can gather targeted user feedback when it matters the most.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.
Create 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.
Navigating stakeholder alignment in product management
Effective product management depends on everyone sharing the same vision, from top to bottom, or your project could stall or veer off course.
But aligning this vision can be challenging. For example, it’s not always easy to convince executives to prioritize long-term customer satisfaction over short-term financial goals. You’ll need to prove the long-term value and potential ROI of your customer-centric approach.
Also, different departmental teams may have different concerns and so measure success differently. For example, a marketing team may be focused on conversions, while the product team may prioritize engagement and retention. Here, holding regular cross-departmental meetings and tools like decision matrices can help align everyone's interests.
There is also another challenge, especially for big companies or when using methods like OKRs or stakeholder maps for alignment. Not everyone may have access to all information or know how to use these tools. It's important to regularly train stakeholders and update these tools to reflect the latest plans and efforts.
The role of data storytelling in product decision-making
PMs need product management tools to translate data into actionable insights to learn user pain points and adjust products accordingly.
By transforming qualitative and quantitative data into actionable insights, you can develop data-driven strategies that bridge the gap between user experience and product solutions.
Sprig AI analyses quantitative and qualitative user data collected through tools like Heatmaps and Replays and translates them into valuable insights that tell you exact user issues and pain points. Sprig Recommendations then use these insights to give you actionable steps to improve user experiences.
Use Sprig AI to turn qualitative and quantitative user data into actionable insights.Developing a winning product strategy
A clear and effective product development 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.
Sprig AI takes 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 requires establishing a process for assessing, evaluating, and improving the user experience. 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 necessary 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 playbook for product and user success
The world of product management truly is about the journey over the destination because your work is never fully done. Keeping users happy with your product offerings requires a continuous feedback loop. And with the right tools in place, you set everyone up for success.
But there are many pieces to this puzzle. Keeping users at the center of your product strategies, automating essential processes, and aligning all stakeholders are all key challenges for any product manager.
Our product management playbook, based on insights from 50 industry leaders, will help you navigate these challenges and show you how to keep users engaged, optimize your workflows, and foster collaboration across your team.