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by drsim 873 days ago
Yes. And be sure to follow up with a robust customer interview to discover the why.

Executing a customer interview discovers the why behind feature requests.

If you leave it at the Sales and CS level you can end up with requests like I want to export to Excel. Sure, build that feature, but you risk missing the bigger picture.

Why does the customer want to do that? What’s their pain/problem/opportunity/JTBD?

You may uncover it is to integrate with another system, to give their boss a report, or to do some data analysis.

As a PM your job is to not build what customers are asking for, it is to solve the underlying need in line with your product vision and company strategy.

1 comments

There's a big difference between "a customer asked for this once" and "people need actual human help to accomplish X, because it's not working nearly as well as we advertise it to work, and we're spending a huge chunk of our time compensating for a design flaw with human intervention."