The partnership between product and your customer-facing teams
Customer-centric product development and how to build a research culture
One of the strongest opinions I developed over the years of working at startups is this:
The best products are built at the intersection of great Engineering and Customer Success
Yet, the reality too often is nothing but a lack of understanding, communication, and alignment between the two.
Today, I'll share how we centered Slido’s users in our product innovation and why we ultimately ditched the traditional product roadmap in the process. I’ll leave you with 5 principles that may help you tackle the million dollar question of “How do we build products that make our users more successful?”.
The status quo
Reflecting on my past experiences, certain themes between Customer Success and Product consistently emerge, even in my current interactions with leaders and early-stage founders.
Customer Success is laser-focused on improving retention, tries everything, from improved onboarding and data to customer education and new tools (like in our case, implementing Gainsight), to only realize that they need Product to really make an impact.
Product on the other hand is deep in their quarterly roadmap planning. Shipping features instead of solving problems, regularly missing deadlines and needing to rework stuff after delivery. All to be eventually disappointed with the adoption of new features.
The result of these challenges is that the Engineering team blindly executes the given roadmap, leaving the Success team feeling their voice is unheard.
Our aha moment
There were 3 main sources of customer insights for us at Slido: NPS comments, live chat and support tickets, and any customer-facing calls.
To help us make sense of all these inputs, we introduced the Customer Experience (CX) team. They worked on collecting and categorizing the customer insights, digging deeper into root causes, and serving these in a manageable format to Product — the beloved monthly CX Insights Report.
This is when we realized we needed to shift our current way of thinking around product roadmap planning. Our aha moment:
“We aren’t solving our customers’ biggest problems.”
5 principles to building a product that makes your users successful
Here are 5 things we did to bring product and customer-facing teams closer. Hopefully, these inspire you.
Experiments > roadmap: Shift from top-down roadmaps to bottom-up experiments.
Truly autonomous teams: Put together an empowered product team with a product manager, designer, 2-3 engineers, QA specialist, and a dedicated user researcher. Next, give them a clear key metric to orchestrate around.
Clear company and product strategy: Make sure the teams understand the big picture. Keep it simple with something like the GLEE model by
.Identify top problems: Customer insights are the lifeblood of customer-centric product development. Invest into a User Research team early on and regularly invite engineers to join the user research calls with customers. My ex-colleagues wrote about the art and science of building research teams from scratch in more depth here. Shout out to products like Blossom that help you build a research culture.
Involve the customer-facing teams: One way we’ve done this at Slido is creating dedicated Slack channels like #customer-insights, #customer-pains #product-ideas and #customer-love. This made it ridiculously easy for anyone coming off a customer call to go to one of these channels and use a Slash Command to submit an insight that is then analyzed and organized by the CX team. To keep the insights flowing, you need to continually demonstrate their impact. For this, consider hosting internal events, such as Demo Days or Insight into Insights.
If you, or anyone you know, might benefit from (free) product and GTM advice, book a time with me here. I’d love to see how I can help you!