Do Product Managers and Engineers Even Care What Support Teams are Hearing from Customers?"
Preface / Before you read
I fully expect that the response to this article series will be, “wait a second, are you saying that I have to do the PM’s job for them?” My answer is, “ yes? and no?”
My answer is “Yes”, if you firmly believe that the Product Manager’s job is to collect, collate, organize data, use that data to create Product Documents, pitch the problem, and the solutions space to convince the company to solve a problem. I would also agree with you, that is part of the perfect world definition of a Product Manager.
My answer is “No”, if you believe that we all work at the same company (same team, y’all) and we can have empathy for each other, that in an ideal environment we can work together by taking steps that help each other solve problems for the whole business, rather than just for ourselves. I would also agree with this.
It is not always the case that your Product team is so overwhelmed that they can’t have 5–10 customer calls per week as well as get the information they need to find problems from the tools where the data lives. It isn’t also often the case that the Product team is so understaffed that there isn’t anyone to organize a feedback loop meeting, let alone actually cover all the products and features well. However, it happens all the time.
For those of you where the feedback loop isn’t happening, or it sucks, or you just like solving problems — this series is a path forward. For those of you who aren’t, hit me up, I’d love to learn more about how your utopian work environment operates so I can figure out how to funnel some of that magic to the rest of us.
Why aren’t the things that are being reported to the Product team getting fixed? It seems like these things are going into a black hole, what’s the point of reporting it? Should we report everything that comes in? Otherwise, how do we know the Product Teams knows what we see?
For customer facing teams, it is completely ordinary to feel like the Prod/Eng teams don’t care or are not listening. Especially, when you have been talking about the same problems plagueing your team and your customers for so long. Even moreso when these problems happen all the time.
You may have even told your managers, your teammates, anyone who would listen on slack, or when we were in offices, in the food rooms.
The reason that it feels like no one is listening is that you’re so much closer to it than we are. Often, we have people and customer problems that are made very close to us, often artificially, and we don’t have the information, data, or time to fetch the data in order to justify the thing you know about over the thing we know about. The only way through this is to gather and expose the data, turning the knowledge you have into something actionable for the Product team (and others).
So, let’s see if we can get each other in the same room with a mountain of data and blow some freaking minds!
If Product Managers cared, wouldn’t they collect this data themselves?
Yes, absolutely. I think that most of the really good PMs totally would, if they could. In the reality of being a PM, where the average day can have 6+ meetings, where they are running from thing to thing and topic to topic, there just isn’t even time to process what happened that day. Other work, like combing through a mountain of potential data to find trends isn’t often in the cards.
Note: While this is surely not everyone’s experience, it has been my experience at every tech company/startup where I have worked. When I wanted to dig in, because I thought I was missing something, I had to force the space. Sometimes even negotiating with my managers to lie on my calendar so it looked like I was OOO, when in fact I was processing hundreds of tickets, notes, documents, emails, and survey data to see what happened.
I am going to speak for the Product Manager who I am and the ones who I love to work with: We couldn’t do our job if we didn’t care.
For those that disagree, maybe think about another job… just sayin)
The real answer is that there’s no great way for Product or Engineering team to just know what you’re going through, unless we somehow get the time (or permission) to come and do your job with you for a while. This is such a cool opportunity for the people who are building products, but frankly the space is never made for this kind of activity. So, we have to find another way… I made a point of emphasizing “just”, because it is important to level-set on this point: Whatever the job you are doing, you are the expert in that job at that company because you are marinating in it all day every day.
It is often better to assume that no one else knows what you know, rather than the opposite. Your co-worker, your boss, company executives, the Product team, and the Engineers don’t have the constant barrage of context that you get by sitting in your chair.
As a Product Manager, I have to be reminded that the engineers I’m working with, even on a specific project, don’t often know what I know,. Even after I wrote it down and we went over it together. This is the whole premise behind things like PRDs/Canvases and the myriad other documentation tools that we come up with to solve this exact problem — information share. Writing it down, reviewing it together, and even linking it in what you believe is an obvious place isn’t ever enough.
There is too much distraction. Whether this is in their current workload, personal life, whatever the hell our politics are doing, or any number of other things. I have found that many people are only listening enough to catch the things that they are worried about right in that moment, to find a time to say the one thing they wanted to say, and that’s it. Look back and think about the last meeting you were in where someone was teaching, sharing, or proposing something. How much did you actually pay attention? Did you get to make the one point you wanted to make? Was the rest of the meeting a waste of time?
That’s what I mean. We all do it. I’m guilty as hell of this.
All of this to say, sometimes we have to create multiple ways for people — event the most well meaning people — to find the information exactly when they are going to need it, in ways that are best for them. While everyone should do lots of things, most don’t because we have to pick the things that are most urgent rather than what’s most impactful.
That’s probably, like, a lot of work…
Yeah, it definitely can be.
However, the beauty of recognizing that the teams who need the info aren’t getting it and then making small changes to fix that problem is that you can make a fundamental shift in the definition of what’s important from “What’s urgent” to “What’s most impactful”.
It’ll take time and it’s frustrating as all hell getting there.
We can let these very obvious problems sit with us, we can stew in them and get frustrated, we can then take our frustrations out on everyone by asking anonymous questions on Slido at the next All Hands. Or, we can find a way to make things a little better through the ways we work and without adding a ton of extra steps for the team to get on board.
The first correct thought after reading that paragraph is “How in the hell am I going to do that!? I barely have time to scan this wall of text you created here. You must besome kind of asshole to assume I have time for anything amongst the 1000 other things I am working on. Nevermind the fact that I have repeated myself 10 times TODAY about the one thing that I have talked to tons of people about here, and no one has prioritized or fixed it yet. Let’s go, chucklehead. Wow me.”
Me too, friend. Me too. I assure you that while I can be an asshole and there are plenty of people who filed me under “A” for asshole in their their mental Rolodex (lol, go look that one up). I hear you.
I have been there. It was called “Today” and “Yesterday” and “Tomorrow”. If you’re doing your job right, there are too many things to do and never enough time to do them so we have to figure out what has the most impact and do that. For funsies, I will add that I am not only distracted by all the normal things, I have all this anxiety and ADHD that just LOVES to do anything other than what I should be doing, which is paying attention in this meeting…
A little side note: My favorite thing to have impact at work is finding a way to get more out of the work that we are all already doing, rather than adding new things in. So, stick with me for another 8000 words or so. (maybe, idk, I wrote that number and I am only partway through this article I’m writing).
How do we do this, then?
This is already long enough…so I will do that thing where I make a couple articles that encapsulate the whole …article. Or whatever. I started this as a LinkedIn post and blew out the character limit there, look at me go — writing and writing.
There are a couple of steps, which I will explain in a verbose wall-of-text manner in subsequent articles. Really, the initial step is where you spend the most time, setting a good foundation. After that, it’s the normal flow of business that produces the data. Then, you just have to share it so people have no excuse but to have it. Once you’ve done that, you solve a problem and you force the issue on other problems that can be solved — so that the entire process gets better. I have seen this done and been a part of it, a couple of times. It works. It sucks. But, it works.
The next steps that we need to take are:
- Collect the information: How can we collect information for the Product Team, without blowing up our Support Teams?
- Share the information: How Should we Share the Customer Feedback and Trends To The Product Team?
- Inertia is real, things can start getting better: How does collecting customer feedback and data help Products get built faster?