Recently I came across this blog post while following the #prodmgmt hashtag in Twitter: “Death by a thousand paper cuts…” The author Gopal Shenoy, talks about how visiting your customers gives you valuable insight into their daily ills and what you can do to fix them.
This article caused me to reflect on similar experiences I’ve had. With a giant dose of humility and non-defensiveness, you can certainly learn a lot from your customers and see first-hand those things that start out as little frustrations, but over time mount to productivity losses and if you’re not careful, the loss of a loyal customer.
Now I know every Product Manager recognizes the importance of repeat customers, especially in today’s economic environment, but sometimes it’s easy to lose site of what it really takes to keep them. It’s not always what I call Big Feature X. I’ve sat next to a customer who’s been trying unsuccessfully to import a massive spreadsheet of data into the application and getting bogged down in the process, and another who’s had to repeat the same step over and over again when a simple “update all users” option would have done the job.
I have also experienced a surprising standing ovation, when I presented a single unattractive slide with a bulleted list of the small enhancements we’d made over the past six months. The customers in the audience stood up and cheered and so did the sales reps. Why? Because the customers felt we finally heard them. I mean we really listened to our customers and we made their lives easier.
One of the customers came to me during dinner that evening and told me how she was looking forward to my Big Feature X and she was sure it would be awesome, but she doubted it would come close to the happiness she felt when she clicked that “update all users” option the very first time. She was able to finish her month-end tasks in minutes instead of the 3-4 days she usually allocated to this task.
I walked away from that Sales Meeting slightly embarrassed, but with a lesson that I will never forget. Listen to your customers. Really listen. Whether you’re on site, or whether they’re talking via social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, or through blogs, forums or other web tools, listen to them. Paper cuts hurt. And thousands of them? No way. Sooner or later that paper’s going in the trash and the next thing you know, they’re reaching for a new sheet of paper from another stack. Ouch!