Aligning Product Development with Customer Needs

Michael Margolis has been a UX research partner at GV (Google Ventures) for nearly 15 years, and through his hands-on work with over 300 startups has developed a unique approach to helping founders identify their “bullseye customer”—the specific subset of their target market who initially is most likely to adopt their product. In our conversation, Michael shares: 🔸 The step-by-step process of running a bullseye customer sprint 🔸 Practical tips for conducting effective customer interviews 🔸 The most common mistakes founders make when picking their first customers 🔸 The power of “watch parties” in aligning teams around customer insights 🔸 How to apply these methods beyond typical tech startups 🔸 Much more Listen now 👇 - YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gwJ6vMfm - Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gpZgzVfc - Apple: https://lnkd.in/g493bRqG Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 Eppo — Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/ 🏆 Paragon — Ship every SaaS integration your customers want: https://lnkd.in/geirC2qS 🏆 Enterpret — Transform customer feedback into product growth: https://lnkd.in/gjz_mCJt Some key takeaways: 1. Instead of a long, drawn-out research process, you can identify your ideal customer by doing a one-day sprint with your whole team. The process involves five qualitative interviews with your bullseye customers and watching them as a team in real time. This speeds up learning and ensures that the whole team gets aligned around the same insights. 2. The bullseye customer is more specific than a typical ideal customer profile (ICP). It’s an even more narrow subset of your target market most likely to initially adopt your product. Focusing on this narrow group helps you prioritize product development, align teams, and accelerate learning. 3. When validating your ideas, don’t get stuck on perfecting a single prototype. Instead, create at least three different versions to test. This helps you see what resonates most with your bullseye customer and allows your team to avoid getting too attached to one concept. 4. One of the biggest advantages of doing the bullseye sprint is learning how to recognize rejection early. Pay attention to signs of indifference during customer interviews. When you hear, “Oh yeah, I guess that would be nice,” or something similarly noncommittal, that’s your cue to move on. You’re looking for customers who are ready to say, “Take my money—where do I sign up?” 5. The way you approach customer research should differ from sales. Practice humble inquiry—ask questions as if you’re learning, not selling. Be vulnerable and embrace the fact that you don’t know everything. Your goal should be to learn, not to pitch. 6. Before diving into interviews, get everyone to predict what they think they’re going to learn.

I was a VP at Amazon from 2004 to 2014. In that time, every major new product innovation was built using the same exact process. 11 years later, they are still using that process for everything they build. Here’s how it works. The process is called Working Backwards. It flips the traditional invention approach by not starting with a company’s internal capabilities or current products. It starts instead with a clear definition of a customer problem. The goal is to write a press release describing a significant customer problem or need, how current solutions don’t solve the problem, and the new product user experience for a solution to the problem. This approach is “Backwards” because it starts with a press release (the last step in building a new product ). Most companies start building products by evaluating their existing technology or capabilities, or by looking at new trends, and then trying to build something customers will want. Amazon takes the opposite approach. Working Backwards starts with a deep understanding and concise definition of a customer problem before moving to potential solutions. After writing the Press Release, you add a list of frequently asked questions, or FAQs. The FAQs include the likely questions from customers and the press, as well as the typical questions the internal leaders ask about any new product idea, like "How big is the market?" and "How will we solve the technical challenges?" This document forces teams to clarify not only the customer problem they are solving, but also the ideal outcome from the customer’s perspective. This is all done before a single line of code is written or a prototype is built. To do this, teams frame the problem statement, the customer behaviors, and existing alternative solutions. Then, they describe the ideal customer experience, outlining how the product would solve the problem meaningfully. Finally, they anticipate key challenges (legal, technical, competitive, or operational) and document how they will address them. The key here is this: If the problem statement is weak, unclear, or does not represent a significant customer need (with a large TAM), then moving forward with development is a waste of time and money. While working backwards, teams iterate on the problem definition until it is strong and clear, or they move on to a different idea. Amazon has used this process to build many multi-billion dollar businesses, and it remains a core part of their innovation strategy. By working backwards, Amazon ensures that the products they build have a clear reason to exist before any resources are spent. Follow for more insights about building inside Amazon.

Your Head of Product will tell you this: The best PMs aren’t product people. The best PMs are business people. Early in my career, I thought being a strong PM meant: ✅ Clean roadmaps ✅ On-time releases ✅ Backlog grooming like a pro I checked every box—and still missed the mark. Because none of that matters if the product doesn’t drive the business. Old way: PMs manage features, coordinate teams, and keep the engine running. New way: PMs challenge assumptions, prioritize by impact, and own outcomes—not just outputs. Before anything goes on the roadmap, ask: - What business metric does this move? - What customer problem does it solve? - Why now? When you start thinking like a business owner—not just a product owner—everything changes. Here are 3 ways to make that shift: ✅ Take the initiative to drive action. Don’t wait for direction—own the next move. -> Frame problems, not just solutions. -> Bring data and customer insights to support your case. -> Proactively align with cross-functional partners. 💡 Actionable step: Use a BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) to pitch new ideas: - What we’re proposing - Why it matters to the business - What we need to move forward ✅ Ensure the team knows the vision you’re pursuing. People don’t rally behind features—they rally behind purpose. -> Set clear outcomes, not just outputs. -> Anchor sprints to customer impact. -> Tell the story behind the roadmap. 💡 Actionable step: Start each sprint with a one-liner: "This week, we’re solving this problem for this customer because it supports this business goal." ✅ Prioritize by business impact. Great PMs don’t chase effort—they chase outcomes. -> Tie every feature to a metric that matters. -> Cut what doesn’t move the needle. -> Make tradeoffs visible and deliberate. 💡 Actionable step: Make sure every feature on the roadmap is linked to a prioritized strategic initiative. If it doesn’t ladder up, it doesn’t ship. Final thought: You don’t need an MBA. But you do need to think like a GM. -- 👋 I’m Ron Yang, a product leader and advisor. Follow me for insights on product leadership & strategy.

I was just interrupted during our onsite innovation sprint… “I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s what our customers want.” We’ve been mapping our innovation roadmap all week, and something fascinating keeps happening: Our social team (who absolutely has a seat at the table) continuously brings a critical perspective: “The conversations on social are focusing elsewhere...” “Our listening tools show this is the actual pain point...” “Here’s what customers are saying in real-time...” Their insights can shift our next steps. And they are backed by data from thousands of real customer conversations flowing through social channels every day, unfiltered and honest. So the most valuable question we kept returning to during our onsite was: → Are we building what WE think matters, or what our CUSTOMERS say matters? Your social team isn’t just executing your social strategy - they’re sitting on insights that should be shaping your entire business strategy. How are you integrating social intelligence into your product roadmap? The answers might surprise you.

I've seen my fair share of product development processes. JPD's approach stands out as particularly principled and well thought out. Here are the five most important things about how they build product: 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘁 𝗢𝗻𝗲 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗣𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗼𝗽𝗵𝘆 As Catalin Bridinel, Head of Design, explains: "The product is a ship, and the user is a lighthouse that gives you direction." This is more than a cute metaphor - it's a fundamental operating principle that multiple interviewees brought up. It manifested, for instance, in the early access program stages: Step 1 - Deep dive with 10 carefully selected customers Step 2 - Expand to 100 customers for broader validation Step 3 - Then 1000 and GA And it does in a million little other ways. 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘁 𝗧𝘄𝗼 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 They have Five Autonomous Squads: 1. PM Experience Squad: Focused on core product manager workflows 2. Admin Experience Squad: Handling the critical but often overlooked admin experience 3. Cross-flow Integration Squad: Making JPD play well with the broader Jira ecosystem 4. Infrastructure Squad: Ensuring performance at scale 5. Growth Squad: Driving adoption and expansion Having each squad own specific components end-to-end has transformed their development process. As Edouard Kaiser, Head of Engineering, put it: "Before, everyone owned everything - which meant no one owned anything." JPD operates with a surprisingly lean team of about 50 people, including just 3 PMs (plus Tanguy). 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘁 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 Instead of rigid quarterly planning, they've adopted a "nested timeframe" approach: 1. Strategic Planning (Every 6 Months): - Create opportunity solution trees - Define key strategic bets - Align on major initiatives 2. Weekly Rhythm: - Monday: PM Loom updates (3-5 minutes each) - Wednesday: PM sparring sessions - Friday: "Dojo" sessions for deep dives 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘁 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗿 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲 They stay connected. 1. Weekly PM Rotation: - One PM owns all feedback channels - Monitors community posts - Reviews support tickets - Catalogues sales feedback 2. Video-First Customer Understanding: - Every product decision includes customer video clips - Regular customer interview reels - Visual evidence over written summaries This allows PMs to have a near-Tanguy level knowledge and understanding of the product. 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘁 𝗙𝗶𝘃𝗲 - 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰 In a delightful bit of dogfooding, JPD uses their own product to manage their development process. Their public roadmap isn't just a marketing tool - it's their actual working document. This transparency creates an interesting dynamic: they're building a product management tool while publicly showing how they manage their own product. It's a level of authenticity that I find refreshing.

Five years ago, Warburg Pincus LLC invested in BetterCloud and urged us to work on a project to narrow our ideal customer profile (ICP). It's the most impactful thing I've ever done to improve conversion rates, shorten sales cycles, increase deal size and ultimately transform the company. A big mistake many CEOs make is believing their product is for everyone. It’s tempting. More potential customers should mean more sales, right? But in reality, chasing too broad a market drains resources, distracts your team, muddles messaging, confuses your product roadmap, and kills go-to-market efficiency. Being laser-focused on your ICP drives alignment across product, messaging, and the go-to-market motion. When the right prospect engages, they’ll feel like you built it just for them. Anyone who has built a product or service knows that the things a small business needs are very different than what a huge enterprise needs. A company is different from a school. An IT buyer is different from a security buyer, a sales buyer is different from a marketing buyer, a director level decision maker is different than a C level decision maker… but we still believe we can sell to different segments and personas as the same time. The process to define and use your ICP is relatively straightforward but does take time. The larger your business, the more data you have, the more resources you have to crunch that data the more time you should spend to do it as scientifically as possible. The high level steps are: 1. Build a Customer Dataset: Gather all your customer data. Current and churned customers, won and lost opportunities. Enrich it with firmographic, business-specific, and buyer demographic data. 2. Engage Your Team: Your best sales and customer success people hold invaluable insights about your most successful (and worst) customers. 3. Analyze & Identify Pockets of Gold: Identify common attributes of high-performing accounts and avoid the traps of poor-fit customers. 4. Communicate the ICP to the entire company with the “why” behind the attributes that make up an ideal customer.  5. Rework your messaging to appeal to your newly defined ICP and narrow your growth initiatives to be focused only on the accounts that matter.  6. Assign the right ICP accounts to your reps and ensure they’re focused on the right buyer personas. 7. Product Development: Reassess your roadmap to align with the needs of your ICP. You should see impact fast. GTM funnel metrics will improve. Conversion rates should rise, with better leads turning into stronger opportunities. You may not get more leads, but their quality will increase. I’ve been discussing this with many Not Another CEO Podcast guests, so don’t just take my word for it. I wrote a deep dive on how to “Narrow Your ICP and Transform your Company”, with real examples from other companies. You can read the full article here https://lnkd.in/e5EN3XSR

"Talk to customers" is classic startup advice. But not enough folks teach you how to talk to users in a way that gets you actual insights. Since launching Decagon and raising $100M over 3 rounds, we’ve learned a lot, especially about GTM. Here's how we've adapted our customer conversations to go beyond surface-level excitement and uncover real signals of value. We benchmark around dollars when discussing product features. Why? Because it’s easy to run a customer interview where the customer seems thrilled about a new idea we have. But excitement alone doesn’t tell you if a piece of feedback is truly valuable. The only way to find out is to ask the hard questions: → Is this something your team would invest in right now? → How much would you pay for it? → What’s the ROI you’d expect? Questions like these don’t allow for generic answers—they'll give you real clarity into a customer's willingness to pay. For example: say you float a product idea past a potential user. They're stoked by it. Then you ask how much they'd pay for said product—and the answer is $50 per person for a 3-person team. Is that worth building? It might be, depending on the outcome you're shooting for. But if your goal is to build an enterprise-grade product, that buying intent (or lack thereof) isn't going to cut it. If you'd stopped the interview at the surface-level excitement, you might have sent yourself on a journey building a product that isn't viable. By assessing true willingness to pay you can prioritize building what users find valuable versus what might sound good in theory. Get to the dollars as quickly as you can. It’s an approach that has helped us align our roadmap with what customers truly need and ensure we’re building a product that has a measurable impact.

My Favorite Analyses: Conjoint Analysis Let’s talk about conjoint analysis, a valuable tool for businesses seeking to understand consumer decision-making. Rather than asking consumers what they want, this approach goes further by revealing the trade-offs people are willing to make and at what cost. What is conjoint analysis? Conjoint analysis examines how customers make decisions when faced with options. It presents various product combinations and asks for choices, helping businesses understand what their target audience values and how much they are willing to pay for it. For example, a conjoint analysis for smartphones may present customers with the choice of two different options to choose from: Smartphone A: 24-hour battery, 24 MP camera, $700 price, Apple brand Smartphone B: 18-hour battery, 48 MP camera, $900 price, Samsung brand Conjoint analysis imitates real-life decision-making situations and can be applied to a range of industries and products. Data is commonly collected through surveys, with respondents selecting between 8-12 sets of product profiles. The more choices they make, the better we understand their priorities for each attribute. How Is The Analysis Conducted? The first step in analyzing survey results is determining what is called “partworths” and evaluating the relative importance of each attribute. Partworths quantify how each element of a product is valued (as the name implies, it expresses how much each PART of a product is WORTH to a consumer). Statistical models are used to calculate partworths, and we will typically rely on a good R package to do the heavy statistical lifting once the data has been collected and cleaned. Next, we must assess the significance of each attribute by examining their partworth ranges. A larger range indicates greater impact on consumer choice, while a smaller range suggests that the element is more of an expectation for consumers than a differentiating product feature. What Does Conjoint Analysis Tell Us? Conjoint analysis provides valuable insights into customer preferences, including the relative importance of product attributes and how much customers are willing to pay for specific features. It helps businesses tailor their products and pricing to maximize customer satisfaction and revenue. Marriott used conjoint analysis to design its Courtyard brand for business travelers, while the Portland Trail Blazers used it to create ticket packages that appealed to fans and increased revenue. Whether developing a new product or making decisions about an existing one, conjoint analysis ensures choices are based on real customer preferences, not assumptions. Art+Science Analytics Institute | University of Notre Dame | University of Notre Dame - Mendoza College of Business | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | University of Chicago | D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University | ELVTR | Grow with Google - Data Analytics #Analytics

I think about Jeff Bezos's "start with the press release and work backward" approach. Here is a future headline I would like to see: "Surveys are no longer the primary tool for gathering insights." To get there, surveys will have had to evolve into precision instruments used strategically to fill gaps in data. Let's call this the "Adaptive Survey." With adaptive surveys, organizations can target key moments in the customer or employee journey where existing data falls short. Instead of overwhelming consumers and employees with endless, and meaningless, questions, surveys step in only when context is missing or deeper understanding is required. Imagine leveraging your operational data to identify a drop in engagement and deploying an adaptive survey to better understand and pinpoint the "why" behind it. Or, using transactional data to detect unusual purchasing behavior and triggering a quick, personalized survey to uncover motivations. Here's how I hope adaptive surveys will reshape insight/VoC strategies: Targeted Deployment: Adaptive surveys appear at critical decision points or after unique behaviors, ensuring relevance and avoiding redundancy. Data-First Insights: Existing operational, transactional, and behavioral data provide the foundation for understanding experiences. Surveys now act as supplements, not the main course of the meal. Contextual Relevance: Real-time customization ensures questions are tailored to the gaps identified by existing data, enhancing both response quality and user experience. Strategic Focus: Surveys are used to validate hypotheses, explore unexpected behaviors, or uncover latent needs...not to rehash what’s already known. Surveys don't have to be the blunt instrument they are today. They can be a surgical tool for extracting insights that existing data can’t reach. What are your thoughts? #surveys #customerexperience #ai #adaptiveAI #customerfeedback #innovation #technology

Transforming Global Capability Center into World-Class Product Development Center: The Power of Customer Empathy Building a high-performing Global Capability Center (GCC) isn’t just about hiring great talent—it’s about instilling a customer-first mindset and creating a culture of ownership, innovation, and purpose. At Intuit, we turned our GCC into a product innovation powerhouse by embedding customer awareness and empathy into everything we did. Here’s how we bridged the gap between remote teams and real users: 1. Customer Connections Every U.S. visit wasn’t just about meetings. Team members were tasked with meeting real customers, learning their challenges, and sharing their insights with the team back home. These stories ignited empathy and shaped the way we built solutions. 2. Customer Booths in the Office We brought the customer voice directly into the GCC. A customer listening booth allowed employees to hear real call center conversations, making customer challenges tangible and actionable. 3. Purpose-Driven Innovation Our hackathons focused on real customer pain points. Teams picked specific problems and designed impactful solutions, driving a culture of customer-focused creativity. These kinds of initiatives complemented with a clear OKR framework that keeps the focus on outcomes can help you transform a GCC: Objective: Build a GCC that deeply understands customers and solves real-world problems. • Key Result 1: Facilitate N+ direct customer interactions annually for GCC team members. • Key Result 2: Identify and solve 10 top customer pain points through innovation initiatives with delightful solutions. • Key Result 3: Increase customer satisfaction (CSAT) for GCC-developed solutions by 25%. The result? A GCC that doesn’t just support product development—it leads the way, creating impactful, customer-centered solutions that matter. Takeaway: A truly customer-centric GCC doesn’t just deliver—it empathizes, innovates, and takes ownership. When you empower, educate and energize remote teams with customer insights and purpose, you transform outcomes and create products that delight. How are you driving customer awareness and innovation in your GCC? Zinnov Amita Goyal Karthik Padmanabhan Mohammed Faraz Khan ieswariya k Komal Shah Hani Mukhey Sagar Kulkarni Veerendra Baligeri Namita Adavi Dipanwita Ghosh Rohit Nair Amaresh N.