How Customer Needs Shape Product Development

“If you want to know how to improve—ask the people you serve.” — Unknown Post #19: Engage Customers as Advisors In turbulent markets, customer insight isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a competitive advantage. While competitors hunker down or rely on stale assumptions, winning CEOs get closer to their customers than ever—and not just as vendors, but as partners. Your customers are your best consultants. They're already living through the same volatility you are. They know what’s changing, what’s no longer working, and what would make you indispensable. When I was preparing to launch a major product expansion in the gaming payments space, we didn’t just build in a vacuum—we brought our customers in early. We identified a group of high-value operators and convened a Customer Advisory Council ahead of the rollout. Their input directly influenced UX design, feature prioritization, and the go-to-market strategy. They told us what they loved. More importantly, they told us what they didn’t. We listened, iterated, and improved. The result? A product that not only performed better at launch—but was already backed by early adopters who felt like co-creators, not end users. Here’s how to turn customers into strategic advisors: + Select a diverse mix of strategic accounts—look for breadth in geography, size, and use case. + Create a recurring feedback cadence—formal advisory boards, listening sessions, 1:1 outreach. + Frame the ask clearly: “We’re navigating change. We’d value your voice in shaping what comes next.” + Act on what you hear—and close the loop. Customers want to feel heard, not surveyed. + Celebrate co-creation wins—when your customers help shape something, they champion it. In uncertain markets, don’t guess what your customers need. Ask them. Invite them into the process. Let them help you build what matters most. Next up: Post #20 – Implement Real-Time KPI Tracking #CEOPlaybook #CustomerAdvisory #VoiceOfTheCustomer #CoCreation #LeadershipInTurbulence

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.

Don't ask your customers what solutions they want. You might be missing the bigger picture! Here's why and how to do better. Innovation fails when we hand it over to end users. => Small tweaks replace breakthrough ideas (“make this button bigger” instead re-imagining the entire process). => Competitors shape customer imagination (customer will list what they have seen elsewhere instead talking about their unique problems). => People will keep requesting new features (hard truth – humans only touch 10% of any software features). If you ask "Would you like a smart meter with real-time dashboard features?", you will likely get lukewarm responses. Wrong question! Instead, ask "What challenges do you face in monitoring your energy consumption?" A client says "We want solar panels on all our facilities." Dig deeper! Ask "What business outcomes are you trying to achieve?" It could be about reducing operational costs, meeting sustainability targets, or ensuring energy security. Customer: "We need battery storage systems" Company: "What would that help you accomplish?" Customer: "We're losing millions during power outages" Actual need: operational continuity, not just batteries! Focus on outcomes, not features. Let your engineers innovate based on real business needs. Your customers know their problems better than solutions - that's where your expertise comes in! Don't ask people to design the bridge. Ask them what's stopping them from getting to the other side.

Your Product Managers are talking to customers. So why isn’t your product getting better? A few years ago, I was on a team where our boss had a rule: 🗣️ “Everyone must talk to at least one customer each week.” So we did. Calls were scheduled. Conversations happened. Boxes were checked. But nothing changed. No real insights. No real impact. Because talking to customers isn’t the goal. Learning the right things is. When discovery lacks purpose, it leads to wasted effort, misaligned strategy, and poor business decisions: ❌ Features get built that no one actually needs. ❌ Roadmaps get shaped by the loudest voices, not the right customers. ❌ Teams collect insights… but fail to act on them. How Do You Fix It? ✅ Talk to the Right People Not every customer insight is useful. Prioritize: -> Decision-makers AND end-users – You need both perspectives. -> Customers who represent your core market – Not just the loudest complainers. -> Direct conversations – Avoid proxy insights that create blind spots. 👉 Actionable Step: Before each interview, ask: “Is this customer representative of the next 100 we want to win?” If not, rethink who you’re talking to. ✅ Ask the Right Questions A great question challenges assumptions. A bad one reinforces them. -> Stop asking: “Would you use this?” -> Start asking: “How do you solve this today?” -> Show AI prototypes and iterate in real-time – Faster than long discovery cycles. -> If shipping something is faster than researching it—just build it. 👉 Actionable Step: Replace one of your upcoming interview questions with: “What workarounds have you created to solve this problem?” This reveals real pain points. ✅ Don’t Let Insights Die in a Doc Discovery isn’t about collecting insights. It’s about acting on them. -> Validate across multiple customers before making decisions. -> Share findings with your team—don’t keep them locked in Notion. -> Close the loop—show customers how their feedback shaped the product. 👉 Actionable Step: Every two weeks, review customer insights with your team to decipher key patterns and identify what changes should be applied. If there’s no clear action, you’re just collecting data—not driving change. Final Thought Great discovery doesn’t just inform product decisions—it shapes business strategy. Done right, it helps teams build what matters, align with real customer needs, and drive meaningful outcomes. 👉 Be honest—are your customer conversations actually making a difference? If not, what’s missing? -- 👋 I'm Ron Yang, a product leader and advisor. Follow me for insights on product leadership + strategy.

Misunderstanding Customer Needs = Innovation Failure Most innovation efforts fail because companies don’t truly understand what their customers want. They optimize existing products, chase trends, and build features based on gut instinct—turning innovation into a frustrating, costly guessing game. But it doesn’t have to be that way. This past Wednesday, I had the fun privilege of sharing "Lean JTBD"—how to unlock the secret of making products customers love—with 39 entrepreneurs and business leaders in a TIGER 🐯 Talk at Innovate New Albany. Big thanks to Neil Collins for hosting! Three takeaways: 1️⃣ People don’t buy products and services; they hire them to get their jobs done. 2️⃣ Customers CAN tell us what they want—if you ask the right questions. 3️⃣ If you don’t understand the “job” your customers are hiring your product/service to do, and where their needs remain unmet, then you’re inevitably missing the mark. And that's a completely avoidable mistake. Don’t ask customers what features they want; ask what they need to accomplish. That’s where true innovation starts; not with a "good idea." If you want to make innovation a repeatable business process, it has to start with understanding customer needs. The fastest way to innovate with confidence? Identify your target customers’ important unmet needs—before building anything. This eliminates guesswork and ensures strong market fit—at concept creation. Want to put these insights into action? I'm creating a free PDF: "The Lean JTBD Playbook"—a three-step guide to help you: ✔️ Choose the right growth strategy for product differentiation ✔️ Redefine your market for innovation ✔️ Obtain customer insights that matter Coming soon! Drop a comment or DM me with 'PLAYBOOK' and I’ll send it your way once it’s ready. #Jobstobedone #Innovation #ProductStrategy #differentiation #CustomerNeeds

Bringing a new product to life can feel like setting sail into unknown waters. Each new user insight or piece of data can shift your course, guiding you toward the features and functionalities people truly value. This isn’t about just meeting a quota of user interviews or surveys - it’s about thoughtfully integrating important feedback every step of the way. Start with a Meaningful Launch: Begin with what some refer to as a “Minimal Desirable Product” (MDP). It’s not about stripping your offering down to the bare bones; rather, it’s about releasing something foundational yet appealing enough to encourage engagement. This ensures that the initial user responses you gather are based on a product with genuine potential, rather than on a stripped-down prototype users can’t connect with. Practical Approaches to Leveraging Feedback: - Observe User Behavior: Track how people navigate your platform. Are users breezing through the onboarding, or stumbling at certain steps? These patterns offer direct clues for improvement. - Seek Direct Input: Go beyond metrics and analytics—talk to your users. Interviews, open-ended surveys, and usability tests uncover the nuances of their experience you won’t find in raw data alone. - Refine and Iterate: Feedback is most powerful when it leads to meaningful action. Focus on enhancing what resonates, adjust or remove what doesn’t, and continuously refine your product to align with evolving expectations. - Maintain a Feedback Loop: Don’t treat user engagement as a one-off event. As trends and preferences shift, keep the lines of communication open. Regular feedback cycles help you stay relevant and resource-savvy. Statistics show that many startups fail simply because they build solutions that the market doesn’t actually need. Additionally, a surprising number of product features go unused - a waste of both time and budget. By rooting the development strategy in user feedback, we enhance satisfaction, save resources, and ensure that our product adapts alongside changing market demands. Admittedly, feedback isn’t always easy to hear, especially when it points out fundamental flaws. But every critique is a chance to refocus and deliver a product that’s not only more appealing but also more impactful. Rather than viewing negative comments as setbacks, see them as valuable road signs steering us toward better solutions. How do you incorporate user feedback into your product development process? #innovation #technology #future #management #startups

One of the most impactful lessons from my time as a PM is this: If you’re building a product, you need to get in front of your customers. It sounds like common sense, but seeing firsthand how they use your product - and where they hit snags in their experience - can help you refine and improve your offering in ways you might not expect. In my past PM roles at Twilio and Box, we took a hands-on approach to achieve this: 📞Every PM spent time in customer support rotations to experience firsthand the challenges customers face and the unexpected ways they interact with the product. (Twilio & Box) 🧑🔬We attended hackathons to observe how users creatively applied the product and where they encountered friction. (Twilio) 🤝We joined on-site rollouts and worked alongside implementation teams, learning how customers set up and adopted the product in real-world scenarios. (Box) These experiences often gave us surprising insights. We often thought, “This is how users will onboard or scale with the product,” only to discover a completely different approach in practice. Those “aha” moments are what we were after - they opened our eyes to roadblocks, shortcuts, and new use cases that we hadn’t considered. For any PM, the key takeaway is this: Get as close to your customers as possible. By stepping into their world, you can design better solutions, anticipate needs, and ultimately build products that truly resonate. There’s a parallel in VC to this too. I’ll write about that one soon!

Alright I've got a potentially hot take about customer success today 😳 As a customer, I'm kind of over it. Another "checking in to add value" call? I hate to say it, but I'm just very unlikely to respond. But if someone from the product team wants to talk? I'm making sure I find time to take that call. Why? Because that conversation is completely different: ✅ They ask real questions about how I use their product ✅ They dig into my challenges and future needs ✅ They genuinely want to understand my use case And here's the thing: I tell them EVERYTHING. 👉 How we use their product 👉 What's broken 👉 What we need next 👉 Our growth plans 👉 Other tools we're considering One 30 minute call with a PM usually gets right to the heart of how we actually use their product and where we're headed. And it's got me thinking: what if we completely reimagined customer success? What if instead of sitting far away from product, CSMs were actually part of the product team? Their entire role would be what product managers do best: deeply understanding customer needs and directly influencing product decisions. I know CSMs will say "but we already do this!" Do you though? Because from where I sit as a customer, those quarterly business reviews and "value check-ins" aren't giving you nearly the depth of insight you think they are. And CSMs - I know this isn't your fault. In your perfect world, you'd be directly influencing product decisions based on all the customer insights you gather. But let's be honest: How many of your product requests actually make it onto the roadmap? Maybe it's time for a radical change. 🤷♀️

When a founder recently asked me, "What's the secret ingredient for nailing feature updates and iterations?", I didn't hesitate. My answer? User feedback. Always. This question got me thinking about the broader impact of user insights on MVP development. Let me share why I believe this is critical: 👉 A staggering 42% of startups fail due to lack of market need - a fate often avoidable by truly listening to users. 👉 Take Airbnb's early days: user feedback led to a simple photography initiative that doubled bookings almost overnight. 👉 Or consider Instagram's pivot from a check-in app to a photo-sharing platform - a move entirely driven by user behavior analysis. These examples underscore a crucial point: user feedback isn't just a tool, it's the compass that guides product evolution. But here's the catch - implementing feedback effectively is an art. It requires discernment, prioritization, and the courage to challenge our own assumptions. I've delved deeper into this topic in my latest newsletter, exploring strategies for gathering insights, overcoming common pitfalls, and leveraging feedback for sustainable growth. What's your experience with user feedback in product development? Has it ever led you to pivot in unexpected ways? #ProductStrategy #UserExperience #StartupInnovation Let's continue this conversation in the comments. What questions do you have about integrating user feedback into your MVP process?

We surveyed 1,244 product teams over the last 6 months and uncovered a reality that blew our minds: While all product teams are trying to create products that better satisfy customer needs, over 80% of product teams do not agree on what a customer "need" even is! Teams define "needs" as exciters and delight-ers, pains and gains, specifications and requirements, features, value drivers, wants and benefits, wishes, aspirations... ...and the list goes on, as if any of these inputs will correctly inform the innovation process. Here's the problem: THEY DON'T! Just like any process, only precise inputs lead to a great result. So what is the right input? We know that people buy products and services to get a "job" done. So, let's start by defining customer "needs" as the metrics customers use to measure success when getting a job done. If we know how customers measure success, we can create solutions that help them get their jobs done better--and win in the marketplace. These metrics, which we call the customer's desired outcomes, are tied to the customer's job-to-be-done and are unique in many ways. They are: - measurable and controllable, - actionable, - unambiguous, - solution independent and, - stable over time. When listening to music, for example, a music enthusiast may want to: “minimize the time it takes to get the songs in the desired order for listening.” This is one of many outcomes associated with the job of listening to music. Using these customer inputs as customer need statements, you're able to: 1. Understand how your customer measures success. 2. Measure how well your solutions get the job done. 3. Give your team clear instructions on how to improve your solutions. Watch your team transform when they're aligned with the metrics your customers use to measure success. #CustomerNeeds #InnovationProcess