“If you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc, co-founder of McDonalds
“The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” — John Russell, Harley Davidson
“Make something people want.” – YC
There are a lot of catchy sayings and aphorisms about listening to your customers.
And they’re right. It is *really* important to listen to them.
Yet, in practice, there are a lot of reasons that doesn’t happen. Or at least not as well as you would ideally like to.
And the cost is high. Building what internal stakeholders, “visionary” founders, or selfish PMs want instead of what the market is signaling wastes time, capital, and precious opportunity.
In a world where AI is helping us all move much faster, and the cost of building is rapidly falling, building the right thing has never been more important; you’ll either get it right, or someone else in the market will.
Based on conversations with PMs I’ve coached, those I’ve recently interviewed for my new startup, and speaking with friends, here’s the common blockers (and sometimes excuses) for why the voice of the customer isn’t heard as clearly as it should at companies of all sizes.
Harsh Truth #1: Customer Feedback is messy and disorganized
Anyone who interacts with a customer is a potential source of feedback. That means your sales people, customer support, account managers, designers doing usability studies, fellow PMs doing interviews, your CEO at a conference, and many others are potential sources.
And that’s just part of it.
You also can have sources that aren’t watched well, but have insights buried in them like:
- Replies to your newsletters and announcements, which may have bounced back if you have a no-reply email, or no one is monitoring the account.
- A public roadmap, or feature voting page that has likes and comments that deserve followup and context, but isn’t checked often.
- Comments made in a community Slack, or on social networks like Reddit, X, and Meta.
And this only becomes a bigger problem the larger your company becomes; the more each team grows, the easier it is for information to get siloed and lost.
That leaves you to only find out about the feedback after you launch, after the customer churns, or when the customer makes a big complaint at renewal time. Or they just ghost entirely, and you never know why your numbers fell off, you lost market share, or the feature didn’t take off as you expected.
None of this is ideal, but who has time to organize it all? You’ve got sprint planning, stakeholder meetings, design reviews, and a lot more on your plate.
Harsh Truth #2: A lot of customer feedback is junk
It would be a dream if all feedback came in crystal clear, succinct, to the point, and focused on areas you care about.
Yet, the reality is more like a lot of the “AI Slop” people talk about polluting social networks; it lacks full meaning and context, and isn’t always relevant.
This customer feedback “slop” can take many forms, including:
- Sales telling you they have to have some functionality really badly, but it’s from a lead who will never close, or comes from a customer type that is not your focus and priority.
- CS will send you every little issue, unless you help them ask good followup questions, curate, and organize it, which is all outside the scope of their day-to-day responsibilities.
- Visionary CEO types (and other execs) can hear one insight at a conference, or one comment by a dream customer, and want to change everything on the roadmap.
And that’s just the internal challenges.
At the same time, the reality is that customers are terrible product managers.
What they request as features is often a rushed solution that isn’t actually what you should build. Just think about how people ended up loving cars, but as Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”
So even when you get in direct contact with a customer for feedback, you still need to drill in with them to understand why they really want a feature, what the core problems really are, and whether this is a “nice to have” or “my boss will make me change tools if you can’t do this.”
Harsh Truth #3: Leveraging customer feedback is hard work
Even if you are a true believer in the power and importance of customer feedback, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to source and leverage it.
When I was the first PM at KISSmetrics I used to spend 2-3 hours a week on Fridays going over feedback and replying to ask clarifying questions to learn more. I also then had to manually tag and organize everything so I could find it and analyze it later.
And that was just one part of the job of getting customer feedback.
I still had to find time to do other things like send surveys, source and run customer interviews, sit in on usability testing, and meet 1-2 times a month each with the head of sales and the head of CS.
And beyond the time commitment, there were other constraints that further complicated this:
- The 24 hour rule: You have to respond quickly, or your customers won’t remember the issue they had, or why they made the request.
- Not everyone can handle this: I had to teach sales when and how to pass along feedback. That proved easier with some reps than others, so I had to iterate to only checking with certain reps I could trust.
- You have to teach others: If you don’t give context and frame how you want feedback, CS may send you everything. For our size, I made a rule that something had to come up 5-10 times before it came to me. I also taught them some basic follow up questions to ask, and when to send something right away.
This was at a ~30 person startup, so your situation may differ, but a lot of that is probably familiar to you if you’ve ever tried to get customer feedback from other teams at your company.
…but we’re not done yet!
Even if you get all that written and second-hand feedback, there’s still more work to be done.
You still need to organize and quantify this feedback in a way you can understand and prioritize, as well as distill this information in a way that will resonate with various teammates and stakeholders who look for different things (i.e.- specific comments for your designer vs. themes and quantified impact for an exec).
No wonder some PMs throw their hands up, do whatever is easiest, and shoot from the hip with their own ideas or simply do what the executive wanted.
Harsh Truth #4: Customer feedback is rarely straightforward
Even if you could read the mind of every single visitor to your site or product, you still wouldn’t be guaranteed to make the right decisions.
That’s because not all feedback is created equal.
Great Product Managers understand that they have to differentiate between various forms of feedback based on things like:
- Buyer vs. end user: If you’ve ever used any HR software, you can quickly tell that the end user is not consulted in purchase decisions. If you care about your business’s success that means you’ll focus more effort and time on the buyer’s needs and feedback.
- Free vs. paid users: As Intercom famously shared in an excellent visual (see below), free users ask for different features than your paid users. While free users can be great for user acquisition, defensibility in your market, and branding, you have to be careful building too much of what they ask for versus the customers who pay your bills.
- Big, key customers vs. low-cost plans: If one of your biggest logos has a major complaint, you should take it much more seriously than if one of thousands of $5/month customers has an edge case complaint.
- Your ICP vs. broader, random customers: A key way to grow your startup is to really nail a specific niche, before trying to appeal more broadly. Part of that means focusing on the feedback and needs of that ideal customer (ICP) over other feedback that comes in.
- Contractual Obligations: At some companies, sales can put promises into contracts about building features you don’t have yet. You may not like that, but if that company is coming up for renewal soon, and doesn’t have it yet, you may need to focus on that no matter what other feedback you have in hand right now.
- Market Forces and Pivots: If there’s been a major shift in your market (like say what’s happening today with AI), then your entire roadmap and prioritization can shift away from iterating on existing features that may be wholesale replaced or disrupted soon.
What all of this really means is that even when you get useful customer feedback, you still have to decide if you even want to solve that problem, or it’s out of scope for your business. And while you do that, you ideally want the customer to still feel heard and appreciated, even if little or nothing is going to change.
No wonder PMs struggle with this…
Harsh Truth #5: Customer feedback is the lifeblood of your product
Customer feedback is a crucial part of building your business and growing any company. You want a product and to build features that people either love or hate:
So while there are plenty of excuses and rationalizations we’ve looked at today, it doesn’t change the underlying truth that great products make your customers feel something.
And when they feel that, you want to know either way:
- If they hate 😡 it: You want to know why they hate it, so you can figure out what to fix, add, or improve.
- If they love ❤️🔥 it: You want to know why the love it, so you can give them more features like that, speak their language about it (share this with marketing), and learn more of what they need.
There’s a reason we all think so fondly of Steve Jobs; his WWDC presentations shared products we all loved using, and that he and his team went through painstaking efforts to make them great.
And a key part of building these great products is feedback.
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If you’re struggling with some of these harsh truths, and wish there was a better way to source, understand, manage, and act on customer feedback, then you’ll love what I’m working on next.
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