Oji Udezue: prediction

Transcript context

…Speaking of talking to customers, another one of your big bullet points in the book is around continuous customer discovery, and I'm curious what you found to be successful in actually doing that. A lot of people talk about it when you keep talking to customers, get feedback constantly. What actually works in your experience? Yeah, I feel like all of park management is about discovery these days. Everyone talks about it, and I want to make a distinction. I think discovery is when you use customer conversations to understand a very specific thing that you want to optimize further workflow that you want to optimize further. And then you call the people who are most likely to be affected and you do use various research strategies to talk to them. There's a version of that also that is what I call continuous conversations, which is a Calendly and a Typeform, which we'll do more and more of. You should organize it so that your PMs, your designers, your engineering managers and your PMMs are constantly talking to customers by default. Meaning that customer conversations show up on their calendar every week automagically, without them getting involved. And then they're trained on how to have the conversation, because the death of customer discovery is friction. If you ask individuals to do customer discovery, they will not do customer discovery. This is the thing that dies in an innovative company because it's very difficult to actually talk to the right customer, not talk to any customer, talk list of the right customer continuously. But there's a third thing that I like to talk about, which is customer listening. In fact, I'm going to talk about this at industry in October, the PM Conference. Customer listening is different. It's not really discovery. It is the scarfing up of customer signals that are happening constantly anyway. So people are talking on social, people are talking on app stores and G2 crowd. If you have a instrumented churn survey, people are talking. If you have NPS, people are not only giving you the scores where they're putting in the verbatims. If you have a bug report, which we had at Atlassian, people are filing bugs, developers love to file bugs, so of course we have that for that audience. And then if you go to Zendesk and customer support, people are either talking about one thing all the time or a range of things, and you can see the frequency distribution. And of course in Salesforce, you have closed one. These are all things happening no matter what you do. Whether you're listening or not, you're getting these signals. One of the big, hairy, audacious goals of product management is being able to process these signals efficiently. We did it in a certain way at Calendly, which I drew a rig together through workflows and Slack, and then having individuals triage those things. And if you can do that hard and at industry, I'll talk a little bit about how to do it. It's not exactly discovery. It is what matters. Our job is to meld customer delight with business ambition. And it feels essential beyond discovery that you are listening and you're understanding what matters from a customer delight perspective. And I don't think many of us do this really well. I've tried to do it everywhere I've gone, Twitter, Atlassian, Calendly, now at Typeform. derstanding what matters from a customer delight perspective. And I don't think many of us do this really well. I've tried to do it everywhere I've gone, Twitter, Atlassian, Calendly, now at Typeform. But it still feels like something that the industry can get better at.…

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