Kevin Yien: commitment

Transcript context

…Let's start from why this even matters. I think a lot of folks, going back to what is the point of product management, I think there's a similar overlap with UXR, like user experience research, and people will say, "Well, if they're doing research, what do I need to do? I should just be consuming what they're producing to help with that." I know PM should settle for looking through bent glass in my opinion because whether it's a research report, whether it's something a salesperson is telling you, whether it's market research, don't care, it's been processed by someone, and PMs need direct exposure to raw material. End of story. And so that's where I think you just need to constantly be talking to or interacting with whoever is your customer. That's the foundation. So okay, if we all agree on that, then the question is, "Well, I don't have time. It's so hard. How do I find them? My customer success manager says I can't talk to the client." If you are in a situation where the product manager is literally not allowed to talk to a customer, there is something structurally wrong and that needs to be fixed first. So I'm going to ignore that one for now just because that's a whole other rabbit hole, but you need to fix that in order to even get close to the next thing. Okay, now the excuse is going to be, "Well, I don't have time. I don't want to run a program. I don't want to have to query and look up and send out emails every week." There's so many good resources out there right now, and I think that there are... I'll speak mainly from a B2B sense. I think B2C, slightly different story, I don't have as much experience there. But B2B, the two things I will say, one is, there's this thing called userinterviews.com. Shout out to them. They're pretty much user testing but explicitly focused on B2B and you can put in super clear criteria on the type of people you want to talk to. They do the heavy lifting and sourcing it, and then you just review and say, "Yes, yes. No, no," and you can have a steady stream of the exact ICP, you want to go after. ICP is ideal customer profile that you want to go after just coming to you automatically. Amazing. The next one though, it depends on whether or not you have this tooling in place, but the broader theme behind this next category is your sales team is a research team, and if you don't view them that way, you are missing out on half the value. And so there's tools like Gong, which do call recordings, and you can set up filters and alerts for specific terms, phrases, competitors, whatever you want. I don't care what PM you are in the team. You can find the terms that are associated with what you care about the most. Those then get pushed automatically to a Slack channel or otherwise. And then you can set up workflows either via Zappy or something else to say, "Who was the customer? h what you care about the most. Those then get pushed automatically to a Slack channel or otherwise. And then you can set up workflows either via Zappy or something else to say, "Who was the customer? Pull their email, put that into a sequence, drop in my Calendly" and you just have interviews showing up automatically on your calendar. I will say I cannot take credit for this. Shout out to Beth Hills who was a PM that hired at Mutiny. She is the queen of automating customer research and built an amazing system around this. So the way it works is you set a term for like, I don't know, POS, point of sale, something in Gong, and if somebody says that or has an issue there, talk about again how that schedules a meeting with you potentially.…

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