Kevin Yien: recommendation

Transcript context

…PM's calendar. So you mentioned Gong, customer.io. There's some tools here. Zapier obviously. Is there anything else you find useful to help automate the sort of stuff? If I take a step back from the automation side or maybe straddle it, depending on the type of business you're in, there's ideally people talking about you somewhere, right? It's either happening on Reddit or Twitter or on some forum or your support forum. There is a community, there's a destination somewhere. And if there isn't, then I don't know, that's too bad. Maybe you don't have product-market fit. If you can take advantage of that, you can usually set up something. And if it's not a Gong or a Zapier, maybe it needs to be just a custom script that you write or you sit down with an engineer to say like, "How do we set up alerting around this thing so that I know when things are happening? " I think you can't use the effort required to do that as an excuse to not be talking to your customers more frequently. Because again, if we go back to a product manager should be trying to convert this potential into kinetic energy, part of that understanding and part of knowing the constraints you can apply is just living in that world as much as possible. The best comparison I can give is, there is a world of difference between reading a report about a lime cook and then standing with a lime cook. You will just pick up on so many ancillary aspects of what their life is like that cannot possibly be communicated in a report. You owe it to yourself as a PM to be exposed to those things all the time. In my experience, every time I talk to a customer, I'm always reminded, "Why have I not been doing this more? How can I not be doing this? It's absurd that I haven't done this," like every time you actually do it. But until you do that, you're like, "No, no, I know what they want. I'm reading all the customer service talent issues, I'm reading their emails, I get it." Until you actually talk to them, you're like, "Oh wow, I had no idea." I love that your advice is like, the tactics you're sharing aren't, "Here's how you get a bunch of feedback." From your users, it's like, "Here's how you actually get to talk to the right users." It's like in the end of the funnel talking to a potential customer. It's not just reading a cool... some feedback that they shared.…

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