Posts tagged "Customer Focus"

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Customer satisfaction is a hierarchy, not a metric

7 min read

Why do customers churn despite green dashboards? Three layers determine retention: friction (anger), outcomes (indifference), resonance (loyalty).

We have all been in that strategy meeting. The dashboard is green. Uptime is 99.9%, support ticket volume is down, roadmap is on schedule. And yet, customers are churning. The problem isn't the data. It's the definition. We treat "customer satisfaction" as a single bucket. We dump everything into it: bug fixes, new features, polite support emails, brand colors. If the bucket is full, we assume we are winning. But satisfaction isn't a bucket. It's...
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Dead Time Is Story Time

3 min read

Waiting isn't friction to eliminate. It's captive attention begging for engagement. The best products turn loading screens into learning moments.

I stumbled on David Maister's 1985 research on waiting psychology while thinking about loading screens. His foundational principle: occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time. But he uncovered something deeper. Anxiety, uncertainty, and unexplained delays make waits feel exponentially longer. That got me thinking. Most product teams treat waiting as friction to eliminate. Load faster. Reduce checkout steps. Skip the queue. But you can't eliminate all dead time. Users will wait during loading, onboarding, checkout,...
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The Feature Factory Problem AI Amplifies

4 min read

AI accelerates shipping but not learning. Teams build faster without validating if they're solving the right customer problems.

Your team just shipped three features this week. Last quarter, that would have taken a month. AI tools turned your engineers into feature factories. Your designers generate variants in minutes. Your PMs prototype without waiting for engineering resources. Everyone's celebrating velocity. Who's checking if you're solving the right problems? Creation velocity isn't validation velocity Recent research shows contradictory results on AI's impact. Some studies report significant productivity gains, others find developers actually slow down when...
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Why Retention Starts at Onboarding, Not Growth

3 min read

Retention problems are created in week one, not month six. Product decisions about time-to-value determine long-term stickiness.

Most products lose 80% of users within 30 days. Teams see this happening and hand the problem to growth. They add email campaigns, push notifications, re-engagement hooks. None of it moves the number because the retention problem wasn't created in month six. It was locked in during week one. This isn't about better onboarding flows or slicker tutorials. It's about product decisions made before launch that determine whether users stay or leave months later. By...
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How to Build Product Sense

3 min read

Product sense isn't magic—it's systematic practice. Learn how to build intuition through decision-making, user empathy, and pattern recognition.

Everyone agrees product sense separates good PMs from great ones. Nobody can define what it actually means. Here's the paradox: product sense feels like intuition, but it's built through systematic practice. It looks like magic, but it's earned through reflection, pattern recognition, and user empathy. The vagueness isn't because it's mystical—it's because it's contextual. What works in enterprise software fails in consumer apps. What matters in healthcare differs from fintech. But certain principles hold. Here's...
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The Impact Scorecard

3 min read

A simple framework to evaluate product impact: map your work by customer value and business value to focus on what matters most.

It's surprisingly easy to stay busy without making much of an impact. A team ships features, hits sprint goals, and sees metrics move—but six months later, it's unclear what actually mattered. Not because the team wasn't working hard, but because "impact" is slippery to define. I've found it helpful to think about impact along two dimensions: customer value and business value. When you map your work on both axes, patterns start to emerge about what's...
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From Project to Product Thinking

8 min read

A practical, no-hype guide for project managers moving into product roles — how to shift from delivery to discovery, unlearn old habits, and build learning loops that compound insight.

We shipped on time. Every dependency cleared, every stakeholder satisfied. The dashboards lit green. And then—nothing. Usage flatlined. The “big release” landed quietly, with customers politely ignoring it. This was several moons ago, early in my career. That was the moment it clicked for me: we had delivered perfectly, but we hadn’t delivered value. Scope, schedule, and cost were all managed flawlessly. But none of that mattered if the product didn’t change user behavior. That’s...
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From 50 to 100: The Human Edge in an AI-Accelerated Product World

7 min read

AI can now take product teams from 50 to 90 faster than ever, but the final 10 still belongs to human intuition, judgment, and empathy.

AI has changed the pace of product development. What once took months now takes weeks. We can ship prototypes in days, test them with users, and iterate instantly. The acceleration is real. But speed creates a new tension. If AI can take us from 50 to 90 in quality and execution, what does it take to reach 100? That final stretch, the space between something that works and something that resonates, is where human judgment...
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The Strategy-Outcome Connection: Moving Beyond the Feature Roadmap

7 min read

How product managers can move beyond feature roadmaps to build strategy-driven outcomes, handle stakeholder pressure, and make sharper prioritization decisions.

The loudest voice problem If you’ve ever owned a roadmap, you’ve likely faced this. A senior leader walks into your review and says, “We need to build this feature next quarter.” The statement carries weight. It comes from experience, hierarchy, and often, conviction. You might even agree at first. Maybe you think, “Let’s build it once to gain trust.” Sometimes that’s a fair trade. But most times, that’s how the loudest voice in the room...
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Platform Products Need to Earn Their Keep

8 min read

Platform products need empathy and accountability. Treat them like external products — measure impact, earn trust, and prove real value.

Every company wants to build platforms. Few succeed. The promise sounds irresistible: build it once, reuse it across teams, and move faster forever. But inside most enterprises, “platform” has become a buzzword attached to sprawling systems that no one loves and everyone tolerates. Some of these platforms thrive because they are built with empathy and clarity. Others limp along as corporate mandates — used begrudgingly, updated reluctantly, and funded indefinitely. I’ve seen both ends of...
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The Factory Robot for Apps

7 min read

Cloudflare’s VibeSDK acts like a factory robot for apps. It turns plain language into live software while teams stay focused on customer value.

Cloudflare announced a game-changing open source AI vibe-coding platform: VibeSDK. Think of it like a factory robot that understands plain language and builds the gadget you describe. You walk into a high-tech workshop and say, “I need a device that tracks expenses with clear charts.” The robot designs the blueprint, picks the parts, assembles the device, tests it, and rolls out a working demo in minutes. You request a tweak, and it updates the device...
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When Work Becomes the Practice

4 min read

Moving beyond the search for meaning to the practice of creating it. A product manager's reflection on making work matter, one sprint at a time.

A colleague and an inspiring leader, Puneet Maheshwari, recently wrote something about work and meaning that stopped me in my tracks. He talked about growing up around people who never had the luxury of romanticizing "meaning" in work. For them, work was survival and dignity. Nothing more, nothing less. His insight? The question isn't whether work is a means to an end, but which ends make the means worth it. When Time Disappears For me,...
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Outcomes Over Outputs For Real

7 min read

How to make outcomes real, align cross-functional teams, and still give leaders confidence with a dual lens scorecard, DORA metrics, and probabilistic forecasts.

Everyone in product circles nods when we say we focus on outcomes, not outputs. It sounds right. It signals maturity. Yet when the sprint boards fill up and deadlines loom, many organizations slip back into outputs, features shipped, story points burned, demos completed. The intent is good, but the execution gets hijacked by the process. There is so much to unpack here, I'm expecting several more posts in this series. Let's set the table first....
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The Hidden Cost of UX Friction in Enterprise Systems

4 min read

Enterprise systems often rely on mandates, not UX. But small friction compounds into real business risk. Here’s why PMs can’t ignore it.

Following up on my earlier piece: Build, Buy, or AI-Build, in which I noted Marty Cagan's view that AI will not easily replace enterprise solutions, even in the age of “vibe coding.” His reasoning is sound: enterprise products are deeply embedded in intricate workflows, with business rules and integrations that can’t be swapped out overnight. Today, tools like Copilot or low-code builders tend to play a helper role rather than a wholesale replacement. But this...
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One Question Every Product Manager Should Ask in Roadmap Reviews

2 min read

A simple question can sharpen roadmap reviews: what will this feature replace in the user’s life? Here’s why the replacement lens matters.

Roadmap reviews tend to focus on timelines, dependencies, and long lists of features. These discussions are important, but they often miss a single clarifying question that can cut through the noise: What will this feature replace in the user’s life? Asking this question changes the framing. Instead of thinking about what a feature adds, the conversation shifts to what it displaces. Users don’t have unlimited time or attention. Every new feature competes with something they...
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OpenAI’s GPT-realtime Brings a Step Forward in Voice AI

3 min read

OpenAI’s GPT-realtime unifies voice AI into a single model. See why its technical leap and early adopters make this the moment voice AI goes mainstream.

For years, voice AI has felt like a half-step behind its text-based counterpart. The standard architecture relied on a clunky chain: speech-to-text, a language model for reasoning, then text-to-speech. The result was often laggy, robotic, and disconnected from the flow of natural conversation. OpenAI’s new GPT-realtime changes that dynamic. By unifying speech recognition, reasoning, and speech synthesis into a single model, it eliminates the pauses and disconnects that made past systems frustrating. The model not...
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Why Customer Success Belongs at the Start of Product Strategy

7 min read

Shift-left Customer Success by embedding it early in product strategy, design, and GTM to boost retention and drive SaaS growth.

Customer Success (CS) is one of the most misunderstood roles in SaaS. As Saahil Karkera wrote in a widely shared LinkedIn post, one quarter CS teams are heroes; the next, they're blamed for churn, adoption drops, and burnout. This volatility exists because CS sits at the fault lines of Product, Sales, and Customer expectations. The solution isn’t hiring “miracle CSMs.” It’s treating Customer Success as a shift-left strategy—designed into product, GTM, and organizational incentives, not...
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The Informal Committees Behind B2B Buying

3 min read

B2B buying isn’t decided by end users alone. Informal committees shape decisions, and product managers must map their jobs-to-be-done.

When we think about product adoption, the focus usually falls on the end user. Product managers map user needs with frameworks like jobs-to-be-done (JTBD), ensuring the product fits a real workflow. But in B2B, adoption doesn't always equal purchase. Deals often hinge on an informal buying committee — a shifting group of individuals who influence or approve decisions, even if they never use the product directly. This isn’t a boardroom-style committee. It’s a loose network...
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Start with Product and Target for Effective Distribution, Not Channel

3 min read

Learn why smart product managers match channels to product and target, not trends, with a simple hospital software example.

When it comes to getting your product into the hands of customers, many new product managers start with the channel. They ask, “Should we sell through partners, go viral, or build a sales team?” Ben Horowitz puts it simply: “A properly designed sales channel is a function of the product that you have built and the target … that you wish to pursue.” In other words, the product and the target market come first. The...
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Architect vs. Gardner: Product Development Mindsets

5 min read

Product leaders must know when to act as Architects and when to act as Gardeners. Learn how to balance precision and adaptability in product development.

Product development demands vision and execution. But the mindset you bring to the work often shapes outcomes as much as strategy or process. Two powerful metaphors illustrate this tension: the Architect and the Gardener. Both have value. Both can lead to success. But knowing when to adopt one mindset over the other—and how to balance them—can mean the difference between building structures that endure and nurturing products that adapt. The Architect Mindset Architects design with...
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Cultivating Strong Product Culture

5 min read

Learn how to cultivate a strong product culture by empowering teams, aligning leadership, and focusing on outcomes over features.

Culture may feel intangible, but in product organizations it’s one of the strongest predictors of success. Teams with the right culture move faster, make better decisions, and consistently build products that matter. Teams without it often drown in process, produce outputs that don’t add up, and lose trust with customers and stakeholders. A strong product culture doesn’t appear by accident. It is cultivated deliberately through leadership choices, organizational design, and team habits. Technology as an...
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Love the Problem, Solution will Follow

6 min read

Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Learn seven techniques to uncover customer needs and build products that create lasting impact.

When you’re building a product, it’s easy to get excited about the “how.” The sleek design, the advanced tech stack, the long feature list. But here’s the hard truth that separates great products from forgettable ones: don’t fall in love with the solution; fall in love with the problem. This mindset shift can be the difference between a product that thrives and one that just exists. Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour...
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Beyond the Deliverable - The Strategic Product Mindset

4 min read

Learn how to move beyond delivery and adopt a strategic product mindset with practical steps, proven frameworks, and customer-first thinking.

"Strategic thinking." Sounds lofty, doesn’t it? The kind of thing we expect from leaders, not just order-takers. But here’s the truth: it’s not an inborn talent. It’s a skill that can be developed with deliberate practice. Like learning to ride a bike, or in our world, learning to ship something that truly matters. Too often, what gets labeled as “strategy” is really just a diagnosis or a broad policy statement. What’s missing are the coherent...
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Defeat Bias: Build Products that Truly Matter

6 min read

Learn how to defeat confirmation bias in product management with eight practical techniques to improve decisions and build products that truly matter.

When you’re deep in product work—dreaming up features, refining flows, or debating the next roadmap bet—there’s a sneaky force that can derail even the most well-intentioned efforts: confirmation bias. It’s a natural human tendency. You form a belief, and suddenly your brain filters reality through a lens that only shows evidence supporting that belief. Contradictory data fades into the background. In product development, this can be deadly. You may convince yourself you know “the next...
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Jobs-to-be-Done - Demand Reducers and Systems Thinking

5 min read

Explore the demand reducers in Jobs-to-be-Done—Inertia and Anxiety—and how systems thinking helps overcome hidden barriers to product adoption.

In Part 1, we explored the forces that generate demand: the push of dissatisfaction with the status quo and the pull of a better future. Together, they explain why customers look for change and what attracts them to a solution. But even when push and pull are strong, adoption isn’t guaranteed. Hidden forces often prevent products from being hired. These are the demand reducers: Inertia and Anxiety. As Alan Klement describes, these forces are as...
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Jobs-to-be-Done and the Forces that Create Product Demand

5 min read

Learn how Jobs-to-be-Done explains the forces that create product demand—Push and Pull—and why progress, not features, drives adoption.

We hear a lot about being “customer-centric.” It’s on slides, in strategy decks, and peppered into pitches. But too often it’s a buzzword. The real test is this: do we truly understand why customers choose our products—or why they don’t? The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework, shaped by thinkers like Alan Klement, offers a clearer lens. Customers don’t buy products because of features alone. They “hire” them to make progress in their lives. That progress is the...
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