 Hello everyone. Welcome to today's session. Let me just organize things here. I'm really excited to be here. This is the third time that I'm on product school, giving a talk. And it's along the same lines of stuff I usually talk about, which is around really loving your customers. And there's a very famous saying by Shakespeare, which is, do that own self be true, which is great. But I think in the world of product management, it may not be that great because that's kind of like the tension point I want to talk about today. And instead, the proposal here is to that own customer be true. And the general theme of today is going to be putting the customer of the heart of product management, which may seem obvious, but oftentimes it's not for a lot of reasons. And I'll talk to some of those today. So sorry, quickly, I'll go through an intro. Just in case, you know, like I've met a lot of people from product school, but there's always new people to meet. My name's Avi Homs-Alenko. A lot of people call me Avi. It's just easier to say. And I grew up with that name as well. So if you meet me or you send out a message, feel free to write Avi. Some things about me kind of broken up into career highlights and a bit about me and my spare time. So notably, like, built the feed, home feed or main feed on LinkedIn. Part of the broader team worked on one of the aspects within feed and something I'm really proud of and really enjoyed. And also worked at Atlassian on the Consolence Editor, specifically working on Consolence Cloud, was on the team that rebuilt and then rolled out a brand new editor to all the customers, which was probably one of the more challenging projects I've got to work on. Also really proud of it. And just great to see what's out there today. I also am an advisory board member at the University of California in Irvine to a certificate program and user experience. And last but not least, I'm also a product of both advisor, whether it's to startups, angel investors and institutional investors, etc. In my spare time, I'm actually an Ironman in training, not a full Ironman yet. Most I've ever done is a half Ironman. It's a journey and there's always a lot of work to do. So hence the training, something I'm really passionate about and takes me kind of like to the edge of my physical and mental abilities. Another thing that my wife and I jointly is investing real estate. So we're invested in different strategies in different states across the US. If anybody's interested in that, you know how to find me on the 10th, feel free to reach out. It's love to talk about it. I am the youth basketball coach for my son's third grade basketball team. And my first grade daughter is now into it. And she made me promise to be her coach too. So hopefully next year, I'll be coaching on both of their teams. And same year, last but not least, I'm an author of a book that's basically a compilation of short stories and observations of like my world as a dad with my kids when they were younger and kind of the intersection of that with what it means to be a product manager. It's called happy as a five year old. Basically kind of figuring out how do you find joy in small moments, taking leave from five year olds who I think, you know, they kind of have the world right at that age. Cool. So a little bit about the agenda today. What I'd like to cover is first of all, you know, what does it mean to define your customers? The second is, you know, what is the role of product management when it comes to serving customers? Then we'll kind of jump into, you know, what does it look like to gather and analyze customer feedback? Then we'll also look at the aspects of the importance and what does it mean to develop a customer focus strategy? And of course, we'll finish off with the concept or aspects of, you know, how do you build a customer centric team culture that can be within your immediate team, it can be within your broader team, that can be within your entire team, depending on the size of the company. Think of team is something that could be very fluid, I could be isolated, it could be across everywhere. Cool. So first topic, defining the customer. It's really important, essentially, if we just kind of summarize quickly, and I go into more detail, it's really important that first and foremost, that we identify and define who our target customer is, what are their needs and wants? And this is where things like frameworks like jobs to be done, or you break down needs and wants based on functional aspects within the product, you break them down based on emotional aspects, and even social aspects, right, like looking good, how are you going to be perceived, the optics, et cetera. And you want to obsess over this feedback. And that does not mean to, you know, take the saying of, take feedback at face value, and just build faster horses, which a lot of people like to say, because there is an aspect which is important in product management, where you can't expect customers to know exactly how articulate the problem, because that's our job as PMs. And most of the time, customers are just trying to do what they want to do, right? They want everything to get out of their way, so they can bring their value to the table. But even with that being said, the feedback is extremely important. And it's actually something that's very easy, because of the reasons I was just mentioning, to kind of discount it or say, well, customers don't really know what they want. And we kind of like need to create a need. We're just saying, you know, it's very hard to go through it. It's a lot of verbatim. It could be very volatile. I still think it's incredibly important, because when I say obsess over feedback, it's not just what about someone says, or what they write, or a rating that they give, a lot of times when you're talking to customers, or even when you're reading their feedback, there's this subtext, and that can be tone, that can be body language, that can be facial expressions. And you can kind of get a sense of how people are feeling about the product and experiences that you're building for them. And that's something that feedback conveys in many, many ways that aren't surfaced of all that structured data while being great doesn't necessarily convey the same way. Now, a framework which I personally have just started using all the time ever since it was introduced to me as part of the growth series at Reforged, which by the way, highly recommend great content. And it's basically called the ELMR framework. And the way I perceive it and kind of use it day to day is my belief is that every customer action, every human action for that matter, big or small, always starts and ends with an emotion. And how does that work in kind of the, the, the lens of this framework is, whenever you're about to do something, let's take, for example, here, a customer, right, trying to use a product, take an action to decide to buy something on our website. We like to think that that's all the logic that people are using all the parameters of price and location and value and all these different things. But the truth of the matter is, what actually happened, and this is backed by a lot of research, and actually see it about yourself in many cases, is more often than not the first thing to spark you into action is an emotion. And the logic comes in to actually justify the emotion and explain why that motion makes sense. And that's where you start building on all those layers that are a little bit less attached. And once you've kind of gone through this stage of having a feeling, justifying it, then there's the actual motivation, the actual action itself. And there's a concept in this framework that is called a motivation hill. And you can think about that hill is the steeper it is, the more difficult it is to take that action. The less steep it is, the easier it is for you to fulfill that motivation, and kind of feel that flow and just keep going with the action you're looking to take. And that can come to life in ways of an experience being very fluid, it can be you know, great usability, just great products, principles, etc. And what happens is you kind of go over this motivation hill. And hopefully it's as you know, really steep as possible. When you get to the end, that's where it's really important. You're always looking for a reward. And a reward could be something physical, tangible, but ultimately what you're left with when you get a reward is a feeling. It could be accomplishment, it could be satisfaction, it could be happiness or you know, you finally like done something you've wanted to do for a long time. You've kind of taken action with a sense of progress. And that's where you can kind of see how this framework kind of goes until you start with an emotion, you end with an emotion. And a lot of times this can also be kind of related back to other frameworks around how do you form habits? And I don't say it in the sense of manipulating or utilizing psychology to get somebody to form a habit. But it's more like how do you help somebody go through something that they're interested in to form a better habit that makes them happier. And that could be from our lens of how do you build something that's more valuable for a customer? Putting them at the center as opposed to getting them to do something that you want them to do. And I'll expand on that in a little bit. So our next topic is, you know, what is the role of product management in serving customers? And generally, I think that the ultimate role of product management is to actually do that, it's to serve the customer. And yes, there's like I said before, a lot to be said on how do you kind of read between the lines of the feedback? How do you create needs, right? There's some products that have created needs of things that we didn't think we needed. But ultimately, the customer is the most critical stakeholder. If you're really thinking about your job, a lot of customer, a lot of stakeholder management is always referred to as internal, whether it's vertically up to leadership, whether it's horizontally with like partner teams. There's always that on the non present party and stakeholder, which is your customer. And that is probably one of the most important things as a product manager when you're sitting in the room. That action of advocating speaking up for them is in fact, serving your customer, not just by serving the right experiences. It's doing them justice. It's doing the right service of actually making sure to be their voice when they can't be there. So this kind of comes down to two things. There's a lot to unpack here. But if there are two things that I think are really important to focus on one is to always consider how every decision you and your team makes impacts the customer. And this may seem like a bit of a silly or like obvious question to ask. But a lot of times, especially as you get into companies that have more scale, more complexity, and kind of operational as different metrics, it's very easy to get into the weeds of thinking about building a certain roadmap or building a certain feature, and how that's going to impact the metrics that you care about, or how it's going to unlock flow to get more usage of products. But it takes sometimes courage and kind of the not caring with maybe looking a little silly in the to just ask what may seem like a question like, do we think that this is adding value to our customers? Or something to the effect of, do we think that making this decision should it's going to drive metrics? And we're going to be celebrating internally? Do we think that that's going to leave our customers feeling better about a product feeling more competent and whatever they're trying to achieve? And if the answer is no, then I think that's a really important warning sign to take a look and say, let's make sure that our incentives and our outcomes align or kind of the superset is the customer outcome. So that's number one. And I can't stress that enough. And it's really important. And the second pieces or like the second half of before we get into the second bullet is it's not just about the product manager saying, hey, how is this every decision in fact, the customer? It's about a lot more than that. And touch on that in just a bit. Second thing is, you really want to deeply understand your customer's journey. And that's another way you serve your customer is not just kind of building a feature that's on the roadmap, checking off, we did this, we did that. It's about being the person that knows your customer journey, whether anybody else, whether that's leadership, whether that's people on other teams, whether that's even people on your team, the right service to your customer is to obsess over the journey. And this includes things like not just thinking about the customer journey or experience in a lot of times like an isolated context of the feature that you're working on, or even product that you're working on. But it could be let's say you're working on a specific feature. How do you think about the context and touch points that the customer has with the entire product? Or if you're in a startup and you own the entire product, customers live in a context of multiple products. So when you're thinking about that, how do you think about it in the context from the customer's eyes? And some great tools like one great example, which just keeps on being a great go to over and over is journey mapping. And a lot of times what happens is, you know, team gets together, you do the journey map, you get to know the customer, you want to understand like highs and lows of like sentiment and areas for opportunity. But then you don't really do it again, you kind of let that build your roadmap. And you don't really share with the team. And then you kind of stay stagnant and you don't understand why you're building stuff that may not actually make your customers happy with the product. So it's really important to keep on doing this remapping of the customer's journey because your customers change your product changes and market changes. Like, you know, just think about the market and the amount of changes that have happened to your customers in the past. Geez, I don't know, like six months, six months, three years or something like that. It's insane. So what works six months ago may not work today. And it's really important. And I can't stress this enough is when you're doing these kinds of exercises, is not to just think about them from the lens of just the PM or just PM and design, get engineering in the room, right? Whether it's the engineering manager invites on an opt out basis, if you all want to join invite people from the entire engineering team, invite cross functional stakeholders, invite your product marketing manager, a data scientist, like, everybody's got an interest. The more you do this, the more of a service that will be to customers, that everybody who kind of all the different functions knows them. And then it'll build a habit of advocating for them, which we'll talk about. The next piece is customer feedback and data, which is, you know, kind of like the, it's the backbone of how do you make these decisions on how to serve your customers? So the really important thing is a lot of the times teams from places I've worked on in general, like we talk about being product minded. And my belief is that product minded is actually a subset of being customer minded. And I think that the real outcome that you want is to have your entire team to be customer minded and to feel empowered to be that way. Because that incorporates a lot more things than just product minded, customer minded could be on any single touch point, it doesn't have to be in the product. And that's really like the gold standard where you want to get to. So if we think about it, we can break this out also into kind of two main areas. One is when you've got like feedback and data, etc. is you want to clearly define like, what are the objectives you're going after? Right, it could be some companies have like touchy feeling metrics, which could be like, see sad, or how happy people feel about the product, or, you know, all these cool things like customer love, whatever. You can have to be more structured or less structured, and whatever works right for you. And you want to make sure that you have the right methods to collect that feedback. Right, like when I was working on confluence, we had a contextual survey that was like, an emoji scale about how people feel about editing. And that was a way for us to get like a more structured way to collect feedback and baseline, and actually see it changing over time, while giving people an optional ability to then like add their commentary, which they did quite a bit. And we then use that for theming and kind of breaking down things. But the overall kind of scale of like one to five with those emojis helps convey emotion and sentiment. And at the same time helped us be accountable on something that's pretty hard to move. And within this thing, again, let's go back to what I was saying before, you want to think about two sides of participation. One is you always have to think about how do you give value or like, what's in it for your customer to participate to the give you feedback? Because it's not always an easy thing to ask for. And this is where you want to make sure it's contextual, valuable, and like, timely and respectful. And that's one key element. But the second piece is once you have that is when you encourage team participation, that's where magic starts to happen. And I'll give you an example, when we were working on one of the products that I worked on, we had this thing that we call feedback, we back, we take all the feedback that came in just mountains of verbatim. And we get together as a team. And all the engineers would come in every week, we'd assign somebody else to kind of rent meeting. And we go through the feedback and just for a couple minutes, we discuss on every point or like every feedback item came in. What do we think that the customer means by that, right? Instead of just saying, I'd like this feature, I would like to do this, we tried to unpack it. And that conversation within the team, elevated us not from just being product minded, to being really customer minded. And that's when you started to get things like engineers and people from different parts of the of the team, coming up in meetings and saying things like ideas for how to improve, not just based on face value of like, Oh, the real thing of doing this, but actually knowing how customers feel and what they want. And that's where you really start to kind of elevate your ability to build stuff for customers. The second piece is to really think about how to incorporate customer feedback into the product development process. And the way to do this is like what I was saying before is focus on making everyone an owner. If as a product manager, you are the only one who's advocating for the customer. And you've kind of got your back against wall against capacity and timelines and, you know, perfect designs versus good enough designs, all these different things. Then yes, you're doing like already one step of serving your customer. But you're kind of defending against one side and another side. When everybody becomes an owner on this feedback, like I said, that's when people will start to make recommendations and ideas. A lot of times these are the people who can actually like code and build them based on what the customer already says. So you kind of get yourself out of the way. And you become part of the team thinking about it together. And that's where you can actually start to multiply as a product manager, not to mention become more strategic in your day to day. So I'll transition now into how this comes into play in product development strategy. And basically, the approach that you want to take is, and this is kind of like general and they're different kind of schools of thoughts of how to build product vision, you can work your way back, you can work your way from the ground up. Ultimately, you have you can either start from where are you now? Where do you want to go next? What's the next stage that kind of gets you to your vision? Or you can say here's a vision, and then kind of work your way back all the way to where you are now. Whatever path you choose was really important, isn't just to align at the starting point. It's to look across that journey as you go from now to vision back and forth. And what I when I say align, I mean, is not just the line internally on Hey, this is what the roadmap should be. And this is what our vision should be. It's to make sure that this vision that this path is always aligned with what customers need, what they expect and what they want, based on all the feedback that you're always getting, based on the relationship that you're building with them, and based on the fact that you are trying to put them at the heart of everything that you believe, because a lot of times you'll look on roadmaps. Internally, everybody will be aligned, but the roadmap isn't really aligned with customers. If you showed your roadmap to that customer, which by the way, I highly recommend doing, whether it's like a customer advisory board, I'm a huge fan of making roadmaps public, depending on where you work, usually smaller companies are really cool with that. And that would be your best entity check, like, are you aligned for real with the real with the real world, and not just with your stakeholders. And the next piece is, once you're actually aligned, both internally and externally, that's where you can start to develop. And what I mean by develop is, you can start to build out your roadmap, you can start to actually build out your features. And this is where like on the macro and micro level, you start to evolve. Right? That's like iterating, that's taking a certain thing, making sure that it actually provides value that you hypothesize that it would, validating that with customers, getting your feedback, continuing that loop, and making sure that everybody's always asking the question, right, is this actually providing value to a customer? And having the guts, even if something, for example, was a huge win on metrics, but you actually have feedback from customers that they don't like it, is serving your customer by bringing up that voice in the conversation. And I think this is where evolve kind of comes into play. There's a really cool framework, I think it was mentioned in the movie World War Z, I think it originates from the Yom Kippur War. If I'm not mistaken, it's called the ninth person rule. Basically says if everybody unanimously agrees on something, that a little bit of paranoia can come in handy, you have to assign like the ninth person to be the person who's going to play the devil's advocate who's going to be the contrarian and look for what's broken. And I think it's really important when you're doing these things, in the example that I gave you a lot of times in the world of product management, you'll ship something, they don't move metrics, it will drive you usage. And we're kind of trained to then think of like, that was a great success. But if you're sanity checking it, and you think about the line phase, and you have the right tools in place to actually measure customer sentiment on this, and the usage doesn't align with sentiment, you or anybody from the team should feel empowered to come up to anyone at any level and say, but this didn't make your customer happy. And that's like the ultimate standard of really trying to serve your customer. And last but not least, repeat, right? This is a rinse and repeat process. It's never just kind of like a snapshot, you just look at it and just execute, it's always going to change and develop and do it. And like I said, I wanted such on building a customer centric team. And this kind of breaks down breaks out the three main areas that I've touched on throughout the presentation. But it boils down into really thinking about how you develop a customer focused team culture, where the team is constantly thinking about whatever action they're doing, it could be to fix a bug, it could be to work on tech that anything is to think about it through a customer lens. And I'll give you an example of like talking about tech that a lot of times people think, well, tech that isn't customer focused, but that doesn't have to be true, right? Because there could be tech that works, for example, that is extremely customer focused. Like you could be working on things like reliability or load type. And when those things just work, you're actually helping your customers just to work out, which is extremely customer focused. And you can be working on something very foundational, which will actually unlock the ability to in the future add things that you couldn't even dream in the product the customers have been begging for. And this is where you can also use the framework of like, what kind of project are you working on, right? Are you working on a Joshua project or a Moses project? And I think that also helps you become customer focused, because it's a Joshua, if it's a Moses project, you are accepting that you're going to be building foundations for your people, your customers. But you're not going to actually be building and getting, you're not going to be going into the promise line, so to speak. Joshua project means the foundation is there, and now you can actually enjoy everything based on that foundation once you kind of reach the promise line. Second piece is you really want to empower team members to make customer centric decisions. And like I said, this is where a lot of magic happens. And I remember working at Alasian, there was this cool approach of one of the, I think the most senior PM there, and he spoke about how one of the goals of product managers should be to help engineers on their team become product engineers. And that meant elevate an engineer from somebody who's kind of task oriented to somebody who's thinking about every task or every feature that they're building and starting to think about it from a customer's perspective and kind of thinking about it like a product manager. And that's where not only does, you know, you got really smart people around you starting to think of very creative solutions, but that's where you start to get people who are very capable actually execute on some of these things a lot faster. And that's like another aspect is being customer centric isn't just around customer empathy. Once you get the right people in customer centric, you can inadvertently actually drive faster outcomes, faster time to market, which is also a competitive advantage. And the last thing is really thinking about providing training and importantly resources to help support a customer centric approach. It really depends on size of company industry, size of company, where you are in the organization. Being customer centric some places will be like a no-brainer, some places will be a little bit more of a challenge, and some places you will sound downright out of your mind. And being a customer advocate isn't just in, you know, building the right features, talking about roadmap, prioritizing, being transparent about the feedback, showing that to the team and building metrics around it. It's around helping the organization build a framework around, you know, understanding who their customers are, creating personas, looking at journey maps, all these different exercises, and bringing everybody along so they can think about it through the same lens. So in summary, I'll just end this up pretty quickly. I believe that customer centricity is an absolute must-have. It's been that way for a while, and I can't overemphasize that. It's not like a cool thing to get to someday. It's like your P0 must-have feature. The second thing is to remember to always represent your customers in every way that you can, and be their advocate because out of all of your stakeholders, they're the ones who are usually not in the room, and that's where PMs bridge the gap between internal and external. And last but not least, you know, commit to making your customers happy. And I think the more we can do that as not just the product management community, but, you know, product builders community, anybody that's working on products, whatever it may be, physical, digital, we'll just see a lot more value, and, you know, it's all about the emotional, it's all about being happy. Thank you so much for being here today and for listening, and I really hope you enjoyed the topic. And if there's any questions or anything, I'm happy to answer them offline. In the meantime, have a wonderful day. Bye.