 Hello everyone, good afternoon, good evening, good morning wherever you may be in the world. My name is Zach Khan and I'm here to talk to you about customer obsession and what does it mean. So just a little bit about me before we get started. I'm currently a senior product manager at Lyme based in San Francisco. I joined Lyme about two and a half years ago in our product operations group then transitioned internally to product manager just over a year and a half ago now. Before Lyme I worked at Facebook for over two years where I was in the operations group. And before that I was doing my MBA at Wharton, and then way back when earlier in my career I started off in nonprofit consulting I did strategy work at Groupon, and then also did work for Kiva.org and microfinance in both South America and the United States. So that's a quick bit about me. Let's dive into the content. The agenda for today in this talk is as follows, number one defining customer obsession. Second, the qualities of a customer test PM. What are these, what should we look out for what should we develop. And then the third tactics for building the customer obsession muscle. I'll talk more about that towards the end. Two takeaways I want you all to have from this talk is the following flexible definition customer obsession can mean a lot of different things to different pms to different companies there's no right answer. Number two, there's not a single quality that defines a product manager who is customer obsessed pms can exhibit multiple behaviors multiple skills to demonstrate their hyper focus on the customer. Customer obsession is a muscle that you build over time. It's not something you either have or you don't have it's something you can learn something you can practice. There are many tactics to be done to develop this mindset. So customer session what does it mean well. There's a lot of ways you could frame customer obsession. If you just Google it you'll get a lot of hits a lot of different ideas, but I think it really all came into focus with Amazon's leadership principles and this is kind of what made the customer more well known. So, Amazon has their leadership principles customer obsession being one of them. This principle says leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. And although leaders pay attention to competitors they obsess over customers. So customer work backwards, make sense, working vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Trust is important. Trust plusting is bad. You need to have the trust your customers and not lose them, and then competitors are important obsess over customers. So at the end of the day what are we doing, we're obsessing over customers. That top article I found about customer obsession provided a little more clarity and nuance to what customer obsession is, and I like this a little better, but customer obsession describes organizations that continuously add value to the customer experience, these companies collect feedback regularly and prioritize customer needs in every business school, and they're more concerned with retaining and delighting existing customers than acquiring new ones. I definitely agree with the first two here. These are obvious qualities, but on the third, saying we're more concerned with retaining and delighting existing customers and acquiring new ones. That definitely depends on the stage of your business. At Lime, we are a hyper growth company retention and delight of existing customers extremely extremely important. In growth mode, we need to grow, we need to acquire new customers so you can't just focus on one thing such as retention. So, taking it together my quick high level thoughts. Customer obsession is not just about obsessing over the customer and product development. There are other folks in the organization who should be obsessing over the customers, a customer obsessed culture is very important at your company. I think that folks on the customer rely on feedback and really own the problems and be accountable to what goes well and what does not go well with your customer. After launching a product, what you do after is what really matters with customer obsession. You might take all the quantitative and qualitative feedback you have to fill out one of the greatest products ever, but after you launch it, something's going to go wrong, something's not going to be perfect. You're going to notice problems in the metrics, problems in the feedback, you're going to want to optimize, you're going to want to address it. So what you do after the launch is what really matters. And then customer obsession, yes, it does help keep and retain customers. If you are having bad experiences, if you are doing things that are not in the best interest of customer, you're going to lose customers, you're going to break their trust and I'll talk to you a little bit more about some of these examples later on. This is a customer obsessed product manager. We've all seen it, we've seen the LinkedIn headlines that say user obsessed product manager, customer obsessed product manager, hyper focused on the customer product manager. You know, you get the drift. All PMs are supposed to be customer obsessed, but customer assessment of being obsessed is just defining, it's just a summing up different things that we do as product managers and skills that we are supposed to have to be successful. So three key behaviors I like to say for the customer obsessed product manager. Number one, nail the details. The details matter when it comes to your product the details matter. Number two, seek customer feedback might seem like a no brainer, but it's not, you need to set aside time regularly to seek customer feedback, whether you're practically looking for it, or you know, maybe it's coming to you from other channels. Seeking customer feedback being proactive as a PM is essential. And then lastly, when in doubt, do what's best for the customer. There are going to be times in your business and in your product strategy, you have to assess the trade off of doing something that is going to be better for your business. You might be at like a tangible metric level with a cash flow of revenue, or whatever what having profit, but ultimately, you might really need to be doing what's best for the customer with the sacrifice some of those metrics, and that in the long run will help you by having this hyper focus on the customer, taking their best interest into account when making these trade off decisions. Now the details, what is an example of this this is something we talk about a lime all the time in our user experience and you know figuring out where there are problems how to make them better etc. So, this is an example of a screen, when you take a scooter ride with lime and you want to end your trip right so lime or non demand micro mobility rental service you print a scooter you rent a bike and rent a moped scanning a QR code. When you're done with your trip you press and ride, and then you used to see this UI. We can temporarily lock the vehicle while you grab a coffee you can keep your ride and resume later. So, if you want to pause your ride while you grab a coffee, you can resume it later. Great. This is free right wrong. This costs money we charge riders for the time they pause it. Well why don't we just say it. Well, this is a detail we missed, and we went back, we fixed it, we updated the UI to explicitly call out the pricing for the pause permitted rate, and we've seen seen less, less customer complaints about this confusion and pricing around pause. Things like this that matter. It's it's copy it's UI design, it's button placement it's all that good stuff but really, this is obvious copy needs to be clear copy needs to be transparent set appropriate expectations for your customer. The details matter. So, seeking feedback. If you want to proactively seek feedback from your customer. There's really easy ways to do this you have to dedicate time to preparing for it and also then speaking with your customer but I like to do these feedback sessions generally once a month once a quarter. I like to direct a random group of riders from Lyme who meet a certain criteria I'm looking to assess and just send a quick email introducing myself offering a really quick phone call in exchange for a nice quick reward. Obviously it costs money to advise your customers to speak with you sometimes and then offering up a calendar link might seem like a no brainer might seem basic but just to lay it out for you. Simple thing you can do to get sign up from your customers to speak with you. And then, when in doubt do what's best to your customer aka as a former Amazon product leader at my company said no trust busters cannot break the trust of our customers. If we do. That's it, we're done. So when in doubt do it's best for the customer well what is an example of this. So, at Lyme, we offer a feature called lime cash, you can preload funds into your lime cash wallet, then you can later use to take a ride with a line vehicle. Here's the UI for the lime cash see you can add different fund amount. We have a sort of reload feature to top up after a studio below a certain amount and then of course you tap that funds and funds. So, what do you notice different between these two screens. They're almost the same. Well, what was going on. So, in the left hand side screen auto reload was default on for new users. So, unless you opt it out, we would top up your balance when your balance hit zero. This is not good for the customer. When in doubt, we need to do it's best for them, which entailed making auto reload opt in not opt out. This is something we saw good results from, and really just get at the end of the day feel better about yourself as a company you're not trying to sneakily with dark UX patterns. You know, take more money from customers they want to give you. So now we're trying to do it line, just a general practice though just print. So, lastly, build the muscle. How do you build the customer obsession muscle and become a great product manager. Well, you start by working out. I just like this jiff of the banana and the broccoli, building their muscles, probably not customer obsession muscles but you get the point. So what are some simple tactics for improving your muscle building the muscle of customer obsession. Again might seem basic, but I just want to spell it out. So for a consumer app like lime. This means looking in the app store looking in the play store and doing this on a regular basis discussing with the team calling out issues etc. Number two, read and if possible respond to customer support tickets doesn't hurt to spend like, you know, even 10 minutes a day just sorting through the most recent tickets reading what's going on with the customers, seeing what's going on out there, or if your product is searching keywords in your customer support ticket related to that product. I'm reading a couple of those, seeing what's like spend some time in your customer shoes and get to understand their mindset. And then lastly, this is more of a mantra but I'll get into why it's a tactic at the end. Nothing is someone else's problem for a customer obsessed culture a company needs to adopt this mantra. Nothing is someone else's problem just because you don't own it. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try to get it fixed, because it's in the best interest of your business, do you fix the problems that customers are facing. So customer reviews, online, the product managers and the engineers we read them weekly. And we do actually even try to respond to them through, you know, customer support integration with Zendesk reading the customer user eye opening. Reading the five stars great it's a nice pat on your back but read the one star reviews. They can hurt doesn't feel good always reading them but it also to me it inspires me to want to do better to want to fix things and to want to always build a great experience for our writers. So, here's a fun one I read recently. Just first sentence says it all I don't know what 15 year old made this app but it's slow, not user friendly and sometimes doesn't work at all. So we're going to talk about some other things that we don't even think might be actionable but yet you know it's in our it's in our place to review and we just have to deal with it so you know we talk about this we talked about this in our weekly product and engineering planning meeting. And while it is, you know, facetious to read does highlight problems with like latency in our app, big problem. And then you're going to work to fix it so something that just validates our priorities for the quarter when we see these things in the reviews and what we've been prioritizing and then building a culture of customer obsession. I alluded to this, that second, you know, slide on definitions which was from HubSpot kind of alluded to this as well that is at the, you know, the company level overall it's about building the culture company wide. This is a mantra. I actually learned it at Facebook, where, you know, I work previously but it's generalized anywhere. Nothing is somebody else's problem. What does that mean. So, what does that mean it means if you see something off maybe some metrics, or a customer view or customer support ticket or read something in the news, and you might not be the product owner you're not the product manager for that feature or it's not even in the flag it find the right person whose area pertains to because maybe it's urgent maybe there's a problem that can be faced easily, and this and then the owner of whatever the issue is doesn't know about it. The person on the other side here your coworkers will appreciate this, because you are seeking to improve the business overall by just making sure the customer is always happy. I love to build this customer obsession culture so nothing is somebody else's problem. I really love this mantra. And I take it with me, you know, every day to work when I look at metrics and and read, you know, updates and things like that. Okay, so that's all I got. Just to sum up the key takeaways customer obsession. The definition is flexible. It means different things to different pms and companies. There is no single definition customer session just like there's no any of your reasons. Product managers who are customer obsessed don't exhibit a single quality. There's multiple behaviors multiple behaviors to demonstrate your hyper focus on the customer, you know, and then lastly, it's a muscle you build over time. There's skills you use tactics you use to get better and better, developing that customer obsession mindset and becoming an all star product manager to build delightful products for all of your customers. Anyways, that is all I got. If you want to contact me ask me more questions you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, but yeah, it's been really great talking with you thank you product school. Thanks for listening and, you know, have a great day have a great week. Thank you.