when everyone shares their point of view

Look on Marketing or Product LinkedIn and you’ll see it. The same advice I give to dozens if not hundreds of companies:

Talk to more customers.

A teammate recently gave me reason to rethink that tunnel vision advice.

There are people you and I work with whose opinion and point of view we haven’t asked for yet.

What does marketing think of the product? How does your superstar support person use it? When was the last time sales logged in?

The curse of knowledge makes us all forget how we learned to use our own products. We’re too close and in getting too close we lose perspective.

Talking to more customers isn’t always easy.

I wish 100 customers—some happy, some wicked pissed off about something—were always waiting to share their perspective on our product. But they aren’t. We have to ask them. Beg and bribe even (who hasn’t given away a pair of dope calf socks just to get someone on a call?).

Why not talk to the people close to you who aren’t yet close to the product?

New hires. Different departments. Different teams, regions, divisions. Everyone in your company (even if it’s a team of two) has a different point of view on the product.

I was reminded of this recently when a teammate shared some product feedback and a use case to go with it. Us founders have obsessed over this product for years. New teammates bring fresh eyes and a perspective that can almost always shine a light on something we hadn’t noticed or thought of before.

Ask your teammates to use your product and share their experience. What felt easy or hard? What stopped them from doing what they set out to do? How would they use it in their role?

Even simple little questions and suggestions can be gold. And it’s easier to ask someone close by than to beg and bribe. No matter how nice the socks.

Peter

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