
Managing product requests from customer-facing teams - brettcvz
http://brettcvz.com/posts/53-managing-product-requests-from-customerfacing-teams-top-2-things
======
erader
As a PM that has started my career in Support/Success... I don't think I could
ever advocate a strict two-request limit.

Customers (and customer teams) are a non-stop firehose of feature requests.
It's important for the product team to hear all these requests, mostly so they
can be understood. It's tedious work, but I do it with the intention of
looking for patterns and having a pulse on the customers. You might be
surprised by what you find, especially how many feature requests are actually
different solutions to 1 larger problem.

My team does this using ProductBoard
([https://www.productboard.com/](https://www.productboard.com/)) to synthesize
all incoming feature requests on a weekly basis. We sit for 30 minutes as a
team to go through direct requests, lost sales opps, etc.. This weekly work
pays dividends when it comes time to prioritize features for the next
quarter/year, etc.

Customer teams can feel empowered when they are given the tools/opportunity to
prioritize things on their own, but the huge downside is that they feel
silenced on a large majority of things they can't tell you (i.e. the "lower"
priority" requests). This can really eat away at the morale of customer teams
that feel they can't share their customer stories with you. When they hear
feature requests from customers that they know are low-priority, it feels
horrible to tell a customer it won't even be looked at by Product (it's even
worse to lie).

I'd recommend a system where all feedback is shared, but only 2-4 feature
requests are "voted" for officially by each customer-facing team.

~~~
brettcvz
Totally agree with the “yes and” approach of firehose plus top two - I haven’t
had a chance to update the post yet, but responded to similar feedback here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971011)

~~~
erader
Cool! Another weird thing I've noticed when feature requests are capped for
customer teams, is that customer teams will "game" the system.

At scale, customer facing ICs will do things to benefit them personally. It's
not a bad thing, it's just human. Sales people do what they need to get quota,
Support want to keep their ticket backlog down and CSAT high, etc.

If you receive all customer facing feedback, you can make the final
prioritization call on your own. If requests have been filtered too much
before they reach you, the priority must be taken with a grain of salt.

------
motohagiography
Top two is good. Being transparent with your feature stack ranking is also
nice, but consider that everyone's incentives are rarely aligned across
sales/eng/product.

I'd like to propose a controversial view on this and to understand the tension
better.

It should be on members of customer facing teams to demonstrate that they are
capable of saying "no," before coming to product with a request. Not every
time, or even often, but a sales guy recognizing he's losing the sale and only
brings in support from product and elsewhere to diffuse the blame for it is
the basic sales anti-pattern.

I get that for a relationships sake they need to use the "let me speak to my
(product)manager" routine to deflect frivolous objections from the customer,
but unless I know what you were willing to say "no," to, it's difficult to
value what you said yes to.

This is why the relationship with salespeople is so critical, as you need to
have an empathetic view of that dynamic, but if the sales persons solution to
everything is to claim powerlessness and blame others, we need some neutral
language to describe that pattern so we don't have to sound it out and re-
litigate it every time it happens.

The question, "what did you say no to?" seems like a practical filter.

~~~
brettcvz
I hear you - instead of “what did you say no to”, I prefer “would you say <new
thing> is a higher priority than <previous thing you said was #1 or #2>?” -
it’s much easier for people to evaluate “A or B” tradeoffs than “A or not A”
tradeoffs

~~~
motohagiography
Appreciated. The reason that isn't my first choice is, while it unasks their
question by shifting cognitive load back on them, it doesn't build trust by
establishing a way of relating.

To me this is a really interesting generational communication style question.

What I'll admit to criticizing as the Teflon PM approach is a very nuanced
skill, but it is about enforcing that boundary instead of establishing a
foundation of trust.

It's philosophical whether value comes more from the quality of relationships
or from individual leverage, and of course that's dynamic, but this underlying
tension between what has been problematized as transactional vs. collaborative
communication, and whether it actually creates value or rides it out is the
defining cultural question of companies today.

I really like your blog, and I"m a bit chuffed you've responded directly. So,
tactically, yes, "how would _you_ prioritize your request?" disarms their
urgency, but to provoke, I'd say it doesn't take the necessary risk or build a
relationship that yields value.

------
lbotos
Hi, Support Engineering Manager here. This is an okay approach. But let's talk
about where it breaks down:

Bugs.

Some premises:

\- The majority of Support Requests are around bugs or administration.

\- Product teams are incentivized to ship features.

\- Bugs are often de-prioritized or "balanced" with feature requests.

Solution: Embed an engineer (or build engineers out of support -- who will
focus on support problems) and let them fix the bugs that are most important
to support (and have full access to pair/partner with greater eng if the bug
is gnarly.)

This will reduce Product's backlog, and product can then focus on feature
requests of which are usually ~15-20% of requests.

Let that support engineer _Build_ the tooling needed to make support more
efficient.

This is often a problem in orgs (getting eng resources for cost-centers)
because it's not "product features".

This process allows bugfix to circumvent the product planning and
prioritization process and ultimately make for a better customer experience
(where the bug can be solved quickly.)

Product can still get customer feedback and focus on building new features,
support solves their problem, and everyone is happier.

~~~
anon73044
>Solution: Embed an engineer (or build engineers out of support -- who will
focus on support problems) and let them fix the bugs that are most important
to support (and have full access to pair/partner with greater eng if the bug
is gnarly.)

I suggested that once and Risk said it was a "Segregation of Duties" SOX
violation. When asked if Support could prioritize bugs to the Dev teams
responsible, I was laughed out of the meeting.

~~~
lbotos
My understanding is that Support Engineers following CI/CD & Code Review
process can't be a "lone ranger" so it follows the spirit of Segregation of
Duties.

But that laugh out of the meeting is real. I've experienced it too.

------
awinter-py
Including sales teams in the product process is hard because of the time
aspect

The worst-case scenario here is to find out that someone has _already_ sold
something and now it's screwing up your dev schedule. This becomes a power
struggle between sales & product because allowing this will make it the norm,
but turning them down can look to non-technical senior management like PMs are
directly harming the company and undercutting sales.

ICs are also nice + not political savvy, and can be plied and subverted by
sales -- 'hey come out with a drink with us' turns into taking on random work.

This gets political fast, especially because the power balance between sales
and product is usually off -- one or the other is the star and doesn't listen
to anybody.

Good information flow requires trust, skill and good leadership.

------
dchuk
I have a large team of product people, and work with a growing team of sales
people.

Something I’ve been doing recently that’s really important for this is
highlighting to everyone customer facing the difference between client and
customer.

Clients hire you to work for them on something.

Customers buy your product.

Said simply, it’s an inverted demand situation. Clients flow requirements to
you, customers get features deemed most valuable by product folks.

Shit starts to break down horrifically when you treat your customers like
clients, the reason being is that you’re not internally dedicating engineering
resources to that customer, so you’re mismanaging their expectations for
delivery of asks.

There’s a whole detailed flow on this I need to complete as a blog post, but
understanding and educating on this basic distinction helps a lot.

~~~
brettcvz
“customers get features deemed most valuable by product folk” - perhaps I am
misreading the intent here, but this seems like a license for product people
to ignore really getting to know the customer problem. Contrary to popular SV
wisdom, I believe that most customers really do know what they want, at least
most of the time and in broad brushstrokes. Many of the best products I’ve
worked on have come from asking customers what they want! See
[http://brettcvz.com/posts/49-finding-product-ideas-in-new-
cu...](http://brettcvz.com/posts/49-finding-product-ideas-in-new-customer-
expecations) for a more detailed write up.

~~~
dchuk
It's not about what they want typically, it's what they need. Most
customers/users aren't incentivized to solve upstream problems for themselves,
instead they just need to use the tools they're given to do their job (at
least in B2B area).

Product people should rarely if ever react directly to WHAT customers ask for,
but instead dig in and understand WHY this ask is coming up. Then you'll get
to the good stuff.

EDIT: For clarity, I fully agree that product people must learn the customer's
problems. Just be careful responding to what they ask for when doing so.

~~~
brettcvz
Okay I think we’re saying pretty similar things then!

The “top two” technique works particularly well for addressing “performance”
type features for products already in market. Most customer requests, and most
of the things that my stakeholders come to me with, are around ways the
current product could better address the existing problem it’s trying to
solve, rather than finding whole new customer pain points.

------
kareemm
> Why set the limit at two requests per team? It seems to strike a good
> balance - asking teams for a single top priority tends to make teams bundle
> all issues into one big ask, making it harder to find quick wins to slot
> into sprints, whereas asking teams for three or more can quickly overwhelm
> the PM and lets teams off the hook from making as many hard choices.

Maybe it's just me, but as a PM I want to hear as much as possible from
customers. Asking other teams to prioritize e.g. two requests ensured that I'd
be missing potentially valuable customer feedback which made me twitchy.

It's not support or sales' job to decide what's important. It IS their job to
tell Product what they're hearing a lot of (ideally with minimal disruption of
their workflow). But it's Product's job to decide what's important. Not having
that information leaves Product (and by extension the business) more in the
dark than it should be.

Solving this problem is why I built Savio[1] to help support and sales teams
quickly send customer feature requests from Intercom, Help Scout, and other
tools to their Product team... and for Product to have a sane list with tools
to prioritize their features (e.g. "Show me feature sorted by # requests, or
cumulative MRR, or from Churned customers").

1- [https://www.savio.io](https://www.savio.io)

~~~
brettcvz
Totally agree! I use this technique as a complimentary layer to “send all
possible feedback my way”. Tactically, we achieve this through having a
handful of different “feedback-X” channels for different audiences that people
dump feedback into. But over time that can start to feel like a black hole
that isn’t listened to, so I like adding this layer on top. Good point though,
I can add a clarification to the post.

~~~
kareemm
> over time that can start to feel like a black hole that isn’t listened to

Great point. Definitely need to ensure teammates feel like their feedback is
making a difference so they keep sharing it!

------
monkeydust
One of the realities of 'software eating the world' is managing client driven
requests with finite engineering resource.

Forcing sales to prioritise their requests amongst themselves (fight it out)
periodically is generally good practice that all product teams should employ
although doing this on global scale across multiple regions and products with
same pool of engineers can be challenging.

------
Someone1234
I'm a really big fan of the concept of UserVoice (no affiliation). Essentially
direct the end-users there and let them vote on product features, track them,
discuss them, and so on.

A lot of organisations are scared of this, because they don't want to be put
into the position of saying "no." Which is likely to occur as not all feedback
is actionable, even if popular.

But saying "no" and explaining WHY is in itself a great relationship building
exercise with end users. I'm not saying they will always agree with the
decision or explaination, but they will feel closer/more connected.

This won't improve the empowerment of Customer Service roles however. Just
might make them less of a punching bag for customer feedback that won't go
anywhere.

~~~
brettcvz
Do you know anywhere that does this really well in practice? My concern is
that it would end up similar to the internal feedback problem where people
feel like they submit requests into a queue that never gets worked on. I feel
like I know how to solve that problem when there’s a small number of internal
stakeholders I can go over and talk to, I’m not sure how one does it at scale
with users

------
lmeyerov
For small teams, this goes to the weekly leadership mtg and VP's 1-1s: CEO/cto
or vp eng/prod should be reporting their side, but also asking sales+marketing
if they need enablement.

For next scales, two models I like are "Tiger teams" (top dev team who can
jump onto stuff for pushing a VP Sales picked acct through) and dedicated
analysts+devs. I'm skeptical of say A/B testing until you are huge, but stuff
like sales/success/marketing automation can hit way earlier.

------
cmhnn
Been doing this for while now in the crazy competitive world of cloud and
enterprise. At that scale, this recommendation does not work.

Customer facing teams are also very different in focus and there are dangers
to thinking one is prioritizing a feature vs. fixing an issue depending on the
team they are talking to.

Some prioritization is of course normal but it is fluid and not simple unless
you're just ready to hand off the business and not improve your platform.

------
bbulkow
Brett, i have evolved a different system, and i agree on the difficulty and
importance of the problem.

Give me a ring, we can have a coffee and discuss.

------
aklemm
“ And as the PM, at a minimum you should commit to making some progress on at
least one of those top-two issues every quarter or two.”

Thinking from the client-facing side, this would HAVE to be progress on BOTH
items EVERY quarter or it’s hard to take it seriously. And taking each other
seriously can often be part of the problem.

~~~
brettcvz
I haven’t found this to be the case. If needed, you can always surface the
constraint of “look, I have N other teams who are giving me their top two
requests, in addition to trying to move goals X, Y, Z. I want to support you
and move the ball forward on these issues, but I can’t do everything
immediately”

