Listening to customers

Interesting takeaways:

• Everyone - customers, vendors, engineers etc. wants to be a part of a community. If you are not cultivating these communities, you are missing out on the opportunities for word of mouth recommendations/problem solving and stickiness
• There are often considerations other than what can be compared on a table that factors into the decision framework of product selection. It could be tools, processes, skillset, biases, preferences. Worth understanding more on this for anything you work on.
• No one wants to reinvent the wheel or wants their problem or situation to be unique. Some companies however end up at weird spots due to a combination of past choices and changing trends, and have no way other than innovating themselves out of it. Makes them look like a software vendor although they did not intend to be. The best ones keep an eye out and remember to find their way back to the mainstream.

Reminder to self: A PM’s job is to represent the voices of people outside the building (i.e. customers)