Product Demand Intelligence Podcast Hannah Chaplin

About The Episode
In this episode, Hannah talks with Pierre Grenier, who is Head of the ‘Voice of the Customer’ program at Zendesk.

He brings a refreshing and unique perspective to building products thanks to his vast experience in both senior product management and customer experience roles. He’s also the first podcast guest to prepare a script to demonstrate some fantastic points!

He tells us about how he approaches problem discussions with customers and how this not only benefits the customers, but everyone at Zendesk too.

In the episode we walk through:

* Why SaaS companies should adopt a problem-based approach with their customers & teams;

* The pitfalls of focusing on feature requests and solutions too early on;

The importance of asking “Why” to understand customer pain points;

* Advice & proven tips for giving your customers the best possible experience when they spend their time giving you feedback & feature requests;

* Why creativity empowers product teams and how to harness this when it comes to how your SaaS organization handles customer feedback and feature requests.

Who Should Listen?
There are many great take-aways from this episode and it is perfect for anyone working in leadership, product, support or customer success.

Key Takeaways:
* You can’t build the right product without understanding the underlying problem;

* It’s not the customer responsibility to think through the full impact of a feature request;

* Building customer feature requests “as is” is potentially deadly for a SaaS business;

* Product teams want to think creatively and innovate with their product so you need to enable them to do so;

* Focusing on the problem provides a better product but also a richer and more fulfilling experience for the entire customer base;

* A problem-based philosophy is beneficial for your whole SaaS organization.

About The Episode
In this episode, we speak with Daniel Zacarias, Product Management Consultant and blogger at Folding Burritos, about his framework for effectively working with internal stakeholders.

Managing internal stakeholders is a real challenge for product management teams; especially when there can be so many competing and conflicting voices acting on product direction.

Daniel and I met a couple of years ago and I was taken by his very human and practical approach to product management.

Dealing with people is one of the most rewarding yet challenging aspects of the job so I was thrilled when Daniel joined me to talk about this topic in detail. The episode is based on Daniel’s blog post Moving from Solutions to Problems.

In the episode we walk through:
+ How Daniel first recognized the importance of internal stakeholder management as part of the product development process;

+ Leading internal stakeholders away from solution-thinking and towards a problem-based approach;

+ An in-depth look at Daniel’s Problem Case Framework for creating positive relationships between stakeholders and product teams.

Who Should Listen?
This episode is perfect for product managers who are interested in learning a mini-framework for involving internal stakeholders in product decisions in a powerful and productive way.

It’s also great for anyone who works in a product organization to understand how they can proactively support the work of their product teams.

Key Takeaways:
+ Problem statements from internal stakeholders are so much more useful than being presented with solutions;

+ You have to help stakeholders bring problems rather than solutions to product teams - this requires some thought and a little bit of process;

+ It’s easy to implement a mini-framework to revolutionize how the product teams interact with internal stakeholders.

In this episode, we speak with Christina Noren, Chief Product Officer at Interana, about the importance of data, and how Product Managers can access it.

We also delve into the world of automation and scaling, which Christina is putting into place as Interana continues to grow.

This episode is perfect for product managers who want more control over the data and need to convince their companies to let them have access.

People who are in the process of scaling their company will also find this episode useful.

Key Takeaways:
+ Why now is the perfect time to automate processes;
+ Why product teams need to be data-informed and not data-driven;
+ The importance of strong links between Support, Success, and Product teams;
+ How PMs can take control of the data and use it themselves.

Hannah talks to LiquidPlanner's Senior Program Manager, Kayvon Ghaffari, about how they recently implemented the Pandora Prioritization process to help drive and inform their product roadmap decisions.