Hey, what's up?

Welcome to another episode of Build on Seeking Wisdom.

This is Maggie, apparently the niece-in-waiting, here to go deep on everything related to building products.

Today, I want to talk about the most important thing that we can do as product people that we

all continue to fail at, and that's talking to customers. When Martin Erickson from Mind the

product told us that the one thing that he still sees most product teams fail at is getting

enough customer feedback, I thought that this would be a perfect topic to dig into

here on seeking wisdom. Getting customer feedback is another example of something that's simple,

but not easy. It's just incredible that customer feedback and talking to customers is the one thing

that we all know is the key to building great products, and yet apparently we don't all do it.

It's like eating healthy or working out or sleeping more or whatever good habit that you're supposed to have that for

whatever reason, you just don't. But luckily, there's a way to massively increase the amount

of customer feedback you're getting if you open up your definition of customer feedback

and instead focus on the question of how can I talk to my customers more often.

So today I'm going to focus really tactically on how to have more conversations with your customers, regardless of the structure of your team or how you do product development.

My goal is for everyone listening to go back to their teams and companies with at least one new way or idea for how to talk to and have conversations with your customers more consistently.

First, though, there's one elephant in the room with customer feedback that I want to call out that I think might be one of the reasons why product teams just don't get enough customer feedback.

And that's that when someone says,

you should get more customer feedback or you should talk to customers more often, the immediate

reaction that I think some of us in product might have is, I just don't have time. Because when we

think about customer feedback, we're stuck in this model of thinking that feedback is this really

formal thing that you do by setting up a user interview,

...