Why Customer-Facing Experience Makes Better PMs

My first tech job was on the customer support desk for a telecommunications software company, where I spent my days answering support tickets and troubleshooting issues over the phone. As I moved through various support roles, I developed skills that would eventually lead me to my current career as a product manager (though when I started out, I had no idea what product management even meant). 

Stories like mine aren’t unique, particularly among mid-career PMs - but that’s changing. 

Folks are intentionally starting their careers as PMs, rather than finding their way there through other roles. It’s a natural progression of the discipline, but it’s also a bit of a shame because frontline experience can teach you so much about product. Some of the best PMs I know started their careers in customer-facing roles. 

To be clear, customer-facing roles aren’t stepping stones to something else; they’re important and meaningful careers in their own right. However, my experience in support opened the door for my first product role and it continues to make me a better PM to this day. 

What you learn by working with customers

In customer-facing roles, you naturally learn a lot about customers, but this goes beyond knowing that Jim loves to open his conversations with two minutes of small talk about the weather (an actual anecdote from my time in support). You learn how customers actually use your product in the real world, how it fits into their workflows, and where it falls short or could improve - all valuable insights for a product manager. 

Understanding your customers beyond data

Your customers are more than a series of clicks in your app or a certain percentage of your revenue. All PMs know this in theory, but being in a customer-facing role really brings the whole reality of your customers, as people, into focus. 

Knowing that a customer took an action in your product (which you can glean from basic data analytics) is different from knowing why and what they were feeling when they did it. Understanding the percentage of customers that come from a particular country is one thing, but learning that folks in that country rarely use email and so are unlikely to get your nurturing campaign is something else entirely. Awareness that folks with visual disabilities use computers isn’t the same as trying to help a customer use your product when it wasn’t designed for screen readers. 

This is the human element. It’s a core part of how we work at Discourse, and how we think about our mission. 

Increased context around customer concerns

Working directly with customers involves lots of back and forth with them about how to accomplish a task or to share information — this is a feature, not a bug. It’s during this process that you learn what motivates, inspires, and frustrates them. 

When you find out that a customer’s budget was slashed, you’ll understand why they are so upset by what seemed like a reasonable inflation adjustment to their pricing. Budgets are top of mind for them. When your customer is on the hook for presenting to their company’s executives, their continued requests for shinier charts and graphs makes more sense. The presentation of these reports impacts how they’re perceived by their bosses. This context helps you see customer questions, requests, and complaints as parts of a larger story. 

Where your product is failing your customers

Because frontline teams are in direct communication with customers, they’re often the first to know when there’s a problem in the product. Sales representatives hear from prospects that the product doesn’t have the feature they need, customer support agents receive frustrated messages from customers when they can’t figure out how to complete a task, and the success team gets notice that the customer won’t be renewing their contract.

In these roles, there’s firsthand experience of where the product is failing your customers. There’s no hiding behind whether a survey result is statistically significant or not. With all the context the folks in these roles have built, they’re also more able to see connections between feedback from different customers and recognize emerging trends (for good or ill). 

How customer-facing experience translates to your product career

When I moved into product, I wasn’t sure if my previous experience would translate or if my career would be back to the drawing board. There were new skills to learn (aren’t there always) such as thinking about business needs, building quantitative data skills, and managing complex projects. But I found there were so many areas where my support experience set me up for success as a product manager. 

Comfort communicating with customers

The thing about being “customer-facing” is that you’re connecting with customers a lot. You naturally build up a comfort for communicating with them, even when those conversations are tough. I once spent three hours on the phone with a very angry customer, and while at the time that was a really hard interaction, I have never felt nervous when talking to a customer since. 

If you’re comfortable talking to customers, it’s far easier to do the research that is so important in product management. Good PMs listen to feature requests and share them with their team, but great PMs go beyond the surface-level request and understand the problems or goals motivating it. If you’re coming from a customer-facing role, you’re probably already used to the type of back-and-forth communication required to succeed with this sort of excavation based on your experience troubleshooting bugs or responding to RFPs. 

Reality checks with customers

In one of my support jobs, I was taught to end every message with a direct question to confirm whether the customer understood my response or had any further needs, something like “could you please let me know if these instructions solve the problem?”. The purpose of the question, as opposed to a more casual “let us know if you need anything else” signoff, was to make it clear that we wanted the customer to respond to confirm that our answer was right, their problem was solved, etc.

When I moved into product, I learned this concept had a fancy name - validation. It’s the process of confirming that your work has actually solved the problem or achieved the goal that you intended. Sometimes we all fall into the trap of thinking that our customers are just like us, and that the solutions that make perfect sense to us will work for customers, too. Validation is an important counter to this, and a great way to do that is directly with customers (though sometimes relying on quantitative data is a better fit for certain types of work). PMs who validate their team’s work at many steps during the build process are going to end up with more durable, useful solutions. 

Experience collaborating with other teams

In any customer-facing role, you end up partnering with folks from other teams. In support, you need to report bugs to engineering. In sales, you communicate with marketing about trends you’re observing during sales calls. In success, you might partner with design to help think through a customer’s feature request.

All of this is dialed up to eleven when working in product. On a daily basis, PMs need to bring insights about customer problems and business needs into conversations with design and engineering partners to make sure they have the context they need to build a successful product. But even outside of day-to-day feature work, PMs need to coordinate with most other functions of the business to learn from their interactions with current and prospective customers and share plans about the direction of the product. Being comfortable working across the organization makes this part of the job much easier.

Continuing to develop customer insights as a product manager

I want to avoid two misconceptions that might come up after reading this post: that coming from a customer-facing role means you fully understand customers, or that not starting out in this type of role means you’ll always struggle with this aspect of the job.

Neither of these are true, and for the same reason - product managers are never done learning about their customers and using that knowledge to improve their products. In this section, I’ll explore a few ways that PMs from any background can continue to develop their customer insights. 

Get face time with customers

PMs should be communicating directly with customers (or whoever uses your product) at least once a week. No amount of quantitative data, screen recordings, or competitive research can replace real conversations. 

Without regular touchpoints, any advantage your customer-facing experience gives you in this regard will fade in relevance, since customers and their needs change over time. The real advantage of the frontline position experience is not so much that you come into the product role with specific knowledge about customers, but rather that you’ve already built the habit of communicating with customers regularly. Do your best to maintain that habit.

Make use of every customer touch point

Traditional ways of engaging with customers include customer interviews and meeting with customers directly at their workplace (if you work on a B2B product) or at industry conferences, and these are incredibly important interactions that you should embrace. But I’d encourage you to take advantage of any customer touchpoint available to you. 

Whenever a customer interacts with your organization, there is an opportunity for you to learn. Watch sales demos to hear how prospective customers react to your product. Participate in your support community and read support emails to learn about customer problem patterns. If you’re coming from a customer-facing role, you have a leg up here because you know the systems and can more easily find the information you need, but if not, ask the folks on these teams how you can best learn from their customer touchpoints. 

Collaborate with customer-facing teams

It’s easy for PMs to stay within the comfort zone of the product / design / engineering triad, but close contact with frontline teams is a fantastic way to keep learning about customers. You may have already built these relationships from your prior role, so be sure to maintain them as you move into product. If not, spend time getting to know these teams.

At its best, collaboration with these teams is a two-way street. As a PM, you can reach out to your customer-facing colleagues in support, sales, customer success, etc. to ask questions about current and potential customers, vet ideas with the people who know them best, and share information about where the product is headed. Then, the folks in these roles know they can come to you when they come across an intriguing insight or have identified a new pattern that might be useful to you. Understanding your customers is much easier when it’s a team effort. 

The impact of customer-facing experience on your product career

Customer-facing experience can give you a head start when moving into product management,  but lasting success as a product manager depends on maintaining those habits and building upon those skills. Regardless of how you got started in product, the best PMs keep engaging with and learning from customers, because building a great product starts with understanding the people it’s built for.