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4 minute read
“So you’re either trying to replace me, or get CEOs like you on my neck, and killing every creative sense I have in my job? Is that what your company is doing?”
That was, probably, the most direct doubting feedback I got from a product leader since we started Entor. Not a recommended experience, working to connect product leaders to revenue impact - and then to hear someone in your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) saying how they are worried that your product will not empower them, but rather replace them or put more pressure on them.
This person, you’d be happy to hear, turned into an Entor user and fan - but that initial reaction made me and the team go deeper and reflect on the “why”: A few years back, I remember some sales leaders were objecting to some of the revenue operations tools like Gong and others, in their early years, claiming “getting the ‘Big Brother’ to record my calls seems like a bad idea”. They warmed up to it when they saw the impact it had on their efficiency and eventually results and compensation. The question that stood in mind was: “Can Product leaders go through the same process?”
Far from “Coin-Operated machines”, product leaders are in most cases both artists and scientists; Creating what the customers ask for or what Sales demand them to, might seem reactive and expected - instead of proactive, innovative, and exciting.
Many of them, rightfully, claim that their users usually think of small, incremental, and less innovative modifications that can help their use case - and not on new ground-breaking ways to solve the underlying problems in a way that can be scalable. Ever heard of Henry Ford’s famous saying, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, then they would have said a faster horse”?
So why do we believe that an AI-driven ‘Product Headquarters’ platform, full of impact-measuring bells and ‘Voice of the Customer whistles’, is so critical in product work in the new world?
Here’s what we’ve heard from hundreds of conversations with Product Leaders and PMs:
- Data is the best tool to justify a “No” - In a world where resources are limited and every decision counts, using data to justify not pursuing certain ideas or projects can be empowering. AI-based insights provide concrete evidence to support decisions, helping product leaders to say "no" with confidence and focus on what truly matters. Do you know that sales leader blaming you for not closing half the pipe? That CS leader claiming the two biggest accounts didn’t renew because of “product gaps”? Data is your friend in every leadership discussion - helping you justify what you’re focusing on, exactly preventing you from being reactive to thoughts, feelings, and claims your peers attempt to impose on your roadmap.
- Your time is spent on manual monitoring instead of creative work - You know these endless, manual Google/Excel sheets with product requests entered manually? Or the hours of sorting through support tickets to try and match them to a root cause? Or the hopeless attempt to find that quote or understand the context of the feedback someone told you about from a call with a champion at a key account? Or that time that Support and Customer Success said to you ‘Everyone is asking for the same thing’ – yet, when you drilled down to it they were looking into several product areas and what you thought would be a quick product win was a never-ending nightmare? When scaling, product organizations often choose between 2 not-so-great options: being somewhat disconnected from their users and customers, or spending hours on manual work monitoring and trying to milk meaningful insights from all the systems the organization uses. Leveraging innovative technology to accurately reflect all the data the company already holds, allows PMs and product leaders to focus the vast majority of their time on the creative side. When done well, product work is a rare combination of art and science – When tech solves for the science - you have more time to focus on the art.
- Your team should be measured on results, not effort - In sales, you can measure the team by closing rates and quota attainment; In Marketing it’s about leads, and in engineering about the quality and pace of the code development - but how does it look in measuring your product managers? One of the challenges we keep hearing from CPOs and VPs of Product - is that in the absence of true impact measures available, there are no great ways to truly know who in your team is pushing the entire department and company forward. By connecting product initiatives to impact, company OKRs, and revenue metrics - PMs can truly shine where it matters most, and leaders can ensure they promote and empower the right team members who deliver such impact; This can also help justify team growth by solidifying the ROI of the Product function.
- AI opens possibilities we’ve never had before - Product is all about making decisions. The most important decision: what is the company is building and what value it delivers. Decisions are better with more data. The need to incorporate data from all over the organization and outside of it in one place led many companies to create ad-hoc home-built solutions that collect feedback and also led to the creation of ‘product analyst’ functions for many product professionals focusing on competitive assessment, data collection, and strategic recommendations based on tedious work of gathering and analyzing data. Collecting data. The current era of AI, for the first time, allows companies to get all of this data at their fingertips without the additional resources and time gap. It shifts focus from what’s noisy to what matters and operates independently in the background, providing ongoing decision-supporting insights data.
- Predicting Market Trends - Being innovative and agile is the key to success in our industry. The company that wins is usually the one meeting the needs of a specific customer most intuitively and effectively most intuitively and effectively - and doing so before the others do. Staying on top of market trends, competitors offering and other signals - and combining these with the feedback from customers and revenue needs is a challenging mission and it will result in a true competitive advantage. Product leaders who are always aware of what their competitors are releasing, but also aware of market reception and trends - are better equipped to create meaningful differentiation and make better decisions. It’s safe to assume that if there was no cost associated with it, every product leader would have loved to have a “competitors analyst” looking into what’s new in the category every day, and sharing market reception to each trend and release. AI, for the first time, allows for that as well - and can even help predict what the future might hold.
So what do you say - are you “team impact” yet?
