Our engineering team has been building features based on ideas, and I’m the first PM. How do I change the culture and help them buy into being customer focused?

The good news is that you have an engineering team that is excited about the product & generating ideas. That’s huge. Over the long term, this will make your product more successful....so long as you can channel that excitement towards features that are also exciting to customers. Your goal is to help your team fall in love with problems, not solutions. I’ve seen over and over again how this simple mindset shift can be a game changer for more user focused decision making. Here are some appro ...Read More

First, gather all your data evidence. You may need to partner with someone in Data Science/Analytics or run the queries yourself. Identify the % MAU using each feature and list them in descending order. Create a revenue growth curve and overlay it with new feature releases, key marketing initiatives, and other relevant activities. This simple approach helps visualize the collective impact of features over time. Analyze drop-off points in the customer journey. Even without sophisticated metrics f ...Read More

One way to get Engineering excited about customer focus is to invite them to listen in on interviews. We post all customer interviews on a shared calendar and use webinar settings that ensure observers hopping on / off are not disruptive to the participant or moderator. We also run an internal back-channel where observers can discuss responses or suggest follow-up questions. Often, I see that hearing directly from individual customers drives a level of engagement for Engineers that is much highe ...Read More

I would start with minor tweaks to the existing process vs trying to completely re-do things - most changes that stick only tweak 1 variable at a time vs trying to change the whole system. So I would certainly not come in and try to redefine how ideation, scoping, planning, commits, shipping, reviews, etc work on Day 1. But if the team already ideates then I'd try to introduce customer conversations / user research as another avenue to generate ideas, then connect the dots to show that ideas tha ...Read More

If you're the first PM, building trust is your #1 priority. So I'd start with curiosity about their ideas – where are they getting them from? How are they validating them? What have they learned so far? Where are they getting stuck? It's possible that their ideas are based on some notion of a customer that you can expand and make concrete, by introducing the team to real customers and their needs. If they're not, it's likely the team is running into trouble getting traction for their ideas, and ...Read More

Well, the good news is as the first PM in the team, you can introduce some new ways of doing things. The bad news is that its a journey and it'll take some time to change the mindset. You'll need to establish trust with the team and show some wins before the team can buy into the change. The first thing I would do is to invite engineers to listen to user interviews or support calls. That'll make customer real for them and once they see the impact of what they build, they'll start thinking differ ...Read More