What are some examples of the types of insights you used to gain insight from internal stakeholders?
Awesome question! Your internal team is the powerhouse and the biggest knowledge base. You can get tons of different insights from internal stakeholders:
- Customer insights. Talk to customer-facing teams (sales, CS) and learn about the challenges & needs of your customers. This can help you develop messaging and positioning for your product that resonates with your target market.
- Product insights. Chat with PMs to can gain insights into the features and capabilities of your product. It can guide GTM campaigns and messaging that highlight the value and differentiators of your product.
- Competitive insights. Ask the research team about the competitive landscape, competitors' positioning, SWOT. So you'll know how your product is better.
- Strategic insights. You can also get insights into broader industry trends, key industry changes, and non-public reports/announcements from talking with the leadership team.
The Insight I gained from internal stakeholders helped me get a more precise idea of how to prioritize the projects.
User feedback is really important, but it is also very important that you don't let the user drive your strategy. This is where the insight from the internal stakeholders becomes important. It ensures that your strategy is aligned with the company's global strategy.
Be customer-centric, not customer-led
As a product manager, you need to be customer-centric. You need to be obsessed with your users and find solutions to their problems. But this doesn't mean the users shall drive what you build through their feedback.
Integrating user feedback and internal stakeholder insights allows the processing of the information to align your roadmap to the best mix of company strategy and customer needs.
What kind of insight should you be looking for
You may have some ARR or MRR information linked to Feature requests, but learning from Solution Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and Technical Support what the problems most encountered are allows you to use different input types to better prioritize your projects.
Listening to sales to understand what lack of feature made one deal fail allows one to understand what lever is needed to close more deals.
Finally, listening to the board allows you to understand the company's north star and strategy and align your project to better serve this strategy.
Communication is two-way
Communication is a two-way game. You also have valuable insight to share with the internal stakeholders to help them perform better.
You should never hesitate to share with the internal stakeholders any insight that you gain from your different research. They will only appreciate you more and will be even more eager to retribute your inputs with more insights.