Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast.
Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
It's time for this week's Dear Melissa.
So today we've got a great question from a director of product about how to handle an overwhelming amount of customer requests but not get into a reactive trap where you're just trying to pay down all of this debt in the backlog but not really thinking strategically.
So this is a very common issue that I've seen in a lot of companies and I'm excited to dive in.
But first I wanna remind you that you can ask me all of your burning product management questions.
Go to dearmelissacom and let me know what you're thinking.
I answer them every Friday on the podcast.
So let's get into this week's question.
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Dear Melissa, I just joined an organization that has a huge queue of customer support tickets and enhancement requests that went unanswered for years.
Most of our PM's time is spent trying to address issues for customers that scream the loudest, without much time for discovery or any sort of product thinking.
We obviously need to pivot to begin leading strategically, but what do you recommend doing in the short term to help reset expectations and clear backlogs?
This is, like I said, a very common issue that I see.
So as companies grow, naturally you're going to get more and more requests from your customers about what they would like to see.
You start off with a smaller product.
It starts to solve the problem and then you get a.
Wouldn't it be nice if it would do this?
And this is not exactly what I want, or I want this feature to be able to do that too.
And it grows and grows and you get more and more customers, more and more voices.
So now you actually have to set up a process for how to handle that.
At the beginning.
A lot of times, what we want to do is just answer all of our biggest customers' questions and make sure they're happy.
And that makes sense for a startup that's starting off very small.
But like you said in your question, if we only do that, we won't be strategic.
We're just going to be reactive.
And we're not trying to be a consultancy here, right?
We don't want to just solve very specific problems for certain customers that do not scale or help us meet our strategic goals.
So what we need to do fundamentally is clear our time out to give ourselves some space to create that strategy.
And then we need a system for being able to look at the things that are coming in from the customers and say, does this meet our strategy?
And is it something that we want to pursue?
How do we think about prioritizing it?
And then what do we do to communicate with it?
So here as well, we're not just dealing with a backlog problem, trying to get through all these tickets.
We're dealing with a whole cultural and expectation management problem.
And we want to make sure that we're addressing that.
So there's a couple of steps that you can take in the short term to get yourself some space so that you can start doing that long-term strategic thinking.
And the first thing we need to do is really about triaging and categorization.
So step one, right?
Don't try to tackle everything at once.
You need to create buckets to make sense of the chaos.
So what you're going to do is create some simple categories.
We want, like critical bugs in one categories enhancement requests, feature requests, technical debt.
And within each of those categories, you're going to start to segment.
You're going to try to figure out what's the impact.
Is it super high?
Where if we don't solve this critical bug, for example, right now, we're going to have churn.
People's systems will go down.
We might break SLA contracts, anything like that.
Those would be really high.
Some things are probably going to be low.
They might be only affecting, let's say, one person.
It might only be in a certain situation that doesn't happen very often.
That's going to be low.
So we want to look at impact.
We want to look at effort.
And we want to look at customer type.
Is it enterprise, key accounts, general users?
Is it people that we are really targeting as well?
Now, when you're looking at this too, that's not just about looking at if it's critical and if it's breaking things.
You also are setting yourself up strategically, especially with that customer type part, to start thinking about are these our right customers?
This is going to help you strategically in the long run.
So if you segment that way, you're going to be able to go back and look and say hey, on the enterprise level, We are getting a lot of feature requests from them for X, Y and Z.
Are we trying to move into the enterprise right now, or do we actually sell that too early and we can't meet their needs?
So here we go.
It's not just about triaging tickets.
It's also about helping us understand and refine our product strategy when we get to that part.
So that's why this is very important here.
So what we're trying to do here, too, is we're not really trying to prioritize yet.
It's not about perfect prioritization.
We're just creating some visibility and some kind of structure that allows us to now dive into each one of those tickets and start to understand what needs attention right now.
What should we look at later for a rainy day, and what can we maybe just push off for a while?
That's good, right?
So this is going to clear you up so you're not just going through absolutely everything as well.
Next, you're going to want to establish some communication rhythms.
So you want to create a regular cadence for this backlog review.
Are you going to do weekly?
Is it biweekly?
It really depends on the volume and the criticality of some of those things coming in.
So you should probably start by publishing a simple status update showing what's being worked on and why.
If that's transparent within the organization, account managers can see it.
They can communicate back with your customers about what is being done.
You are also going to be transparent about what's not being worked on and what's the reasoning on that.
So do you have a ticketing system where you can keep these lines of communication open between you and sales and account management and customer support?
That's going to give them some visibility and allow them also to have good communication back to your customers.
It will allow all of your stakeholders to see it.
You should also think about setting up some dedicated time slots for stakeholders to come and have these conversations with you, so that you're not reactive all day.
I remember one of my first jobs, I was doing a lot of internal tools.
And anytime something went wrong, everybody would be at my desk all day asking me questions about it.
And I never had time to actually work on this stuff.
Right.
So what we did is instead we would say, hey, there's an hour on Thursdays.
If it's not like broken, broken where you can't do your job.
Come on Thursdays.
Tell me what you want to see.
Tell me what's going on, what's going there.
I'll walk you through why we're going to do it, why we're not.
And that works a lot better because it saved my time from being distracted all day by these requests coming in.
So make sure people know how to get in touch with you.
You don't want to just be like, hey, you can't talk to me about this at all.
You want to make sure that they just know how to get in touch with you and how to navigate that.
So set up that time.
Next, you want to think about quick win strategy.
And this is especially important if you feel like your customers are losing trust in you or your account management team is losing trust in you or customer support or anything like that.
So identify three to five items that are like low effort, but very high visibility.
And if you can knock those out, even if they are not the most strategic thing in the world, you're going to build credibility.
So look for patterns in those requests and also try to dive into what's the underlying issue.
Just because people are saying one thing and it looks somewhat different than this other ticket doesn't mean that there is an underlying problem there.
And that's where good customer research comes in.
So if you see these patterns, that's where you should be going out and talking to customers and trying to figure out hey, what's actually going on here?
And if you can fix that root cause rather than treating individual symptoms, that's going to last much longer.
So when you go through all of your tickets, think about that.
Is this just a quick fix or is there something bigger going on here?
Where am I starting to see these patterns?
Who should I go out to and start talking to about the customers?
See what I can do to fix it for everybody rather than just putting a bandaid on certain accounts.
Look for those types of things.
Make sure that you communicate those wins loudly to everybody the customers, to your customer support teams, to your account management teams, because then it's going to start looking like hey, that team's making progress.
They're listening to us.
I'm not going to panic all the time when something comes in.
I know they're actually making good progress here. and we'll all get it done.
There is a clear way for doing this.
So definitely try that.
Next, you're also gonna have to reset stakeholder expectations.
So make sure you're having direct conversations with internal stakeholders about the new approach.
Tell them what you're changing, make it transparent for them, explain why the reactive firefighting doesn't really work, and also tell them how they can advocate if they really think something is going to churn an account.
Prevent them from selling to new accounts that are strategically there.
Make this like a collaborative process, right?
You want to make sure that they don't think that you're just blocking them from being able to get the answers that they need or being able to do their jobs.
So go out, take the time, really build those relationships, because they're going to trust you in the long term.
Now, when we do that, we're gonna be able to carve out some strategic time.
So when it comes to discovery, I hear this from so many product managers.
They're like, I don't have time to do this.
I'm reactively firefighting, fighting.
Make time for it.
Block your calendar out.
It's a non-negotiable.
Just like any other meeting, it's a non-negotiable.
Block your calendar out.
That becomes discovery.
Onboard your stuff for discovery.
Start small.
Even like one hour per week of dedicated user research or strategic thinking is better than none.
So just start small.
Start blocking your calendar out.
Make it a non-negotiable.
Learn to say no to other things.
This is something that we all have to practice.
And I see more junior product managers have a harder time with it.
But executives have a very easy time with it.
And that is why they're in their job, right?
That's how they make it to be executives is they carve that out.
They understand it's important and they make sure that time is blocked.
So ruthlessly protect your time there.
Make sure that you do that.
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During that time too, it's a great time to go understand those root causes we were just talking about behind all those backlog items.
So here's where we start building our product strategy.
Now, when we start building this product strategy too, it becomes a framework for us to look at those feature enhancements and say what's in and what's out.
Does this actually help us with our objectives?
If you don't have that framework, it's very hard to be able to respond to any feature enhancement because there's no way to prioritize it.
So that's why you need to make the time for the product strategy and for strategic thinking.
That gives you the lens there on how do I actually think about what's in and what's out when we get all of these requests?
And the requests will never stop coming.
You wanna make sure that you're set up in a good way to be able to triage, understand them and figure out what's going on.
This is also a great place as well to start to train and bring in your customer support team.
So, if they're getting these tickets from customers, help them understand what is a feature enhancement versus a bug, what is a different level.
When you make all those frameworks, train them on it and let them do some of the triaging as well.
Let them ask follow-up questions to the customers.
Get the information you need so it's easier to go solve those problems.
They are a fantastic resource.
Account management, customer success, Super fantastic resources.
Make sure you are using them as well.
Teach them what you know when it comes to those things so they can start triaging as well.
And then not all the work is just laying on the product managers.
It's not just getting passed through.
We're actually asking the right questions at the right time.
We're getting the information so we can figure out if we can solve those problems faster.
And by the time it gets to the product managers, it's going to be faster to make a decision.
Is this in?
Is this not?
And they will understand the reasoning behind it.
So I hope that helps.
This is a long journey.
It is not a short journey to start to turn this around and fix it.
But the one thing you need to understand is that this list will never get shorter.
From this point on, you are a growing company.
That list will never get shorter.
That's okay.
We have to be very deliberate and stubborn about protecting our time to make sure we are doing strategic things.
That does not mean don't listen to your customers.
That means you should be listening to your customers, but you set up the process so that you can manage these types of things much easier than just flailing and being reactive.
So you have to create the space deliberately.
Create that space, hold to it, and it's going to get easier from there.
I wish you the best of luck.
And if you like this answer, remember you can go to DearMelissacom and let me know what questions you have.
I will answer them on an upcoming episode.
Make sure that you like and subscribe to this podcast.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest.
So tune in then, and we'll see you then.
