The Art of Revealing Customer Needs

That's actually the secret of my success is when I'm in those calls,
when I'm in those meetings, I'm fully there.
100%.
Nothing else sort of exists.
Hi, I'm Karl and I'm Danielle, and this is productly speaking.
We're product managers by trade and here we explore the world of product
management. It's people and their stories.
We promise to keep it entertaining and maybe you'll learn something.
Shall we give this a go?
Let's do it.
On today's episode,
we are going to discuss the signal to noise ratio and how to make sure you cut
through the noise to get to the signal.
You often get input from customers on what they think needs to be changed in a
product. This can raise questions like,
how do you know if the feedback is truly a need or a want?
How do you know if an individual's feedback represents their whole organization
or just their own personal views? Today,
we hope to give you some ideas on how to start answering these questions in your
particular situation. And to help us do that, we have a guest.
I'd like to introduce our guest today. She is not a product manager,
but serves as a senior manager of technical account managers,
working with telecommunications customers at Red Hat.
She has the unique skill of being able to listen to what a customer says they
want and to then ask the right questions and lead the right conversation to
understand if that's what they truly need.
This is one of those skills that you can only learn from experience and it serves
her well in her role, but would also serve anyone well in a product manager role.
In fact, at one point she almost became a product manager.
We are pleased to welcome to productly speaking, Jennifer Scalf.
Thank you. In addition, I'd like to add,
I've been in a place between the products and the customers for going on 20
some years now.
The interesting bit about that is it has been a ride figuring
out not only what the customer needs based off of what they're saying,
but what they need based off of what we also can provide in whatever product I'm
supporting. So I am usually in what is called now, I guess, day one, day two,
I think it was still DevOps when I started 20 years ago,
we were just sysadmins.
So I've been doing this for a long time and I'm very happy to be here and share
some of my experiences and hopefully folks can pull some learning from it and
apply it to your gigs.
Yeah. So you and I have worked together at Red Hat prior and before that you were
at Rutgers. At Red Hat,
I observed you taking customer feedback and doing just that,
sorting the signal from the noise and distilling it down to a real customer
need.
Could you share your approach and what that journey has looked like to get to
that point?
I highly recommend right off the bat and something that I do without even
thinking about it is the research ahead of time to understand. And again,
I'm in a position where there's already usually a problem happening, something,
they've installed something, they've set something up,
they've architected something. And so what is it that they already have?
Collect that from all of the people around you.
Don't discount any of the other roles that have interacted with the customer.
Make sure you meet with all of those various folks,
understand their objectives inside of either your company, their company,
et cetera. So you do a bit of research on that.
You do a bit of research on the technology itself. That's the,
that's the starting point.
So you do not ever want to go into any of these conversations without having
some background that you,
you definitely want to pull from when you're talking to the customer.
So you want to show really fast that you care enough that you've, you've done that.
You've talked to every single person that they could have talked to inside of
your company before you get in front of them.
It's a level of respect, I believe. Also, you don't want to waste anyone's time.
If you do not feel that you have the technical skillset, then find folks,
even if they haven't interacted with the customer,
find folks within your organization that, that do take them out to lunch,
just have a nice relaxing. You don't have to go really, really deep,
but pick up enough about the casual way folks talk about whatever that technology
is ahead of time so that you can also do that when you go in front of the
customer. These are a lot of the seemingly random things that I just do
naturally. My, my first gut feeling is, okay,
I know there is a significant challenge that needs to be solved.
They wouldn't be asking me to come in and talk to the customer if there wasn't.
I've just gotten to that point. But even if it is something small,
even if it is one case that came in and it seems important,
having that background ahead of time, definitely, because when you walk in there,
you are going to have to very quickly, or when you get on the phone,
you're going to have to very quickly build rapport and trust.
And you do not want somebody thinking that you are learning on your feet right
then and there that either the technology they're the issue that they're having
any of that.
So use all the resources that you have had to go out onto the various socials
and look people up anything you can do.
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
Certainly going into a call with as much knowledge as you can possibly have
is definitely going to set you up in a better spot.
But I would have to argue that it's not possible to go into every call with all
the knowledge that you need for every call.
So what do you do when you get into these situations where you're being asked a
question or the topic goes into an area where you may not know, but yet here you
are, you're on that call.
Yeah, you could go both or you could have data overload or you can go in with
absolutely no prior knowledge.
If you go in with absolutely no prior knowledge, be honest.
So one of the most important things I found is the extreme authenticity.
So go in there.
The first thing you need to do if you do not know the technology, don't know the
background is you need to get the folks you're talking to to understand that you
believe them.
You believe them.
They're telling you they're having an issue.
They're explaining the problem in great detail or not, but they have a problem
and they want people to believe that they do right off the bat.
So you need to make sure within seconds that they know that you believe them.
This is not, we're not dismissing this.
We're here for a reason and there is an actual problem.
So many times now people are rushing.
They're trying to get right to the answers, right to the solution, right to
the final final.
And a lot of people don't want that right off the bat.
They want to be heard.
There's a lot of names for it, right?
And I'm going to pull from all kinds of existing terminology that I, this is one
of the things I do is I just absorb these things and then I repeat, repeat them as
if it's mine.
And so anyway, so things like active listening, there's entire classes on
active listening.
We've all been active listening our entire lives at some point in our lives.
We stop doing that though.
We've got too much going on in our own heads.
We're, we're putting our own biases.
We're putting our own stereotypes.
We're putting our own, whatever we've got going on.
We've got something that happened that morning.
That's distracting us.
Something we know that's happening this afternoon.
That's distracting us.
So if you have nothing else going into a meeting with a customer, go into it and
show them that you believe them and you're there and you're authentically present and
you are actively listening to what they are saying, take notes, et cetera, show
them, repeat back very quickly.
Like the very first impressions are made within the first few seconds, right?
So grab all of that and make sure that you repeat bits of that back because you
believe them.
I mean, I do.
That's actually the secret of my success is when I'm in those calls, when I'm in
those meetings, I'm fully there.
100% nothing else sort of exists.
So believe them and show them that you believe them.
That's, that's really fascinating when you, because we're talking about kind of
prepping for a meeting and then having the meeting and building that goodwill and
that empathy and those personal relationships.
Once you leave that room, what are the kind of milestones or things you put in
place to maintain all of that hard work you've put in?
So I take lots of notes when I'm in the meeting itself, because I'm so fully
invested, I'm so there.
I do have a tendency and this is going to sound wild, but whatever, I do have a
tendency to sort of blank out that I'm and I'll get out of it and I'll come back
to being my own self outside of the meeting, which is not always a hundred
percent in it, right?
In what they were thinking at that moment.
So I do need to take a lot of notes in the meeting itself and make sure that
you were writing it from their perspective.
So not your first person, but a third person in a way, it's almost like
embodying that, right?
So you want to take notes in that.
Yeah, that I don't remember the term in literature, but there's a, you know,
first person, third person, and there's almost these second, second hand person,
something kind of names for it.
But you want to take your notes in that.
So either typing or writing physically, whatever you need to do, because when you
get out of that, you're going to be back in a world where the product is obviously
not doing something that they want it to do.
It could be a feature.
It could be a bug.
Something is wrong.
That's why we're here, right?
Well, wrong might be too hard of a word, but the product is not doing something
that they want it to do, right?
And if you go back in and again, I tend to really, really embody it when I'm
doing this, I will then go out and start talking to the product managers, the
engineers working on it, the other support folks, whomever.
And I will probably slightly slip into that mindset then, right?
If you're like me, you definitely will, but you have to keep, you have to hold
on to the mindset and the view of it, the perspective from the customer.
So I've written my notes in their perspective.
I have that.
I can continue to go back into that because at that point I'm going to figure
out, because again, I'm usually in day two, meaning products has already been
installed, implemented, et cetera.
I'm working with a customer.
So usually having a challenge with it.
They need a new feature, something like that.
That's just, I just want to level set like where I usually am in the process.
I think we can back into some of the pre pre pre before it's installed, et cetera.
But right now that's, that's where my head space is.
So I come back out after the meeting and I'm reviewing my notes and figuring out,
okay, who are the people within my organization that either need to know what
it is that the customer really needs out of the product and how do I then
find out what their motivations, did they set this product up to do something?
There's features in it for a reason, like really good.
And I'm sure they did.
Most people are not just throwing things at a wall.
So why is there a gap between what the customer is telling me they need the
product to do and what the product is actually doing, right?
Why is, why does that gap exist?
Is it because they didn't know, they don't know it already does that.
Is there an actual bug?
Is there a better way or is there a workaround?
Is there like what, what really truly there's a thousand things and there's
entire books written on this.
What is it that is causing that gap, that, that difference?
And the customer told you, and again, we believe them, right?
The customer told us exactly what they want.
Is it what they want is not physically possible.
It's not the direction of the company's product.
All of those kinds of things come after, right?
So we've got to sit down.
We've got to identify and you can do that.
This is not something I don't think that's impossible, but then what do you do with that?
So we get to the next step.
Okay.
We've identified that there is a feature that the customer needs to get the thing done.
So then you go to the folks that, you know, bless and approve the new
features and you build that out.
Or is it a bug?
Is it supposed to do that?
But it doesn't do it.
Is it, let's go even fuzzier because this is where a lot of my world lives.
Is it supposed to do that?
But it doesn't do it exactly as the customer wants.
So do we go back to the customer and we explain, well, it's not exactly
what you were looking for, but we can get real close.
So that I think where it comes into figuring out what they say they need
versus what exists versus what we can actually do.
And again, you'll not hear me use the words figuring out what they think they need
or what they said they need or what, no, I use none of that.
They tell you exactly what they need.
Customers tell you exactly what they need all the time.
It's our responsibility to figure out if the product can do it, if we want it to,
if we don't, what that means to us to physically enable that, whatever that is.
You might have one person at a customer telling you one thing and, you know,
you've given us a lot of really good insights into what you would do with that.
How do you know that that actually represents the entire customer?
Because you and I both know that on a customer site, that's a lot of people.
That's a complex organization at times, and there may be differences in opinions
and what they want to accomplish with the solution.
So how do you how do you kind of level set there and understand that the person
you're talking to is speaking more for the organization and less for themselves?
Or maybe they are speaking more for themselves and less for the org.
How would you go about trying to distill that out?
So this is where it gets real deep.
People have tells people have tells.
So if you talk to you find out from somebody in your organization or yourself has to know
going in, there has to be a reason that we're going in and talking to the people
that are right in front of us. Right.
So you have to figure out real quick, are those the people
that are making the decision for the whole org or just for them personally?
I don't know. People have all kinds of different reasons for for saying things
that they say. Right. So there's tell.
So if you start having the conversation and they are
coming from an emotional place or they're coming from a deep technical,
like they almost want to prove that they know about the technology that I know about this.
And I need you to know that I know about this.
All of those mean something in my head.
And again, a lot of this I do almost innately.
It's just this natural thing I do now.
So it's kind of hard for me to articulate. Forgive me.
So I can tell somehow and I'll just keep talking and we'll figure out how I can tell.
When people are they've got a bug there, whatever it's called,
when it's just their individual, like this has been driving me nuts for many years.
And they don't really show with their words or their actions
that it's something that they see affecting the rest of the organization.
Or if it's just that, like, is that their thing?
This is this is what I've got to get done.
Usually I don't run into that anymore.
I used to run into that a lot, a long time ago.
But at this point, the folks in your organization, you've gotten you
they've gotten you in front of folks that they think are the ones, right?
They're the ones making the decisions.
Usually this is this is done before.
Hopefully, hopefully you're lucky it's done before you get there.
But if you're not, you have a conversation with them about where they're coming from.
Just just take a moment.
Hopefully you can go have a cup of coffee and you can just chill out with folks.
That's the best way.
Just have a go get a sandwich and find out where they're coming from, what they're
people's titles are not always what they actually do in the company
and people's titles don't always show where they influence the company.
Right. So you can find that out by having that particular kind of conversation.
Direct questions to how long you've been here.
You know, how long have you been at this one?
Oh, you were at that one before.
Oh, how was that? Do you know so and so from the other one?
You know, they go through into I'm not trying to name companies right now,
but I do a little bit of that.
Where are they coming from?
If you get names, if they mention anybody else in their company,
write that down, you're always writing that down.
Make sure you make sure you have that long list and then go out.
I mean, this requires a lot of time and effort.
But I'm I'm assuming that folks have if you're going to this kind of level,
you have a little bit more time than, you know, half an hour on the phone with them.
If you have a half an hour on the phone with them,
you really just got to go with the title.
What does the title say?
Is that a person who because because and not just not just superficially,
but if they have a title that in the industry that you're in and every industry,
the titles mean totally different things.
You got to keep that in mind.
There are vice presidents in one industry that are the equivalent
to a senior sys admin in another industry.
OK, so this is again, things you pick up as you go through this for 20 years.
If you are meeting folks with particular titles that you know by default, have that.
If you get in, have that gravitas, have that influence, etc.
That's fine. If you get in and you're working with a bunch of folks
where the titles you have a half an hour to figure it out real fast.
The titles don't match with you.
What you know in that industry are the important ones.
Well, then you collect whatever info you can from that person,
and then you politely ask you.
There's all kinds of tools to find people across the work charts, right?
And you just don't waste anybody's time.
We're not trying. We're believing them.
We're not wasting their time.
We're being very respectful and we're moving on.
So how do you identify?
So you mentioned that like titles don't necessarily equate to influence
in an organization if you're trying to get something done
because you're serving that org, but you're talking to not quite the right person.
How do you identify the points of influence that you need?
Do you just recognize the titles or is there more to it than that?
Well, if you only have a few minutes and you have to recognize the title,
you just have to do the titles.
But if you've been lucky and you have a few days, a few weeks, a few months,
in certain cases, I've had a few years to see how they interact
with others in their organization.
And then you can track that down.
I'm just very hyper aware of the way the people within the organization talk to each other.
Again, this is the privileged.
This is a privileged position where you have that time to do it.
You can you can see after a little bit, either in emails,
the way they interact with each other in phone calls, any kind of input,
any kind of medium that you can get input, right?
If you don't have a lot of so that's if you have a lot of time, right?
You see the way people interact with each other.
You see when one person talks, how quickly somebody else reacts to an email.
I'm getting deep, guys.
This is going to sound a little preemptive.
Email response times.
Yeah, like there's all kinds of ways.
That's not the only one.
There's a thousand ways.
But that's the first one on the top of my mind.
If you're getting super fast response times on email, what does that mean?
Well, that means the other one of the people cares deeply
about what the other person thinks of them, right?
And thinks of their skill set.
Yeah, and the hierarchy.
So is somebody over here who never reads her email?
Karl, please don't take it personally, that it can take me three to four business
weeks to respond to your email.
She's not kidding about business.
I have to get on chat.
That's a great point.
See, but this is actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about
because I've known Karl for a bit and I knew that he was an expert in email before.
And I mean, Karl, I'm going to use you as an example right now
because we know each other.
I know for years that he was all about inbox zero and keeping that clean.
I knew when he moved to the other organization he was in, it was all chat.
And I know that because I was watching him and all lovingly say,
stalking him on social from different social media, the LinkedIn and things.
And so I saw what he was posting.
So somehow and this is this is what I'm talking about.
This is I sounds a little insane, but I knew now his thing is chat.
And so if he doesn't respond quickly to email,
because that's not his thing anymore.
People grow, people change.
Oh, when you recognize that about one of your customers and you slip that in
that you have noticed, they will tell you anything you will know.
Oh, my gosh, like we're best friends now.
You noticed, Jennifer, that I went from using email religiously
constantly to using chat now.
And now your marker or your way we're going to communicate is in chat.
And that's where we are now.
The fact that you listened and paid attention.
Oh, my gosh, it's like the star.
People don't even realize that the clouds part and everybody's best friends,
because you paid attention.
You cared. We're constantly data overload, constantly.
So many things coming at us.
Are we all by ourselves or is anybody listening to me?
As soon as you show a person that you are listening to them
and that you care and that you believe them and the words that are coming out
of their mouths are like actually useful, that you are going to learn
so much more about whoever it is you're talking to.
And so those are great points, not just for dealing with customers,
but for dealing with your fellow coworkers, for dealing with other teams
inside your own organization.
I mean, those are those are the types of points that are going to get you
the furthest along in your relationships with the other people you're working with.
Yeah, it's so beyond.
And now I started with know the technology
because you have to prove yourself all the time in my world.
You have to prove myself all the time.
If people don't think I know the technology, they're not going to talk to me.
Why would they talk to me?
So we have to know the technology.
That's number one, right?
You have to it.
I'm not people are not going to talk to other people
and go into detail about what they need and what they want.
If they think it's just going into a void, because we do this all day.
We go here. We go there. We talk to people.
It's just kind of fluff. It's just out there.
If a person shows them, if you hear somebody and you get this sense,
maybe it's obvious, maybe it's not that that person cares, that that person believes
them, that that person has a bit of a background in that same sphere,
in that same world, they're going to continue to talk to you.
And you're going to figure out from where that person sits in their organization.
You do again, you have to do your homework to figure out
where the other people are in the organization.
And when I say do the homework, go talk to the other people in your organization
and say, OK, so I'll talk to so and so you talk to so and so.
Right. Did you talk to the other person in their org about this?
And then you'll start to. Oh, yeah.
But did they did they then connect you to this other person?
Oh, yeah, they did.
OK, but then then were they the ones in the purchasing
or were they the ones in the in the architecture group?
Well, I thought they were in purchasing, but they really know a lot about it.
So they must have been architecture. This is what I'm talking about.
It just keeps going and going.
And you start to build out who actually has the influence within the company,
who is speaking for themselves or who is speaking
for a greater need across some systemic problem.
I mean, something right that that is causing issues.
I, Karl, I just thought of 10 technical challenges around updating
that we had a long time ago.
I don't know if people want to hear about the actual
I don't know how technical we want to get, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
There's about 50 different ways there have been in the last 20 years updated.
Yeah, this is true.
Inside of these large organizations that have one hundred
and fifty thousand rel machines, there's about seven hundred
and fifty different ways to update and finding out from one team
within one of the teams I worked with versus the architects
who built some of the update systems, figuring out like what do they actually need
and then getting the architects to understand what their users actually need.
And these are folks that don't want to talk to each other anymore.
They're sick of talking to each other.
So I will happily talk to all of them.
I mean, this is what we did.
I think that it gets really that's a key point to make, though,
because, you know, there are so many different ways to update
Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
And why is that the case?
That's the case because a lot of people said I want to do it this way
instead of this way.
And, you know, Red Hat definitely catered to a bunch of different customer types.
But now you end up with a product that's there's there's too many ways to do a thing.
And I can tell you from having been on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux
PM team as my last role that I ran when I was in Red Hat,
we were very much about trying to figure out how much how opinionated
about how to do things in real.
Can we be how much can we push people towards a particular way to do something?
Because, yes, there's 10 ways to do things that confuses people.
It's too much to have to choose from.
Let's pick the most sane option or the most sane two or three options
and try and be opinionated about these are the ways that you do the thing.
And then I come along and explain to you guys,
but that's not actually how they wanted to do.
When you're when you're working with your internal teams,
like you've had all this feedback from the customer.
You've been active listening.
You figured out like what they need versus what they say they want.
How do you bring the internal team along for that journey
so that they prioritize and listen to you rather than their own bias?
I get on the phone, always get on the phone or go in person.
And I tell a story, try not to make it too cheesy.
Sometimes it happens.
I take whatever that is that the customer has told me
and I believe is their actual sincere problem.
And I tell a story and try to add characters and the technology
and make it relevant to carefully convince folks using the the
different ways I know that that that they have built their own,
you know, stories about the customer, the needs or et cetera,
and try to guide us all in the same way.
So whatever it is that I'm working on is usually in that middle ground
between like what the customer actually wants again
and what our product is doing now.
So there's a story somewhere in there about why they need
why does the customer need what they need?
How did they get there?
And sometimes the customer has told me that story
and I just put my own flair on it, make it add some jokes, make it funny,
you know, keep it going.
And then I tell that story again and then I slightly tweak that story
because usually you can't if somebody has built something.
It took years to build that product.
We have to consider that.
You can't walk in.
And I've seen this happen over and over again.
People walk in to talk to the software engineers, architects,
the product managers, et cetera.
And they think you can just well, this is what the customer said.
No, you have to you have to go deep, way deeper than that.
The customer took a long time to get to where they are.
Why does that particular industry person?
Why are they there where they are and where?
And so respect, respect that that took that long.
Respect that took that long to create that product in the way that it is now
and build a story in between those to bridge the gap
between the natural tendency that the folks who built this have to say,
well, this is the best way.
And you can kind of hear in Karl's last story about being more opinionated.
Well, yes, definitely.
You built this. This is important.
You believe that that is the right workflow
or the right way to update something because of this massive amount
of history and information and and experiences.
These experiences we have are why we built the product the way we built it
or whatever you read. I mean, there's a thousand reasons.
I try to find out why the product manager or the engineer
or whomever built whatever they built, the way they built it.
And some of this is too deep.
Some of this I work for a company that there's a lot of very
passionate people that have that, like a real good internal knowledge.
This is we're we're working on things that are open source.
So they're totally free for the world.
And so usually that comes with a little bit extra.
It's not just a job.
It's a I believe in this, et cetera.
And so you have to respect that you're going in front of people
that really believe a lot of silly terms for that.
Some of them are not exactly complementary, but I'll move on
because I'm the same, right?
I'm a fan girl of Red Hat. I can't help myself.
So you have to get in there and you have to figure out.
And this takes a lot of time and effort.
I believe, I believe.
I mean, I have seen people go in and real quick say
customer wants that red button to be blue.
Can you just make it blue when we move on?
Usually that's not the level I'm at, though.
Usually I'm at the level where we need to implement some IPV six related thing
that we should have.
Let's be honest, we should have implemented that a long time ago.
Instead of saying to ourselves, why didn't we implement that a long time ago?
You can't go in there with that attitude, because if you do,
you're going to people are going to shut down immediately.
What do you not assume?
No, no. What are the reasons that we did not implement IPV six in this way?
There's reasons like find out, ask, be curious, talk to the product manager,
talk to the engineer.
This again takes time, takes effort, takes
a lot of energy.
You got to take a lot of breaks, guys.
Personal self-care, you know, but you've got to do that, right?
Take a break because you have to understand if you're you can't convince people
to change what they're doing and to spend time and effort and all that
without somewhat showing them that you understand why they did what they did
in the first place and where we are and then and then why we have to change.
And then you can't understand
that the customer is actually telling you what exactly they want
and then how you can merge those and meet somewhere in the middle without,
you know, showing them also that you truly do care.
So it really does come back to that over and over again to me.
But then we need to go deeper into how do you show you care?
How do you actually care?
How is this not just a job?
Do you find the same thing in reverse?
So that answer was was great.
And I've definitely been on the receiving end of folks
kind of telling me the story about how a customer interacts with the product
that we're building and all of that.
But when you're talking to a customer and you you know that
that's not the strategic direction of the product or the thing that they're asking
for is not going to happen, that doesn't align with the company's
views of what should happen.
How do you tell that story back to the customer so that they're satisfied
and they don't churn and leave and get frustrated?
So you do have to figure out if you've already built that trust.
You have to figure out if they already believe you somehow.
So you have to have another conversation.
You have to know when you're walking in or you're you're on the phone
right off the bat, ask a few key questions, take the temperature.
Again, it happens in the first 30 seconds.
It's you you have to shut everything else out.
You have to pay attention.
You can't can't be on your can't be driving, can't be paying attention
to something else within the first few seconds.
You've got to figure out, have you already built it,
built that trust, built that rapport?
And now can we move on to the next step, which is then ahead of time?
You've got to figure out, OK, we know this product is not going to do
what the customer is asking.
We know that we know the best.
We know the best way.
We've got all this history. We've got all these reasons.
How do I build the story in the reverse?
Right. So how do I say?
Well, what you do, you you acknowledge from those notes
that you took in their perspective that you understood what they were saying.
You have to make sure they they know, oh, I understand what you're saying.
Not you can't just say you have to repeat it back in a way that's not robotic.
Not whatever you got to this.
I understand this is what you need.
And I'm not patronizing you, dear Lord.
That's so many people keep patronizing each other.
No more patronizing. You can't patronize.
Um, right, we feel that immediately.
Yeah, just tense as I patronizing customer.
I understand what it is that you asked me for.
Here is all the background I did.
Here is all the I went from our call and I did all of this homework
to try to figure out how to get that done exactly the way.
Because you told me what you needed.
And I know you know what you need, because this is your job.
People are yelling at you all day to get this done.
I understand. Or you it's just your personal thing
and you want to get it done, whatever, whatever.
So, yeah, I went and I did all this research.
And these are the folks I talked to.
You want to throw in a couple of good names.
You know, like we got to get some good titles in there.
Everybody loves a good title.
I know I just said titles don't matter.
Sometimes they do.
But you have to decide, is this a customer that cares about titles?
Again, we're going deep.
Is this a customer that cares about titles?
Is it a customer that doesn't?
If you know it's a customer that cares about titles,
then you throw those in there.
If you know they care more, it doesn't matter.
We need just the people that have been working on this product, etc.
You tell them, I spent this amount of hours with these folks.
Tell them they do not take for granted that people know what you're doing.
Nobody knows what you're doing.
Nobody knows. You barely know what you're doing.
You're just doing it, right? I just do this.
So don't take for granted that people know.
I think you said the quiet part out loud just there.
I did. I did say the quiet part out loud.
So you tell them and then and then you get to the real, right?
You tell them all of what has happened ahead of time.
And then you get to the real real, which is this is what the product does.
And this is why this is why we built it the way we did.
So this is the reality. This is not dreams.
We're getting away from dreams now.
I go and I tell people outright, I know what it is that you want.
I know what it is right now that it does.
And be brutally honest.
This is what it does.
Don't put a negative spin on it.
It's what it does. It's reality.
Reality is not good, bad or otherwise.
Reality is just reality. This is reality right now.
We are in the now.
We have we're we're practicing mindfulness, y'all.
So this is the reality.
And again, you ought to figure out how to say it in a way that's not,
oh, my gosh, everything is terrible.
Don't do that.
But don't be two rainbows and butterflies either.
You know, you want to do too many, you know, whatever.
We don't want too many sparkles on it, too much glitter.
There's somewhere in the middle that you have to find.
And trust me, I've ruined that so many times.
I've had a lot of people tell me over the years, you're so positive.
It's so like, am I though?
I mean, really, though?
Or did I just tell you some bad news in a way that, you know,
they could spin anything?
You know, let's let's we can we can spin anything
because this is just the reality.
I'm not making a judgment on it.
There's lots of things I'm going to get real deep
because I've spent a lot of years, a lot of yoga, a lot of meditation,
a lot of wandering in the woods by myself.
You know, a lot of that,
which I highly recommend to everyone on this talk about self-care
and just pausing and saying that exists.
That's a thought.
There's no it's not good or it's not bad or it's not whatever.
I'm bringing all of that when I come to this.
This is serious.
This is my this is what I do, guys.
And then you and you say, OK, so here is what I know that you need
and that you want.
This is what the reality is.
And these are the reasons that we think this is the way that this should go.
Right. That this is.
And sometimes that's it.
The customer goes, I didn't think about it that way.
Oh, because they're just thinking for the most part about what they need,
what their wants are, or there's some kind of pyramid about that.
We got our Maslow thing going on.
You know, that's all they're thinking.
They didn't. Oh, shoot.
You just sort of slipped in there.
And I'll say tricks because I like to use slightly subversive words sometimes.
Well, you tricked him into understanding other people's perspective.
And that's awesome. Right. We're doing this both ways.
We're doing this for ourselves.
Three different ways, customer and the in the product management.
And they go, oh, OK. Oh, well, I didn't know.
And you're like, well, how do you not know?
There's product documentation. No, no, no.
There's one one thing reading product documentation.
There's one another thing internalizing it and seeing how that actually
assaults my problem. Right.
So then maybe we're done.
You've now done all of your research.
You've proven you've built the respect you've built in the trust.
You built the the authenticity.
And maybe we're done. Right. Or more likely.
They say, but no, I still need.
I still want.
And so, OK. All right.
So let me sit back. So let's take a pause.
So we know what the product does.
We know the reality right now.
We know what you need.
And then you've got a thousand more decisions to make.
Have you noticed that every single step of this is a thousand decisions
and nothing's easy?
Yeah, I have a tendency to do that with everything.
Drives everybody a little crazy.
But it is. It's some of it.
Maybe this is some of my innate interest, curiosity, strive.
I'm never I have an endless.
Oh, I'm going to use some more terminology.
Growth mindset is endless for me.
I used to think all these different ways my whole life.
And then I stumble upon other people have written books and named these things.
Isn't that funny how that works?
Wait a minute. I've just been doing that.
Now you named it. You put a label on it.
So that's what happens.
And so we sit back and we say, OK, we've got a customer
that needs a thing and we've got a product that does a thing.
And we've got a whole bunch of people behind that product.
They're like, this is the best way to do this.
We've been doing this forever. Trust us.
Do we keep going down the path of trying to get that customer
to understand that, you know, for real, this is in your best interest.
You should use this one way.
You should use satellite to update. Well, you should.
I know you're using and there's a whole bunch of other competing products,
but you should.
And here's the reasons. You really, really should.
Do we do that? Do we keep going?
Or do we say, you know what?
You've decided there's a different product.
How can we work together with you on that?
So in my world, I work with customers for years.
That's just the technical account manager and then me having a team of them.
We work together for years.
So I have the luxury of being there for that interim period.
We're still going to use the other way that still has challenges,
that there's a whole bunch of features that are needed in RHEL or elsewhere
because they're using this other way.
We know that they could use satellite and it would solve all their problems.
But they don't know that yet. We haven't gotten them there.
That, to me, then, is my failure.
And I say failure lovingly.
I don't say failure to mean I literally failed at my level.
Oh, my goodness. Well, no, it's a temporary bump in the road.
And I have six months. I have a year. I have sometimes years.
So it's a little different than I understand a product management role
or position would be in it.
But I'm telling you where I'm coming from.
Hopefully, you guys all get that spot, right?
Yeah. Well, thank you.
I mean, that's a really good explanation of why it really you should
you ought to care about what you're doing and why the people that truly care
and are passionate about things are going to be able to get in there
and get the job done a lot better.
So I think, Danielle, you want to take the final question here?
Yeah, just a fun one.
You can take the day to do anything and be anywhere.
How would you spend your time?
It changes every 15 minutes for me right now.
I would love to be on a warm beach with that wind,
that that wind that wipes all the sound and the memories
and the thoughts and everything out of your mind.
And you have to be fully present.
There's nothing else you can do when you have that kind of wind
on that warm beach and you're looking at the ocean and it's going in and out.
And there's nothing you can do.
You've it's been taken away from you.
All the decision making in the world has been taken away from you.
You are on a beach. There's thousands of decisions.
Right. There's no more decisions.
There's no more overthinking.
Everything we're done because you have to do that.
And that's where I would like to be right now.
Tomorrow would be somewhere else.
But those were right now.
And it's this little chilly day we're having.
So thank you. Thank you.
That was amazing.
Karl, what did you think?
What were your takeaways from the session?
I thought that was really good.
I really liked the points where Jennifer talked about proving that,
you know, the tech to be credible and that you're not wasting other people's
times, you know, coming prepared to the calls and coming prepared to conversations.
I thought that was really, really good.
And also, I like the point where she talked about telling a story
about just the different people and the technology and considering
and respecting the number of years it took for everybody to get to that point
in their career, to where you're actually having that conversation.
I know that's something that's easy to forget when you're talking to somebody,
is how long have they been doing this?
How how much do they already know?
And I think that it's probably easy for other people to forget that about us as well.
It's not something that we all talk about normally when we get into these conversations.
So it was really kind of poignant to hear that, yeah, these are things
we definitely need to be thinking about.
Danielle, what did you think?
Yeah, really similar.
I love those points, especially the consideration and respect.
I think people often make decisions in tough environments
and so recognizing that they've lived that experience
and you're coming in at the end or you're coming in towards the end
of that journey is important to recognize.
I also really liked the call out that when you're talking to customers,
people have tells and you can you can try and figure out
whether they're coming from an emotional perspective
or a technical perspective and understanding motivations
to really pull apart wants versus needs.
And then when you're interacting with others, just to be really empathetic
and to be truly authentic and to active listen,
I think is just such an important takeaway in general
when working with other team members and customers.
Yeah, so to wrap it all up, our call to action for this show
will be to let us know the ways that you connect with people
that you work with to better understand where they are coming from
and what they really want to accomplish.
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I don't think you can call it nattering.
I guess actually we did stay on topic and it's not technically nattering.
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