The end of the year is always a time to put things in perspective. In that spirit, here is what our customers don't care about and what they truly care about:
Don't care about:
- The tool we use to manage our backlog
- Our favorite prioritization framework
- Whether we like or don't like how user stories are written
- Whether we are using AI to write user stories
- Why there is tech debt
- What we mean or don't mean by MVP
- Why we have or don't have Product Ops
- Whether we are or are not in a "feature factory"
- Our OKRs
- Whether we are sales-led or product-led
- Whether we are or are not in founder-mode
- Whether we are or are not the CEO of the Product
- That we are a "certified PM"
- If our strategy document is one or six pages long, or that we even have one
What they really care about:
- That we truly understand *their* definition of success
- That we measure our success through *their* success
- That we ask them about *their* roadmap (yes, they have one!)
- That we are listening and learning
- That we understand what they *actually* have to do to use our product
- That our pricing makes sense to *them*
- That we are transparent when our timelines go awry
- That we apologize when things go wrong
We need to separate the signal from the noise. There is a lot of noise, especially if you follow the PM discourse on LinkedIn that leads to a polarizing dialog around a lot of things that customers don't really care about.
Hope you are having some down time before things ramp up again! Have a great start to the New Year!
