Customer Feedback Has No Single Home for Product Managers
Product Managers across various companies are struggling with an overwhelming influx of customer feedback, internal requests, and data, leading to disorganization and difficulty prioritizing effectively. This manifests as scattered information, lack of a single source of truth, and challenges in translating insights into actionable product improvements and strategic direction. Ultimately, this impacts their ability to build and scale successful products.
SOURCES (60)
“Manage the discussion in solutioning meetings so one person doesn’t monopolize the conversation? ;)”
“A piece of advice that I've been pushing (and found successful) that I haven't seen Focus on the last 10% in the product Example: When deciding whether to expand the platform to a new product or to make an existing feature 10% better, choose the 10%. It's helped me a ton. It's easy to get addicted to new. It's also easy to replicate it. By making the last 10% a keystone of your product strategy, you make it more competitor proof and find experiences that weren't possible”
“Add value (I'l be specific): "Product Marketing": If they build in collaboration with you, make sure their work gets really good internal notice and distribution.”
“Yes, i would recommend good strategy bad strategy by richard rumelt too. rumelt actually breaks down how to identify the actual bottleneck and focus your resources on it. if you can clearly state the challenge and a guiding policy to deal with it, you are already ahead of 90% of the deck-writers out there.”
“PMed a 9 figure B2B product that had been around for 20+ years. No interest in investing engineering resources to really make it any better. It was great at first (for me)...no roadmap pressure. I was handling customer complaints, talking to the occasional customer, keeping the lights on. No one internally used it so it caused no internal strife. Downside, it got really boring.”
“Define a product manager. There are agents to do most of those things. Half the job is figuring out what - PM brain? That’s just automating a product or a company”
Marty Cagan, Marily Nika, Anthropics full set of leadership
“Look for the "classics" with timeless principles because they're still holding up. A few good ones I read: -Inspired by Marty Cagan -Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres -The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick”
“This is something we spend a lot of time thinking about at Studio. The challenge isn't that AI can't help product managers. It's that product management is mostly decision-making, not document creation. An agent can summarize interviews, write specs, cluster feedback, or prioritize ideas. But deciding whether a problem is worth solving still needs context and judgment. I'd expect "product agents" to emerge as focused assistants rather than autonomous PMs. Happy to chat”
“Two that survived years, and one thing that broke. Notes answer a question, they don't cover a topic. "Why we dropped that pricing model" gets found a year later, "Pricing" doesn't. Structure comes last. I stopped designing folders upfront and let it form around whatever I kept coming back to. The thing that broke: properties I added "for later". Half the vault had fields I invented on day one and never filled once. Fewer fields you actually use beats a clea”
“The most important things in my opinion is to: 1. Double down on one or two features that brought in customers. 2. Do not sell features sell outcomes 3. Leverage existing workflows, one thing you must realize is that the more radical a change your product demands from a user the more difficult it is to sell. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done in cases of real ingenuity but it's more acceptable to make an incremental change to a user's workflow, than a complete 180. My service is”
Add Box, Jira, Tableau, and now Mode to describe the world I live in.
“No self-promotion. This includes linking to your own material, as well as the company you work for”
“We are building out our Product Led Growth (PLG) strategy and would really appreciate some recommendations, what really works, what to avoid, and honest thoughts on winning in PLG? submitted by /u/blunom [link] [comments]”
“i've been in a product role for a long time and until i recently tried to build my own side project i didn't realize how important it is to spend the time with the customer. Like genuinely sit and understand deeply in what they are trying to do. going through your product, sharing ideas, and getting their thoughts is a lot more valuable than you sitting in a dark room and trying to build new features every single week. So here is what happened: I posted about my product (mangos.ai - a pr”
I'm working on a new product and have been spending way too much time jumping between supplier websites just to compare specs, certifications, and technical data sheets. There has to be an…
“Been there with a very senior team and EMG. They had a very serious technical roadmap and a lot of credibility. Some of their initiatives needed a PM but it was their agenda and they had the support of the Product Director so I often saw myself as a supporting role as well. It sucked. Be careful because in the EOY review they said I was not doing enough or challenging them enough, so I ate some shit because of that.”
“I used to average 4 rounds of revisions on any creative project. The designer would send something, I'd react to it, they'd adjust, I'd react again. It was expensive, slow, and demoralising for both sides.The problem wasn't the designer. The problem was what I was giving them to work with. My old brief: I want something premium-looking, maybe using our brand blue, with the product front and centre. Kind of like [competitor listing] but more modern.This is an aesthetic description”
gut feeling mixed with ideas and topics from higher ups and people i like
“Congratulations!! My feedback: For SMBs I have to think that simplicity is the key - in product and pricing. The concept of having to think about modules (which of the 26 do I need?) is cognitive overhead that the average restaurant manager or hairdresser probably doesn't want to think about. Similar re: devices - a would think the average smb owner just assumes mobile access is included, like with stripe or anything else. Again, an SMB owner just wants to answer their question in the moment”
“It sounds like you know the answer. You have developed features. But you haven’t developed “the” feature that really improves the process. Do you know what the key feature / benefit should be?”
“Here to bandwagon that the only way to fix this mass delusion is to actually conduct user research and testing. Get the validation (or invalidation) from the target.”
“I've been wondering for a long time how successful entrepreneurs organise their customers' feedback when they begin scaling. At first, manual organising and filling cells might work. But then what? We end up wasting hours and hours every month. It's exhausting. Luckily I've been learning automations for a long time and I've built a system for myself that runs on autopilot, it helps a lot. It runs on n8n, and it receives my customers' feedback from Typeform. The text is be”
“You're doing let's say 20% of the work of a product manager. Don't you talk to customers? Don't you think about pricing and your product's business model (who is it sold to, how is it sold, does it make money and how much) how does your product fit in your company's overall strategy, in which market are you competing, who are your competitors and what are they doing, what are your users happy with, what unaddressed or underaddressed problems do they have that your product”
“Hope this is actually the reason. Last month all PMs were asked to showcase their product metrics and everyone decided what they wanted to show on their own (so it varied quite a bit between products). Now the founder said HDD (hypothesis driven product development) in last MBR and now my VP Engg is checking in with me if I implemented it or not. Until last month I didn't think product is that mature level. But now it seems it is.”
“I totally get where you are coming from. Nothing tops a living portfolio view where you can see the current status, milestone hits, next steps of every project. I think you can get pretty close to this by treating initiatives as structured objects with consistent fields. Not the usual free-form documents or tickets. Each initiative should have the same shape: what it is, what phase it’s in, what was last completed, what’s next, and any blockers. This way, it’s easy to generate a portfolio view t”
“Your question shows that you do not understand the requirements management phase and how PM fits into the SDLC. You are essentially demonstrating why 90% of software projects fail. Sorry to be so blunt.”
“Are the conversations and resulting decisions in one particular bucket . . . overall business strategy, product functionality and phasing, etc? In other words, the first step in identifying the root cause is to figure out what type of decisions are made and then constantly put in the cycle of revisiting. Documentation is most definitely a problem in this case, but so is communication, it seems. Solutions for both tend to be a well-documented, visible, posted roadmap. In other words if you are co”
“For financial products, clarity is a product feature. Users need to understand fees, account actions, and risk information before they need another chart or indicator. Confusion at a critical step can undermine the whole experience”
“I keep seeing product manager roles within firm IT Departments. In a law firm setting how does that work? Any thoughts? submitted by /u/Character_Girl [link] [comments]”
“I would be interested in whether platforms such as BGEANX treat "more features" as the default solution. In a financial product, beta feedback might instead point toward simpler explanations, clearer status updates, or better risk disclosures”
“I'm a grad student in a product-focused program, looking at how discovery actually gets done outside of formal research teams. I've met a few a PMs that run their own interviews now and put a prototype or mockup in front of users. Curious how you keep those sessions clean. Do you find people react to how finished the concept looks? Does a polished mockup get you different answers than a rough one? And has building those prototypes gotten easier or messier as tooling has changed? Trying t”
“Internal software. I like to see and interact with the people using my products. Used to do B2C and had to do data driven guesswork to find out what they actually want or respond to.”
“The BGEANX example is interesting because CFD products have to balance functionality with clear communication. Feedback about fees, leverage, and account actions could reasonably lead to a redesign, even if users originally asked for more tools.”
“We use task manager tool Aha to track all the initiatives and tag feature under it. If you don’t have it you should use excel to track and create a dashboard to track percentage”
lol, are other SaaS PMs downvoting this because I said code and pixels??
“B2B, preferably a product that includes hardware, software and services. That's where I started my product journey. I'm currently in B2B SaaS and while its great I dislike that the answer to every problem seems to be code and pixels on a screen. Never did B2C.”
“What’s the purpose of this (likely AI generated) question? I don’t see how it would help anyone personally and you seem to already have a lot of knowledge on the subject with the way you framed the question. It looks like you’re an AI trolling for training data for some kind of PM companion app.”
“I’ve always been in B2B and recently made the switch from leading teams (head of product) to being an IC. What I work on is largely internal with some future hope that we can make it external. For me, the change has been great. Less BS, less stress. The pay is the same and I get to work with very cool technology. I do miss deeply engaging with external customers but I think I’ll get that opportunity again. The biggest thing I’ll tell you is that it’s very difficult to switch between B2C and B2B”
“Ideally i prefer B2C or B2B models with consumer approach, because otherwise you spend a lot of time on bullshit “spell everything we have to do” activities and very little to none discovery.”
“Something like how video game side quests show info like % completed, latest completed milestone, but for product management lol. I want to ensure I don't forget any started initiatives and be able to provide a self-service status report to leadership on how the project is going. submitted by /u/abcdefghijklmnopqr-2 [link] [comments]”
Get a product coach, and get them to pay for it, immediately.
“My two cents is... I've worked at a bunch of companies that were very naive in their product maturity. I've also worked at high product maturity organisations. One example springs to mind. They built a roadmap and it was super clear to me who knew that it "was just a map" i.e. an indicative vision of where we were planning to go, and those who believed it "was the irrefutable word of the creator of the universe". The higher ups in this example I'm recalling now we”
“We've been running feedback through a mix of Intercom tags, Gong summaries and a very tired Notion doc for the last year, and it's starting to fall apart at our current volume. The real problem is that nothing connects. sales hears something on a call, cs hears the same thing over and over, and product finds out weeks later when someone remembers to log it, so we're finally looking at a real platform. Based on Google and Reddit recs, we're considering Enterpret, Cycle, BuildBette”
“Yeah this is basically the only way good products get built tbh. You launch with what you think people need, then 3 customers use it totally differently and suddenly that's your actual product. The founders who fight this and try to force their original vision usually just burn cash until they pivot or die.”
“Roadmaps are needed only to reveal that roadmaps are not the solution. Without a roadmap, the whole business believes they need one, because it will help them communicate plans and intention to customers. But when they get it, the item isn’t perfectly named, showing the dependencies is too complex, and no one can tell why we’re doing X instead of Y. Because the story can’t really be told in swim lanes and horizons. The roadmap can exist as a companion to talk around, but never as a static, one s”
“Just saw this stat that 1 out of 5 companies produce more than 50 (per a Visme survey) decks per WEEK. That's literally insane. What got me is that 92% of those said they follow the same format every time, but yet 81% still have to personalize it... every single time. So it's both repetitive AND custom lol - which is probably why it eats so much time. I know this struggle all too well working in our marketing dept too. Does this sort of volume match what your team deals with? Or is that”
“Well, internal consumers aren't customers by definition. Internal things always get messy because the normal seller/buyer model isn't there. You really can't use normal PM methods in that situation.”
“At first we just put up with it and accepted the chaos, but then I got fed up so hired consultants & drafted a contract that prevented them from nodding along without producing results and still getting paid. With their help, we streamlined everything in ~2.5 month. pretty standard story”
“in my experience in having a software company and pivoting many times before finding a good product worth marketing, trying to market twenty unrelated tools usually creates twenty weak feedback loops, not one strong business. pick the tool with the clearest buyer and the fastest path to a conversation. give it a focused 30 days: one audience, one problem, one distribution channel. the rest can stay live, but stop treating them all as active bets. you need enough repetition to learn why people bu”
“older: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm foundational: https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html newer: https://www.momtestbook.com/ newer: https://www.firstround.com/levels example: https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/ newer analytical take that i'm still working through: https://longform.asmartbear.com/product-market-fit/”