AMA Notes: The more customers you speak with and the more different types of customers you speak with, the more ahead of the curve you will be in your industry.

NextBigWhat’s Wednesday AMAs bring a lot of clarity and perspective to founders / product and growth leaders.

The last AMA had Arpit Rai, VP of Products WebEngage share his lessons building and scaling WebEngage and Browserstack.

The NextBigWhat AMA is supported by the awesome team @GOJEK. GOJEK is hiring great engineers and product leaders for its India offices (checkout the openings here).

Here are few excerpts from the AMA:

How do I stay ahead of the curve in my industry for new feature development?

You have to genuinely understand the problems your customers are facing. The only way to do this is to speak with your customers on a regular basis. Indirect feedback through sales/success can only help to a certain extent. I have done both telephonic calls as well as in-person meetings.

Nothing beats in-person meetings.

The more customers you speak with and the more different types of customers you speak with, the more ahead of the curve you will be in your industry.

In fact, whenever possible, don’t just always talk to existing customers. You should also be speaking with folks who never became your customers. Just helps to have different perspectives.

Can you talk about the core skills needed as a PM?

Mostly these:

• Strategy & Big picture thinking
• Product sense
• Structuring problems & analytics
• Soft skills & communication
• Attention to detail
• Project execution

How do you effectively allocate resources for user growth or how do you accurately determine total cost per acquisition for each channel?

That’s a tough one. Funnels are not linear by any means. To be honest, we’ve struggled with truly understanding the attribution for the leads we get. There are so many things targeting the leads that the attribution needs to be given in a weighted manner to all the different sources. That said, if its a B2C scenario and you have enough volume, even looking at last-click, first-click etc. model will throw some insights. It may not be entirely accurate. But it’s definitely enough to make certain decisions.