How Do Product Managers Stay Close to The Customers at WePay
Product Management is all about being the voice of the customer. Customer discovery is an important part of how products are imagined and built at WePay. The product team at WePay engages with prospective customers, customers which are currently onboarding, customers which are active, and even with customers that did not successfully onboard with WePay. Feedback is captured at every stage of the customer lifecycle to ensure that the product team delivers an experience that is coherent right from acquisition till the end of customer lifetime.
In this blog article, I talk about how product managers at WePay stay close to the customers!
#1 Attending customer calls with Sales and Account Executives
Product Managers attend calls with sales and account executives during the pre-sales phase with the customer.
Customer calls during the pre-sales phase help product team understand the needs of our prospective customers and communicate upcoming product updates proactively with teams internally.
It also enables PMs to understand the competitive landscape in 2 ways:
- If a customer is showing interest in migrating from one of the competitors, PMs try and understand the pain points of the customer with the competitor product, so that those insights can be leveraged to invest resources in areas that the product is better at and improve it even further. It also helps PMs to better position the product against the competitors.
- If a customer is requesting for features that might not be supported as compared to a competitor, it helps PMs influence the product roadmap and be cognizant of product capabilities that will make the company lose customers and/or reduce customer satisfaction.
#2 Gathering feedback from customers once they launch a pilot
PMs proactively schedule calls with customers once they have completed their integration with the WePay platform and launched a pilot.
This is the time when customers are willing to share the most amount of product feedback as both the positive feedback and opportunities for the product are fresh in their mind.
It helps PMs get elaborate feedback on the entire customer journey right from acquisition to the pilot launch.
#3 Talking to customer facing teams
Customer facing teams at WePay consist of Solution Engineers, Integration Engineers, Technical Account Managers, and Customer Delight people. Each of these teams work with the customer at different phases of the product integration. Solution engineers engage during the pre-sales phase to help the customer design the ideal solution using the WePay platform. Integration Engineers assist the customer in implementing the designed solution. Technical Account Managers provide support once the customer is live. Customer support and delight people are available to answer any queries or help troubleshooting.
Talking with these teams can highlight qualitative product usage patterns and pain points across customers during each phase of the integration.
Each of these teams interact with the customers on a day to day basis at a much deeper level than a PM can manage.
#4 Access to customer support and feedback channels
PMs have access to the support and feedback email aliases which help them monitor customer feedback and queries as they are integrating with platform.
Each question asked or feedback delivered is an opportunity for the product team to improve the product.
While PMs do not necessarily have to respond to each customer query or request, PMs can chime in to help the customer if they think they’ll be able to add some more color to a response by a customer support specialist.
#5 Access to historical customer insights and feature requests
Account Executive and Relationship Management teams at WePay leverage the CRM tool to document all the requested product features and improvements during the entire journey of a customer with the platform. Feature requests are documented even if WePay lost a customer or did not win a deal with them. This is a repository of customer feedback and insights that can help PMs with historical data and its analysis.
#6 Supporting a customer during the Beta phase of a feature
PMs opt to work closely with the solution and implementation engineering teams as described above if there is a customer integrating with Beta features in the product.
This is an opportunity for the product team to engage early with the customer while the feature is still being developed and improved.
#7 Quantitative product usage metrics
PMs have access to internal tooling which enables them to create dashboards for their respective KPIs and product areas. Quantitative data helps PM understand large scale product usage patterns, improve product experience, and pre-empt any product wide customer issues.
The process of customer discovery varies for each PM and depends on their own style of product management. All of the above practices are adopted and followed with varying degrees across different teams. If you are a product manager looking to work with a customer centric team and like what I have written, come join us at WePay! We are hiring :)
