Marcelo Calbucci

    In my previous life at Microsoft we had a mandate to be customer focused and very few people knew what it meant. So, every dev, PM, GM and tester would focus on the usual suspects: Usability studies, customer surveys, customer feedback/support, etc.

    The problem really occurred when they started using customer touch points to justify pet features. Kevin Merritt Jon Byrum from blist does a good job of describing "confirmation bias" and why it's dangerous.

    But I think Jon misses an even bigger point. Whenever you talk about customer you have to define "what a customer is". Let me be clear, is Kevin talking about "existing customers" or "prospect customers" ("desired customers")?.

    The problem with listening to your existing customer base if you are a consumer startup is that you are not listening to the other tens of thousands of people that decided *not* to use your product. Or to the millions of people that are part of your target audience and that are not aware of your product yet.

    The big issue with existing early stage consumer startup customers is that they are early adopters (ahead of the curve) and they are using a product that is likely to shift directions significantly over its initial 2-3 years of life. So why on Earth are their opinion so important?

    Listening to existing customer base is only worth if you already have a established business and is shipping version 3 or later of your product. Ok, maybe I'm being to radical by saying that, but you should discount your existing customer feedback by 10. And discount voluntary customer feedback (a.k.a. support or feedback emails from customer) by another factor of 10. (Thanks to Dave, our VP of Marketing, to make that clear on my mind)

    At Sampa, we pissed off users more than once. Heck, we dropped features that were critical to a huge part of our most avid customers. Why? Because they are not representative of the customer we want our product to have.

    I think good product managers will understand and avoid confirmation bias, but great product managers (and marketers) will go beyond that and try to really understand what is the need your product is trying to solve and which persons she should be asking for feedback and suggestions.

    I think the key lessons are to not be afraid to drop your entire customer base in favor of a different set of customers. That's what startup is all about, adapting to the market needs.