Transcript
Todd Olson:
My name is Todd Olson. And I’m the CEO/co-founder of Pendo.
Todd Olson:
Companies that are product led tend to put product at the center of the customer experience. It’s not just something that’s part of it. It’s literally central to how they engage with customers.
Todd Olson:
So I think customers prefer product-led organizations because it’s more authentic. You cut through a lot of the BS when you get right to the product and what value that delivers to the end user. And at the end of the day, when we’re engaging with companies, we are using products, we’re using services, right? So companies that focus on the product and the service itself tend to deliver better experiences.
Todd Olson:
We want things done, asynchronously, convenient, always on. That’s what it means to be product led. And that’s kind of what we all expect now. And there’s a gap between what users expect from software and what their software at work actually looks like. And that gap is creating opportunities for innovation.
Todd Olson:
I’ve talked to way too many companies that think that they have to have human engagement to deliver a high level of customer service. So if you’re not measuring what people are doing in your product, if you’re not measuring how they feel, or if you’re not providing mechanisms to capture customer feedback, you’re missing an opportunity. The reality is your customers, your users, are a treasure trove of information that can help guide how you deliver a better experience. So if you’re reaching out to service or support, it’s because you have a problem, you are blocked. You want to do something, you cannot figure it out on your own and you go ask for help. And in an ideal world, you get help immediately. You get unblocked, you execute what you wanted to do. You complete the task. That to me is what great service and support is.
Todd Olson:
So the key attribute I need to think about is building a culture around how do we use data to inform our product decision-making. How do we use data to inform what we build? And how do we listen, iterate, and adapt as we’re continuing to build new products? The other thing I see in modern product organizations is the emergence of a new role called product operations. Product operations essentially centralizes a role that looks at customer feedback, that looks at data, that thinks about how do we do more iterative releases. It extracts a lot of these functions from what a product manager does and frees up those individuals to talk more with customers, work more on engineering, focus more on innovation.