Lost in translation | Blog

Companies exist to build a product that solves a problem, sell it to customers, and support those customers. Everything should be in service of this. As the ambition grows, so does the team, and what seems simple suddenly becomes incredibly complex. If I’ve learned anything growing software companies, it’s that in the long run it comes down to the people not the technology. This is why it always feels harder and messier than expected. More people means more information asymmetry. Suddenly seemingly simple questions start being asked…why are we doing this, why are we ignoring these customers, who are we even building this product for…and so on. One major contributor to this is what I call intel impedance — the lossy internal network to turn what customers say on calls into informed product decisions.

If you have a team of one PM and one sales person almost no misunderstandings occur. They join calls together. They understand the product feedback and ask the right questions. They properly document every piece of intel with the appropriate supporting data—customer name, segment, value, and opportunity. Once a week they analyze the data to find the themes ranked by opportunity, align them with the strategy, and make necessary roadmap changes. Happy teams, happy customers.

As the team grows, this utopia crumbles. Soon you have several product teams competing for funding, stressing to meet deadlines, and naturally spend less time on these calls. Distributed global sales, customer success, and support teams are measured and compensated based on quarterly performance. The product becomes more complex and the roadmap feels chaotic. Inconsistent documentation processes silo call data into disconnected repositories. Each customer segment has different needs. Suddenly the simple task of listening to the customers that matter, building what they need, and telling them about it becomes seemingly impossible. There are a few big cracks in the network that almost every company experiences.

The “wrong” information is captured

Customers express product feedback in ways that aren’t always easy to understand. They can ask for a feature without expressing the problem. They can use technical jargon that is difficult for a non-technical sales rep to understand. The primary purpose of the call isn’t always to review the product, so it can be hard to remember that one offhand comment they made. Even with the best of intentions, reps often leave these calls with feedback that differs from what a product manager would have captured.

Broken documentation process

Even if the “right” information is captured, the next breaking point is where it goes. Almost every organization as a manual, consistent process for handling this. Not everyone knows where to put the feedback. If they do, they rarely have the time to document it thoroughly with all of the requisite information needed by the product team. Some reps make as much noise as possible to advocate for their deals, and while the intent may be good it creates bias in the system making it hard for product to trust the process. Often reps also have no clue who the right product team is to share their feedback with. And if the GTM is large, the product teams are constantly drowning in these one-off requests. It’s all very messy.

Analysis isn’t trusted

All of this results in a garbage-in, garbage-out system. Even the most well analyzed and presented voice-of-customer report is met with skepticism. Are certain segments, verticals, or regions over represented? Can I trust the suggested ARR upside the reps have shared? Are we just listening to the vocal minority who are unhappy with the product anyway? What about the small suggestions that will lead to love from our ideal customer and personas? Despite the best of intentions, the output of this whole process is time-consuming analysis that no one fully trusts or endorses. Questions are asked, more meetings are had, and people start to get frustrated. This analysis then becomes less frequent or discarded altogether.

Apathy sets in. What’s the point?

It only takes a few cycles of the above to build apathy with the GTM team. The reps who care get frustrated by the blackhole of feedback that isn’t properly analyzed, routed across the org, and acted upon to improve the customer experience. Product teams point out the gaps in the analysis as reasons to not use it to make decisions. Eventually the culture becomes eroded and the silos in the org are crystallized. Product builds stuff. The sales team sells what has shipped. If sales and customer success know the product team is going in the wrong direction, it’s “not their problem”.

These failure points are a combination of poor tooling, limited analytical resources, complex team structures, and misalignment of incentives. The good news is that a new wave of tools are emerging that aim to fix the intel impedance, which should lead to much better product, cultures, and most importantly, happy customers.