Product & Startup Builder

Managing customers when switching from Customer Lead to Product Lead

Added on by Chris Saad.

How do you manage customer expectations as a B2B SaaS company rotating from sales and customer lead to product lead?

You have to have a clean break from the past.

Set up a cross functional meeting with their key stakeholders to explain...

  1. We have a new product team and process in place to create world-class products for you and all our customers

  2. We have a set of product principles that shape all our decisions. They are...

  3. We love working with you to collect your pain-points and validate product direction (note, I did not say collect your requirements and co-design our product with you). Specifically this work must be...

    • Cross-functional (Involving Domain + Product experts. Not your project manager's opinions vs. our account manager's pushback)

    • Focused on pain-points (Not solutions)

    • Calibrated (We come to you with our plans 80% baked so that you can help us calibrate our best thinking against your real-world experience)

    • Validated by users and data (Ultimately it's all educated guesses until we test it with real users and usage data)

  4. Here are the current UX problems we're solving for now

  5. Here's our vision of where this might go over 12-24 months

  6. Here is our immediate, tactical plan for the next 1-3 months