398: Why customer experience is part of a product manager’s responsibilities – with Natashya Narkiewicz

How product managers can understand their customers better than anyone else

If you have listened to me before, there is a good chance you’ve heard me say we need to fall in love with the customer’s problem, not our solution. Getting enamored with our solution can distract us from the customer experience. Instead, the customer experience is a component of what creates value for customers. For example, have you ever been asked to enter your address more than once during an onboarding experience? What about at your doctor or dentist? For me, the answer is yes to all three. It’s those simple things that add friction to the customer experience and if we want to make products customers love, we need to improve the experience for customers.

To help us explore customer experience, joining us is Natashya Narkiewicz, currently VP of Product Management at Avetta and formerly senior director of product management for Newfold Digital, the company behind several popular webhosting brands, such as Bluehost, Network Solutions, HostGator, and Sitebuilder. She has held product roles for nearly 20 years and enjoys building products that have a clean customer experience. She is also a mentor in the business college at the University of North Florida, sharing her knowledge and experience each year with seniors as well as serving as a business mentor to female entrepreneurs in a 12-week program at the Jacksonville, Florida, Women’s Business Center.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[3:18] You made a move from being a senior product manager in the medical industry at a company creating surgical implants to being the senior director of product management for an IT services company specializing in web hosting. How did you make the move across industries?

I was in the medical device space making surgical implants using the body to heal the body. It was a really exciting space when I first joined, but then the FDA increased regulations, and I realized that was going to stifle my creativity and ability to contribute to innovation. I started looking to switch industries. Strategic planning and connections assisted me in switching industries. Who I knew got me the interview and what I knew got me the job.

The onus was on me to show product management is a transferable skill. It’s all about knowing who your end users are, what their goals and pain points are, and how you could effectively solve those pain points. Couple that with the business acumen of knowing sales, costs, and margins, and you can do product management in any industry. I knew I had to apply the framework I had used in understanding my previous users to users in this new industry. In my interview, I came up with lots of examples of how I could use that framework for scenarios that would apply to this company. Having a solid understanding of that framework landed the job.

[8:21] Why is customer experience a key part of product management?

If you don’t know your customer, you’re just guessing. I’m a naturally curious person. As a product manager, you have to be naturally curious, constantly asking why? It’s your responsibility to know your customer better than anyone else does. Get in their shoes, sometimes quite literally.

The Jobs to be Done framework (listen to recent episode with Tony Ulwick) is a great way to think about your end users and what jobs they’re trying to get done. It helps you put yourself in their shoes. You need to know what is important to your users. Otherwise, you run the risk of building something that never gets used.

[11:48] How do you keep your customer’s problem at the forefront?

You need to humanize the customer. It’s easy to use the term “customer...