Customer interviewing for the introverted product manager

Adam Davis May 17, 2023

Synopsis

As if product management wasn’t challenging enough! Natural introverts (like me) have some additional hills to climb. Yes, you work well with designers and engineers. Playing the role of product owner in a delivery team comes naturally to you. However, reaching out to customers seems daunting. And *that* is your lifeblood. Analytics, surveys, reports from sales & CS all have value. Even combined, they’re no substitute for customer conversations. Especially in B2B products.

This talk will cover some tactics that got myself into regular customer interviewing without causing stress or anxiety. From automating parts of the recruitment process, over structured note-taking all the way to creating a virtuous feedback loop with your colleagues. If you are (or leading) an introverted PdM facing discovery work, you’ll pick up a few things to try out for yourself the next day.

Our speaker

Pieter is a product manager and SaaS enthusiast. After starting out in management consulting he worked with technology teams in start-ups, scale-ups and corporates over the last 8 years. Pieter is passionate about developing the people and operations who turn squads into empowered product teams. He occasionally writes about the practicalities of working in a product team to complement the vast literature about frameworks.

Pieter enjoys comedy shows, re-organizing cupboards for greater efficiency and conducting entire conversations using only direct quotes from “The Big Lebowski”.