This week, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a fellow OSU Post-Bacc student that I referred to my start-up finally join the team! I’m in the unique position where I’m still working in Revenue Operations, while he’s joined our Product team as a Software Engineer.

Knowing I was on the Revenue team, Eric messaged me this week asking if I could give him more insight into how we’re pitching our product to customers. He was hoping to capture more about what product features are incredibly important to the way we do business either via a product demo or Marketing one-pager.

This is honestly the first time I’ve had a Product person ask for this, and needless to say, I was proud of my fellow OSU Beaver! What resonated most with me was his reasoning for asking.

Even in the short-term projects I’ve done through the OSU Post-Bacc program, I’ve recognized moments where we were working towards a solution vs. working to please an end user or customer. It was a good reminder on how solutions-oriented folks like developers can lose focus on the customer, especially when they are not given the opportunity to learn and interact with the customer on a regular cadence. It’s our responsibility as a customer-facing team to help give our Product team that visibility of the customer experience.

Product Centricity vs. Customer Centricity

In my research, I found an article that really resonated with me from UserVoice around Customer Centricity vs. Product Centricity. The article quotes Bruce McCarthy, Founder of Product Culture, defining Customer Centricity as more of a subset of Product Centricity:

“‘Being product led incorporates customer wants and needs into a broader perspective of what’s good for the company strategically.’ he explains, it means looking at things through a wider lens, ‘Where is there viable business for us? What is technically feasible and defensible? What can we build that would be unique and differentiated as well as desirable for the customer? Those are kind of the three Venn diagram bubbles that people draw in product, and being customer-centric is one, but being product centric is all three.'” (via UserVoice, “What is customer centricity?”)

I’d definitely recommend checking out the full article at that link. Customer Centricity is just one subset of Product Centricity, not a separate category. Great product teams balance desirability, feasibility, and viability to make the best products for their customers and the business in a way that keeps the long-term product vision in mind.

How to Create Cross-Functional Collaboration

One of the biggest limitations on collaborating cross-functionally is creating consistent and insightful mechanisms between Product and Sales teams. We struggle with this at my current company,

So what are a few ways that we are working towards more useful collaboration between our teams?

• Quarterly Mock Product Demos: This came directly from Eric’s idea. As a leadership team, we’re looking to implement a quarterly mock demo from an Account Executive and mock implementation training from an Account Manager to highlight more about what product functionality resonates with our Customers. This will allow our Product team to ask questions and provide recordings to new hires, while also giving our reps the opportunity to get feedback from Product on other functionality that could be highlighted.
• CRM Churn / Lost Opportunity Feedback: Though this has required a lot of backend work in our CRM, it has provided an opportunity to drive consistency in feedback and tie feedback directly to missed revenue opportunity. This feedback is not only vital for our Product team but also allows us to work cross-functionally with our Support team as well. Building our feedback around two key moments, churn and lost opportunity allows our Sales managers to make sure we’re being better partners to our cross-functional teams.
• Product Liaisons: Finally, we’re creating leadership opportunities for our more ambitious Sales reps to lead the charge. The expectation is that these reps consistently meet with our Product team, keep up with current projects, and deliver consistent feedback from the field. It is their goal to take questions or projects from the Product team and collect feedback or examples from their fellow reps. They are also responsible for aggregating field and customer feedback into meaningful suggestions for the product team.

These projects are still in their early stages, but at the very least, they have allowed our Sales reps to feel like they have a seat at the table to effectively advocate for their customers. In addition, they are providing our Product team with more consistent and meaningful ways to get more deep into the customer experience our Sales reps are part of every single day.

How do your Sales & Product teams interact in order to ensure Product Centricity does in fact include a healthy amount of Customer Centricity?