Geoff Charles: How To Hire Product Teams & Increase Product Velocity | E1091

(instrumental music) The founder or the first product manager should be selling the first 100 customers, absolutely. Products should sit with sales and should be in every single sales demo, and use the sales process as a way to identify pain points. You actually should be, like, a bit more professional services-oriented as a product team earlier on. If you actually find one or two design partners and you just build for them, they will love you way more than the best-in-class SaaS product that's already on the market.

You said before that you worked in two-week sprints. What does that actually mean in reality?

I'll be super tactical. So you have...

Jeff, I am so excited for this. As I said to you before, I've been running listening to your other shows. So, thank you so much for joining me today.

Super excited to be here.

Now, I would love to start. I always like some context. So first, how did you make your way into the world of product? Let's start there as an entry point.

I've always been, like, very short-term focused in my career, so I just, I follow a lot of the energy, and I think that's gonna be a theme throughout this, (laughs) this chat. The first, like, energy was management consulting out of, out of college, so, um, is, is all the hype around just, um, h- how to think, how to structure, how to sell. Then I got kind of bored of, of PowerPoint presentations, so I, I, I wanted to get close to the metal in terms of big data, uh, and, and I joined a big data analytics company. And that's where I got my first foray into product, and I think that the way I did that was getting super close to the customer and understanding the customer pain points, and then, um, having great relationship with the, with the tech team and understanding, like, how do we build technology to solve those pain points? And I think the product team kind of came running from there.

What have been your biggest lessons in how to truly understand customer pain points? 'Cause a lot of people go through customer discovery, but I think we'll both agree, many do it badly. What is the best way to really understand customer pain?

I think you kind of have to walk in their shoes for, for a full day. Like, what do they listen to? Go listen to that. What conferences do they go to? Go to that conference. What are their, uh, pain? What are their aspirations? Um, what does success look like in their role? What, what is their degree? What did they learn? Uh, what, um, what is the, their habits? And so, I, I spend a lot of time with, with, with customers. Um, and then it's all about just, like, asking the right questions. Oftentimes, like, product managers, they have an idea and they, they ask the question to validate their idea, and it's actually the wrong idea. And so, just ask them, like, "What does success look like here? What is the worst part of your job? What, um, what takes a lot of your time?" Um, and, and just continue digging in and digging in and digging in. And then lastly, like, when you do have a product, like, sit down next to them or have them share their screen and just watch them do work in your product, and you will see how painful your product is and how many different ways you can improve that product. Oftentimes, just PMs spend way too much time in the office, and I think that, um, that's, that's just a huge downside, uh, for your team.