My name is Todd Olson. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Pendo. Companies that are product-led
tend to put product at the center of the customer experience.
It's not just something that's part of it.
It's literally central to how they engage with customers.
So I think customers prefer product-led organizations
because it's more authentic like you cut through a lot of the BS
when you get right to the product
and what value that delivers to the end user. At the end of the day,
when we're engaging with companies,
we are using products, we're using services,
right? Companies that focus on the product and the service itself,
tend to deliver better experiences. We want things done asynchronously,
convenient, always on. That's what it means to be product-led,
and that's kind of what we all expect now.
And there's a gap between
what users expect from software and what their software work actually looks like.
And that gap is creating opportunities for innovation.
I've talked to way too many companies, that think that they have to have human
engagement to deliver a high level of customer service.
So if you're not measuring what people are doing in your product,
if you're not measuring how they feel,
or if you're not providing mechanisms to capture customer feedback,
you're missing an opportunity. The reality is your customers,
your users, are a treasure trove of information that can help guide
how you deliver a better experience. So if you're reaching out to service or support,
it's because you have a problem.
You are blocked.
You want to do something? You cannot figure it out on your own
and you go ask for help. In an ideal world,
you get help immediately. You get unblocked, you execute what you want to do,
you complete the task. That to me, is what great service and support is.
So the key attribute, you need to think about, is building a culture around —
How do we use data to inform our product decision-making?
How do we use data to inform what we build?
How do we listen, iterate and adapt?
As we're continuing to build new products.
The other thing I see in modern product organizations is emergence of a new role,
called product operations
Product operations,
essentially, centralizes a role that looks at customer feedback, that looks at data,
that thinks about: how do we do more
iterative releases? It extracts
a lot of these functions from our product manager. It doesn't freeze up
those individuals to talk more with customers, more than engineering.
t focuses more on innovation.