One of my favourite areas to explore during PM interviews is how customer-focused the candidate has been in their previous role.
Sometimes I end up asking directly: “How customer-focused do you think you are?”
The answers can get interesting.
PMs who are self-aware, and/or who have worked in mature product organizations, often say something like, “Reasonably customer-focused, but not enough though.”
I like that answer because it usually comes from people who understand how much more there is to learn about customers.
Then there are candidates, often from organizations where the product management function is still evolving, who confidently say, “Very customer-focused.”
When I ask what that means, the examples are familiar: joining sales calls to help close deals, talking to customers during escalations, or working through support issues.
All of these are important activities. But they do not automatically lead to a deep understanding of customers.
Knowing what a customer is asking for is different from understanding why they want it. It means looking beyond the feature request, understanding the underlying problem, and learning how customers think, make decisions, their incentives, and work around those problems.
I can now confidently say that – Some of the busiest product teams serving customers end up learning the least about them.
Because their conversations unfortunately have only an immediate objective—closing a deal, resolving an issue, or answering a question, there is very little space left for curiosity.
Summary:
Customer interactions don’t automatically make a team customer-centric. Learning from those interactions + knowing what is unspoken does.
What does being “customer-focused” mean in your organization? Please share them in the comments.
