The challenge for product managers is ensuring that your product evolves to meet the needs of your new customers without leaving long-term, smaller customers behind. For Intercom, this means evolving to build for upmarket companies while ensuring Intercom’s long-standing customers remain at the center of what we do.
Customer behavior is more important than company size
Instead of considering company size when prioritizing the problems to be solved, we classified based on maturity of a customer’s knowledge base using three labels: early, established, or advanced
- These labels allowed us to better understand which problems our customers needed us to tackle, and in what sequence
“Industry-standard” isn’t always a priority
Some features which you should think twice about prioritizing don’t add as much value as you might think.
- It might be the case that only a handful of customers are really using dark mode, and what they really want is neon mode.
Building for bigger customers doesn’t mean building only for your biggest customers
You always want to build for your desired future customer, whose characteristics align with your product strategy
- How do you do that?
- Put processes in place to make it easier
- Appropriately weight all customer feedback by centralizing them within a single tool
- Build mechanisms to help us seek inputs from customers we don’t hear from using interviews, surveys, and data analyses
- Ensure your sales and product teams collaborate deeply and effectively
Build for Your Customers, Not Your Competitors’ Customers
Understand whether your customers want these features because they’re essential to their operations, or because your competitors have them.
- Do they actually use these features? Do these features solve a problem for them?
- If not, remove them.
