Getting Close to the Customer

Why this exists

Most product managers know they need to talk to customers. The problem is how they go about getting access. They ask their business partners to help identify some good customers, the business drags their feet or just says no. So the product team pushes and complains. The business digs in deeper, product pushes harder, and still nothing opens up. So the product team gives up and decides the business just doesn't get it. Blaming them feels good. It's also wrong, and it's exactly what keeps you locked out.

Here's what I actually believe: if you don't understand your customer, what are you doing as a business? Talking to customers builds better products. There's no real debate. The hard part isn't knowing that. It's getting access without the business slamming the door. To understand why the door gets slammed, you have to understand the fear on the other side of it.

The fear is real

In an immature org, the company has either never put product people in front of customers or has done it in a tightly controlled way. What you're proposing breaks that pattern, and it can feel reckless to them. So before you go near a customer, look at the person standing between you and that customer.

Most products have a salesperson behind them, someone who's spent years building a relationship with that customer. That relationship is how they get paid. It's how they put food on the table, cover the mortgage, get two kids through school. Maybe it's paying for an aging parent's care, or carrying the household while a partner is sick and out of work. Their whole livelihood can ride on this one account. You don't know which of those is true for the person across from you, or what's at stake for them at home. That's exactly the point.

Now picture a product manager who doesn't fully understand that account, or the product, or the history, deciding to call the customer directly to do some discovery. From the salesperson's seat, that's terrifying. One clumsy question, one wrong assumption, one moment where the customer feels handled badly, and the relationship they spent years building takes a hit. And it doesn't stop at one account. You lose that customer, that customer talks to the next one, and you lose more. The product manager moves on to the next interview. The salesperson lives with the damage.

That fear isn't them being precious. It's them doing math you can't see. Do product managers actually wreck these relationships? Rarely. But rarely isn't never, and when the downside is someone's livelihood, the fear is rational either way. How you treat it decides everything. Treat their caution as ignorance and you've insulted the very people whose help you need. You'll fight your whole tenure for access you should have been given freely.

Lead with empathy, inside the building

Half the people reading this just cringed at the word empathy. I get it. It's one of the most overused buzzwords of the last few years. But at work, empathy isn't soft and it isn't a feeling. Sympathy acknowledges the issue. Empathy is action, aimed at a solution. It takes effort, which is why most people never spend it on a coworker, and why it lands so hard when you do.

Take a scenario. There's a guy in accounting, call him Keith, who's chronically late getting you the budget numbers you need. You could berate him over email and escalate to his boss. Nothing changes, except your resentment of him grows.

Or, after the second time, you set up time with Keith. Not to berate him. To get to know him. And you find out it's not that he doesn't care about your report. He's exhausted and overworked, buried under more than one person should carry. So you design a small compromise. He sends you the raw numbers in Excel, you build the slide yourself. You both win. And by helping Keith, you most likely just gained a follower. Someone new willing to support you on your mission.

That's the move. You find out how someone thinks, what worries them, where they need help, then position yourself as a solution to their problems. Point it at the salesperson. What does a good outcome look like for them, and how does your work get them there instead of threatening it? Answer that, and they stop seeing a risk. They start seeing a partner. The doors open.

Partner, not permission

The goal isn't to win permission to talk to customers. It's to make customer contact something the business pulls you toward instead of guards against. That happens when the people who own the relationship come with you, not when you work around them.

Someone I've worked with and coached ran straight into this. He brought digital distribution, selling goods online, to a large company that had only ever sold through on-the-ground sales reps. Two demanding VPs pushed back hard. Their biggest concern was that the sales team would lose sales to the online channel. The VP over sales was worried he'd have to lay people off, or that reps would quit, and that it would wreck his yearly review.

He saw what was happening and stepped up. Instead of arguing for his channel, he asked questions and worked to understand the VPs' point of view, mirroring them to pull as much out of the conversation as he could. Mirroring is a tactic I picked up from FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, in Never Split the Difference: repeat the last few words someone said, and they keep talking until they hand you what they're really worried about.

He and his team left that meeting and built a plan that stayed inside the VPs' boundaries and still delivered the mission. The compromise let the new channel benefit the sales staff, both financially and with new customers. The thing the VPs were guarding against became the thing that helped their people get paid.

That's what bringing them along looks like. Invite the salesperson into the discovery. Share what you learn in a way that makes them look good to their customer, not blindsided. Do that and they become your strongest advocate, because your research now makes their relationships stronger instead of riskier. You both want the same thing: a customer who's well served, likely to stay, and likely to buy more. Those only feel in tension when one side moves without the other.

So move together. Get close to the customer, but don't step over the people whose livelihoods depend on those customers. Get to know them, build the relationship first, then go at it together. You walk away with both the insight and an ally.