Why Great Product Managers Sound Like Customers, Not Executives

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Product Management   Stakeholder Management   Strategy  

One thing you notice if you hang around great product managers; they don’t sound like executives. They sound like customers. Not because they ignore strategy or business needs, but because strategy only works when it’s anchored in the lived experience of the people using your product.

That distinction is easy to miss. In the push to show alignment with leadership, it’s tempting to talk in the language of KPIs and quarterly goals. But customers don’t talk (or think) that way. They don’t care about retention curves or acquisition funnels; they care about whether your product solves their problem in the moment they need it. When a PM uses customer language, they bring clarity to rooms that are often distracted by abstractions.

I learned this the hard way in a roadmap review a few years ago. An executive pitched the idea of a new loyalty program, convinced it would drive retention. It was a good idea on paper, but it wasn’t what customers were struggling with. Feedback from calls and surveys showed something far more basic—people were abandoning checkout because the process took too long.

So I interrupted the momentum of the meeting with a simple statement: “Our customers aren’t asking for loyalty. They’re asking for an easier way to complete their first purchase.” Then I read a short customer quote about …

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