Infusing customer empathy within a remote PM team

Building autonomous team of product managers

Managing a remote team of product managers comes with its unique challenges. As a leader, your ultimate goal should be to cultivate a team that is 100% autonomous and capable of delivering business outcomes without your direct involvement. This level of autonomy not only empowers your team but also allows you to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives. A crucial and most challenging prerequisite to driving autonomous decision-making is customer empathy. Here are some strategies to foster customer empathy within your remote product management team.

A habit of customer interactions

Encourage your product managers to have direct interactions with customers, even if they are remote. Set up an environment conducive to remote user interviews, virtual focus groups, surveys, or conducting usability tests. By directly engaging with customers, your team members can better understand their needs, pain points, and behaviors. Let the team initially shadow and then gradually facilitate and eventually lead these sessions. If English isn’t their first language, plan enough prep time so they can confidently lead the meetings.

Enable virtual observations of customers using your product or service through screen-sharing sessions, video recordings, or remote user testing platforms. By observing customers interact with your product remotely, your team can gain valuable insights into their behaviors, frustrations, and areas of delight.

Share and curate customer inputs

Establish a process for sharing and compiling customer feedback with your remote product managers. Inputs can include customer support tickets, reviews, or transcripts from user research sessions. Make it a routine to disseminate relevant feedback and insights within the team.

Transcribe meetings for follow-ups. Leverage technology to summarize the meeting and debrief with the team later to synthesize the conversations. Encourage discussions around customer feedback during team meetings to ensure the team gains exposure to customer perspectives.

Persona development

Work collaboratively with your team to develop customer personas representing key segments of your target audience. These personas should include details about customer goals, challenges, preferences, and demographics. By referring to these personas during discussions and decision-making, your remote product managers can better empathize with the customers' needs and desires.

Your team will need the cultural background of your customers. Ensure the team knows who the customer is, what market they serve, what’s motivating them to use our product, what their alternatives are, and who their stakeholders are. For instance, the product I lead is meant for CTOs and IT admins, and the major focus for them is cost savings, consolidation, and security and compliance. Painting the persona in its human form helps the team build empathy.

Challenge biases. Are they getting biased by the vocal majority? For example, my product serves both enterprises and SMBs. Enterprise customers can avail of white-glove service and seek comprehensiveness and scale. SMBs need simplicity and self-served features. If not intentional, the former can dominate the latter. The channels we communicate with each segment are different. Tune your listening system to balance the inputs from all your key personas.

Jobs to be done

Encourage your team to create customer journey maps to visualize customers' end-to-end experience. This exercise helps identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and areas where customer empathy can be enhanced. By understanding the customer journey, remote product managers can make informed decisions that align with the customer's context and expectations.

Coach them to connect the dots to paint the bigger picture. For example, multiple customers asking for granular reporting may emphasize the need to improve reporting but understanding the jobs to be done (so I can update my stakeholders) is the key takeaway the team needs to derive.

Forming an independent point of view

A litmus test of autonomy is the team’s ability to incorporate customer inputs into a long-term strategy. Build a road mapping framework such that customer inputs can inform but not dictate decisions. Does a particular ask align with your mission and upstream OKRs? What’s the cost of supporting a particular customer ask? Share examples of teams that do this effectively. Being remote, this information may not be easily accessible to the team.

Create an environment to foster curiosity, ask questions, challenge assumptions, and state new hypotheses. Bake validation into your product planning so they can experiment with newer ideas. Gradually increase decision-making authority, empowering teams to take calculated risks and take ownership.

Celebrate launches. But also celebrate pivots and pauses. My team hypothesized that a particular partner category could benefit from APIs to scale their operations. Their research concluded scale wasn’t top of mind for them. We decided to pause investing further. We recognized that as a win because now we had more clarity.

Continuous Learning

Keep your team’s training top of your mind. Actively seek courses, resources, past research reports that can connect your team with the customer and the market they serve. Encourage your team to stay updated on industry trends by following thought leaders, and analysts on LinkedIn. Attend virtual conferences, and participate in relevant webinars to broaden their perspective and deepen their understanding of customer needs.

By implementing these strategies, you can foster a culture of customer empathy within your remote product management team. Infusing customer insights and perspectives into their decision-making processes will enable them to develop products that truly resonate with and meet the needs of their target audience. This is a vital step towards building an autonomous remote team of product managers.