484: Making customer research easier – with Prashant Mahajan

Tools for making voice-of-the-customer insights more accessible to product managers Today we are talking about aspects of the Market Research knowledge area for product mastery. Specifically, we are discussing how to overcome challenges collecting actionable customer insights. Helping us with this is Prashant Mahajan, the founder of  Zeda.io. Prashant is an experienced product manager and leader, having guided product development in several organizations. In these experiences, he identified a critical gap: Many Product Managers are unsure if they are building the right products because they can’t access customer feedback, customer insight, or sentiment. This led him to developing Zeda.io, which is also focused on the importance of publicly sharing product roadmaps and progress with customers. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:52] You founded Zeda.io to help product managers capture the voice of the customer and get actionable customer insights. What challenges did you encounter as a product manager that gave you experience for improving how to gain customer insights? We learn about product management best practices, like solving customer problems and making a strategy, but most of the product management I saw in companies was about operations. Updating an Excel sheet or going to a meeting was taking up too much of my mental bandwidth. I thought there could be a better way to do product management, where operations are taken care of by software. We took inspiration from GitHub AI Copilot and Chat GPT. We started with the vision to make product management simpler and smarter. Product management can be divided into product discovery, prioritization, building, and launch. Most product people are good at building things, but they don’t know what problem to solve. If people knew what to build, we would not see companies launch useless products and fail. I experienced these challenges firsthand in my previous company. You get input from sales, support, customer-facing teams, and user research. As the company becomes bigger and bigger, the distance between the product team and the user keeps increasing. Meeting with people is like playing Telephone, and by the time you get information, it might be four or five people away from the customer. You can’t go to one place and find out what your customers are asking. I wanted to make a platform where you can centralize the customer voice, analyze it, generate insights, and make the key takeaways actionable. The product team, including designers and engineers, needs to know why they are building things. If you tell them the problem and the impact of solving it, they can brainstorm together and ship it out. It’s critical that you’re using your resources for the right problem, which will create impact, and not just randomly building things. [10:24] After you built a product to solve your problem, how did you validate the pain points and core problems for the larger product management community? I am a strong proponent of talking to people. In the last three and a half years, I have had a call with a product leader on average every day. I’ve talked to CPOs, VPs, and people who have just started as the first PM at a startup. The core problem as a product leader is there are so many ideas and a lack of confidence on deciding which idea to pursue. You need to justify the ROI of building a product. One CPO said he needed our product to be insurance for his job. If the product didn’t work, he would be fired. He needed the data to save his job. [14:18] How does your product at Zeda.io help product managers? We focus on product discovery and planning. We centralize all your customer voice or input from customers and customer-facing teams in one place so you don’t have to juggle meetings and Excel sheets and you don’t lose any informa...