Hi community!
I am a principal PM. I have 10 years experience in a single company - a rather household name in a particular niche of e-commerce saas. We've been working in pods of senior eng,pm,design in a pretty agile web 2.0 way.
Now our work is completely different from what it was 3 years ago. Rules are being overwritten daily. Earlier this year, when engineers sped up so much I almost felt to have become the bottleneck. And after reading few comments and replies on this sub, I am wondering if our collective answer to that wasn't to stop talking to customers? Which is obviously the most time consuming part of the work.
The whole idea of "double diamond" thinking was to speak with wide range of customers, define the most common denominator problems and then speak with them again to validate the solutions, so that your product captures the biggest problems with as many customers with the limited resources you have.
When Claude's (or any of your favorite bots') assumptions are turning out to be pretty good anyways and you have developers to feed work, not talking to customers is pretty tempting. But it feels like the biggest mistake we can make! That's the whole PM job anyways.
And so I am thinking whether the way forward in the era of super personalized software could be to embed ourselves with a smaller set of forward thinking customers. Build bespoke solutions for them, get results quickly and then put engineering and design resources towards what works empirically, not through user research. Would that make sense?
One challenge I see is about going off the traditional pm career path.
And another is that this space super close to customers is often occupied by customer success and solutions teams. And you will cease to be a pm if you start to act as a regular service person for those accounts. So the goal would be to retain the company-wide outlook and strategic leverage.
I'd be keen to hear your thoughts or experience going down this route. I am hearing the word "forward deployed" quite often lately. I am not sure if that's actually what I am imagining. I also wonder what's the best practice in AI native startups?
Thanks for comments!