In this interview, Bob London asks a healthcare SaaS co‑CEO and Chief Product Officer why he personally conducted one‑on‑one “customer rediscovery” calls with existing clients instead of relying on quantitative data, research reports, or delegating the task. The executive explains that working backwards from the customer is the proven way to build the right product, that data and reports are often incomplete or misleading, and that direct engagement lets him ask his own questions, validate ideas, and iterate the roadmap with real feedback. The conversation highlights the importance of founder‑level customer interaction for shaping messaging and product direction, and underscores the limitations of purely data‑driven approaches.
Chapters
In order to work on the messaging, in order to work on the roadmap, you personally as co-CEO, co-founder did a lot of customer calls one-on-one. Let's call it customer rediscovery. That's what I call it. Because it wasn't customer discovery in the classic sense. You have to go talk to a bunch of companies or prospects before you build the product. You guys are already in market. You have a bunch of customers. So you did these one-on-one calls. You didn't just look at data, quantitative data. You didn't just look at research reports. You wanted to have the calls yourself personally. Why was that so important to you?
Working backwards from the customer is proven time and time again to be the right way to build something. So you gotta start there. You gotta start with the customer problems. And I'm a big data person. If the data's available, I want to use it, but I'm also aware of the limitations of data. It's not always available. And even if you have some data, it doesn't mean that that's going to give you all the answers because it might not be a comprehensive dataset. And then research reports, you know, if you know something about an industry and then you go read a research report that some researcher wrote about it, you very quickly realize that it's almost useless.
Strong statement that I don't disagree with.
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you got to do your own research and then you get to ask your own questions and you're engaging with the customer. And then as you start building the product or making the changes, you can go back to those same people and say, okay, we talked about this. What do you think of this idea? And so just starting that process, it was important for us to start with the—
Very good. I should have pointed out, you also didn't delegate it to someone in the organization. The other thing we should point out is that you're Chief Product Officer in the company.
We actually have, you know, we have customer success, we have product manager, we have sales. And so we have a lot of people talking to customers about different things, but they have their own kind of mission for what they're doing. And so this was a way to have a separate discussion with customers that was around roadmap stuff that, that our other folks weren't having. You want, as the CEO, co-founder, co-CEO, to have direct dialogue with your customers, and I think this is a great way to do it. And then as a product leader, so if you have a lot of products and you have product managers managing those products, I think it's okay for them to go and this work, but most startups, the one of the founders is, is leading up the product.
