Short excerpt from a YouTube interview (Jason M. Lemkin) arguing that product-team participation in customer-facing conversations is critical. The speaker recommends product people sit in on sales calls, mandates listening to recorded calls via conversation-intelligence tools, and warns that lack of direct exposure can delay roadmaps or cause missed product insights.
And your product people will tell you like a lot of times they'll tell you no, the engineering and product people will be too busy. Well fine, if you want me to do it, it's gonna push back the roadmap as long as you're okay with that. And I think it's just so valuable for a product person to be sitting there and listening to the feedback directly from the customer. I actually think we use conversation intelligence for a big part of this. So we record the calls and then I mandate that our product people listen to a certain number of calls. That's a shortcut. But there still is nothing as valuable as the product person being in the seat sitting there with the salespeople when you're inevitably going to get punched in the teeth by a prospect where you heard a customer say hey this is a problem and now show me where those things have shown up on the product. How expert does the sales team need to be in the production.
