What is the proper balance between building and speaking to your customers?
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There is always a new feature to ship, a bug to be squashed, an improvement that seems necessary.
However, whenever I take time to speak to my customers, I always end up learning far more than I had imagined, and in some cases, discovering that what I had just built wasn’t even worth it.
The hard part is when do you stop building and start listening.
How many hours of the week do you set aside for customer discussions?
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For me, customer calls are most valuable before starting a major feature. It’s much cheaper to discover that an assumption is wrong before spending several days implementing it
i like the idea of tying conversations to roadmap decisions. If several customers mention the same problem, I have a much stronger reason to pause development and investigate it.
@benjagil do you find a specific number of customer conversations per week works best for you? I’m curious whether you prefer scheduled interviews or more informal conversations as issues come up.
my rule would be be to talk to customers often enough that the roadmap never becomes disconnected from their reality. If I’m spending weeks building without learning anything new from users, that’s probably a sign I need to start listening again.