What Customers Really Don't Care About

The end of the year is always a time to put things in perspective. In that spirit, here is what our customers don't care about and what they truly care about:

Don't care about:

• The tool we use to manage our backlog
• Our favorite prioritization framework
• Whether we like or don't like how user stories are written
• Whether we are using AI to write user stories
• Why there is tech debt
• What we mean or don't mean by MVP
• Why we have or don't have Product Ops
• Whether we are or are not in a "feature factory"
• Our OKRs
• Whether we are sales-led or product-led
• Whether we are or are not in founder-mode
• Whether we are or are not the CEO of the Product
• That we are a "certified PM"
• If our strategy document is one or six pages long, or that we even have one

What they really care about:

• That we truly understand *their* definition of success
• That we measure our success through *their* success
• That we ask them about *their* roadmap (yes, they have one!)
• That we are listening and learning
• That we understand what they *actually* have to do to use our product
• That our pricing makes sense to *them*
• That we are transparent when our timelines go awry
• That we apologize when things go wrong

We need to separate the signal from the noise. There is a lot of noise, especially if you follow the PM discourse on LinkedIn that leads to a polarizing dialog around a lot of things that customers don't really care about.

Hope you are having some down time before things ramp up again! Have a great start to the New Year!