How close should customers be to your teams?
I put some time into thinking about this one last week, informed in part by the discussions we’ve been having about getting our own team more involved here on Meta.
Designing healthy boundaries between customers and Product teams
How product teams interact with customers in their community is going to vary widely across orgs, so I’ll speak to our experience with Meta.
Our situation is pretty unique in that we are dogfooding our product in real time with our customers. For the first few years of the project, everyone in our org worked directly on the product so being part of the community was a necessary part of the job. Over time that has become less the case and we now we have to actively encourage staff engagement outside of support categories.
Some of our team admit they don’t spend time on Meta because they don’t know how to engage. There are no questions they feel qualified to answer and they don’t feel like they have the depth of knowledge required to lead interesting or relevant discussions. Here are some of the challenges we have identified that get in the way of our team participating more on Meta— I’m sure other orgs experience similar ones.
Barriers to engaging in the community
- Inaccurate, outdated or inconsistent responses to questions. (Not knowing the right answer or fear of giving the wrong one stops many from engaging.)
- Vocal members can have a disproportionate influence on our team, potentially to the detriment of other members. (Some members take a lot of energy to interact with diplomatically and not everyone has the patience for it.)
- Trust erodes if we change the roadmap without sufficient communication or if we ask for feedback and appear to disregard it. (Some people feel safer working in private so they don’t set expectations they can’t live up to.)
- Notification fatigue from being personally tagged into topics that have no relevance because people are impatient. (Some members treat visible presence as an invitation to request personal support when they are stressed.)
- Managing frustration when members don’t feel they are being heard. (Sometimes participation can be taxing due to its confrontational nature, even when no one is at fault.)
Where has direct customer–product interaction worked well in your organisation, and where has it become difficult?