The PM Tension Series: Part 2

Welcome and Webinar Overview: Why Smart Teams Sometimes Build Stupid Things

Roger Snyder | 00:00:00 – 00:00:35
Welcome everyone to Productside’s PM tension series webinar. Today we are doing part two: why smart teams sometimes build stupid things. Let’s get to our key presenter. I’m proud to introduce myself, Roger Snyder, principal consultant and trainer at Productside, and I’m based in the Santa Cruz Mountains—but more proud to present Dean Peters, principal consultant and trainer based out of Raleigh, North Carolina. Say hi to everyone, Dean.

Dean Peters | 00:00:35 – 00:00:36
Hey, how’s everyone doing? Hey, put in some chat comments where you’re from.

Roger Snyder | 00:00:36 – 00:01:10
Absolutely. Yep. So, as we’re gathering, we’re going to let folks kind of join over the next 20–30 seconds. Fonda is based in Chicago. Hopefully it’s warming up there at last. Got someone from down the street—Carrie. Yes, exactly, in the containment area.

Productside Housekeeping and Community

Roger Snyder | 00:01:10 – 00:03:35

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The Customer Insight Gap: How Teams Lose Touch With Customers

Dean Peters | 00:03:35 – 00:07:40
We’re going to talk about some tensions we experience as product managers—in this case, how smart teams sometimes create stupid products.

We’re going to first talk about that customer insight gap because this is the gap that helps create some of those tensions. We’re going to talk about the five fatal forces—these unseen influences that pry that gap open. We’re going to talk about five plays from our playbook to help get out in front and remedy those issues.

Products don’t fail because we ignore customers on purpose. They fail because customer understanding gets crowded out. Let me translate that: we get so busy with being busy that we crowd out customer insight. Sometimes we jump straight to the solution. Sometimes we jump straight to the technology. Sometimes we just take a bucket of features.

There’s a gap. We’ve all experienced those gaps.

Here are just two of thousands of victims of the customer insight gap: Quibi and Juicero.

• Quibi—they were going to create turnstyle videos, whatever that means. They lit this thing up without really talking to customers. They were confident that this new format would create all sorts of revenue. In fact, they got 1.75 billion in investment and blew through that because they didn’t connect with their customer base. They built the wrong thing the right way and built it beautifully.
• And then you have Juicero—another fun little disaster. They built a $400 machine that would sit on your kitchen countertop and squeeze a bag of juice. There was nothing special about the bag of juice. It was just a bag of juice. Everything was going fine until someone put up a YouTube video, bought one of the bags, and in 30 seconds destroyed the company saying, “Who wants $400 just to do this?” and she held up a cup and squeezed the juice.

It wasn’t that Juicero and Quibi were being stupid. They were being distracted—disconnected from market reality.

So I want to run a poll: have you been in a situation where you’ve seen or heard smart teams build stupid products?

Poll #1 – Have You Seen Smart Teams Build Stupid Products?

Dean Peters | 00:07:40 – 00:08:44
All right, we’re getting some answers here. Few more people are answering.

So before I end the polling, Roger, which one do you think it’s going to be?

Roger Snyder | 00:08:44 – 00:08:51
I’m revving for the hippos one, honestly.

Dean Peters | 00:08:51 – 00:09:35
Hippos, the rhinos, the zebras. Oh my.

All right, let’s end the poll and share the results. As you can see—“I worked there.” The person was like, “I’ve spoken to the customer. I know what they want.” They really didn’t know what they want.

“Ship first, ask questions later” was pretty much a tie with “addicted to activities” and “busy building.” Interesting—fewer people talking about reveling in the glory of past wins.

Let’s talk about the five fatal forces that cause this to happen.

The Five Fatal Forces: What Crowds Out Customer Understanding

Dean Peters | 00:09:35 – 00:10:41

The five fatal forces are:

• Urgency

• Authority

• Legacy bias

• Confirmation bias

• Busy building

These are forces that can pry open an insight gap slowly and then all at once.

First: urgency beating rigor. With Quibi, they rushed to launch before validating core user behaviors. Urgency is just anxiety in a suit. We see this in feature factories and in enterprise work: “We don’t have time for this. Just get a product out the door.”

Roger Snyder | 00:10:41 – 00:11:00
I’ve lived that more than once—both startups and large enterprises. “We don’t have time for this. Let’s get something out there and get the feedback that way.” More often than not, it hasn’t yielded the results we want.

Dean Peters | 00:11:00 – 00:11:34
Next: authority beats evidence. This is where “hippo” comes from—highest paid person’s opinion. Or my favorite: the seagull manager who swoops in, poops all over a project, and then leaves you to clean up the mess.

Roger, you’ve got an authority story.

Roger Snyder | 00:11:34 – 00:12:25
I was working for a company doing apps—great company with amazing photo technologies. One Monday the CEO sat me down and said, “Over the weekend my son was playing with our beta app and he said we really should do this, this, and this. What do you think?”

I said, “Let me look into that and I’ll get back to you.” After I walked out of that meeting, I started looking for a new job because I knew there was no way—even with data—I was going to win that argument. Three months later I had a new job.

Dean Peters | 00:12:25 – 00:18:17
I had that with a seagull manager who said, “I created some code over the weekend. Can you put it in the codebase? It solves the problem.” I’ve got a whole story about how my lead engineer and QA person were about to throw me off the seventh floor if I didn’t find a way.

Now: legacy bias—“it’s always worked this way.” Carbon-copying legacy reports, policies, or applications because “that’s how we’ve always done it.” What got it to where it’s at is likely not going to get it to where it needs to be.

And confirmation bias—cherry-picking data to validate your opinion. This is one product managers must watch in themselves too. You have to be willing to look at the data that says: this is a bad idea, or it should be different.

Finally: busyness beats learning. We equate velocity with value delivery—and that’s not necessarily true. A chief product officer saying, “We delivered 167 features this quarter” but can’t tell you which features pay the rent versus which are resource vampires. Goodhart’s Law shows up: people split one feature into three so they can count more “delivery.”

Getting Out of the Building: Five Plays

Dean Peters | 00:18:17 – 00:19:28
A lot of these insight gaps spawn out of the fact that we don’t get outside the building enough. We’re not talking to enough other human beings—or we’re talking to people who agree with us.

We have five plays from our playbook to help you frame conversations. Whether it’s a template, canvas, framework, or method—there’s no magic behind it other than the conversations it helps you frame and hold.

We have five plays:

• Empathy interviews

• Affinity mapping

• Reframing the mandate

• Storyboarding

• Tiny acts of discovery

These aren’t magic. They are forcing functions for better conversations.

Empathy Interviews: Stop Asking “What” and Start Asking “Why”

Dean Peters | 00:19:28 – 00:20:04
Let’s talk about the empathy interview. Stop asking what and start asking why.

Roger, when you teach empathy interviews, the worst question I’ve ever seen asked is: “What features do you like?”

Roger Snyder | 00:20:04 – 00:21:06
That’s a killer. That takes you down the wrong direction. You’re in a support call; you’re no longer in an interview.

I start on a positive front: “Tell me why you are using my product.”

And I tell the story of my Greek grandmother—my yaya Maria—who could “tell the future.” All she was really doing was listening. “I understand you’ve got problems. Tell me about it. When was the last time it happened? How did it make you feel? How often does it happen? What do you do to cope?”

Dean Peters | 00:21:06 – 00:24:44
We use a template to frame a conversation—not read a script. “Walk me through a day in the life. Tell me your story.”

People grab a script and read it without eye contact. It sounds like an interrogation. You want a friendly conversation where you become empathetic.

We emphasize “feels/appears.” It isn’t just jobs, problems, desired outcomes. The feels part is important: do their eyes widen, do they wave their hands, do they get red, do they cross their arms, does their tone change? Physical tells matter—and AI transcription can cause us to ignore them. That’s why I like another person in the room, not just an AI note-taker.

Use the canvas to frame a yaya Maria conversation: “Tell me about it. How does it make you feel? How often? What do you do to get around it?”

Affinity Mapping: Turning Qualitative Data Into Themes

Dean Peters | 00:24:44 – 00:28:25
Once you’ve got qualitative data, you should affinity map it.

Cluster around:

• Jobs to be done

• Pains

• Gains

We want to categorize what we heard around jobs-to-be-done, pains, and gains—get below solution-speak. When they say, “Give me a chatbot,” they’re trying to articulate pains, gains, and jobs.

Here’s how I do it with AI: screenshot the canvas, convert to markdown, feed it a picture of the template and a picture of the JTBD circle, ask it to generate short “sticky-note” pains/gains/JTBD. I don’t use AI as source of truth; I use it to start conversations. Now my Mural or Miro board is prepopulated to kick off team collaboration.

AI is powerful—but not for everything. You want to conduct the interview yourself and capture emotions and tells.

Roger Snyder | 00:28:25 – 00:29:24
We got a good question: are affinity maps only used with empathy interview output?

No. If you’ve got a mix of data, affinity mapping can be powerful: pull together qualitative research and quantitative research and see where areas of affinity show up. Sometimes, to the confirmation bias point, you thought you had it—but survey data says no. Affinity mapping brings that to light.

Reframing Executive Mandates Into Customer Problems

Dean Peters | 00:29:24 – 00:33:32
We can use these tools in any order.

Now, reframing the mandate: executives ask, “What problem are you solving?” and some product managers go straight to tech: NLP, Elastic, Kubernetes. Then executives stop asking them anything.

You need a crisp articulation:

• Who has the problem

• What they are trying to accomplish

• What gets in the way

• Why it matters emotionally

Take your top pains/gains/JTBD, vote/stack-rank, and articulate from the user viewpoint. Don’t cheat on context and constraints—backstory and guardrails matter, especially in regulated environments.

This statement becomes portable. Pause and ask: “Is this orange worth the squeeze right now?” And test it with other folks. Use multiple data sources: interviews, analytics, customer support/live chat.

Storyboarding: Socializing the Problem and Solution Before You Build

Dean Peters | 00:33:32 – 00:35:28
One way to get around the fatal five is validation testing—and storyboarding is a great way to socialize what you’ve learned.

I took a picture of the pains/gains/JTBD and asked Copilot to give me a story arc in text: hero, pain, disaster, elixir. Then Copilot has a create function that can generate images and even an explainer video based on that narrative.

Now you can take it out of the building and retest with real people: “Yes, that’s my problem” or “No idea what you’re talking about.”

Tiny Acts of Discovery: Validating Before Full Production Code

Dean Peters | 00:35:28 – 00:43:24
Validating solutions: the most expensive way to validate your product is full production code.

With vibe coding and prototyping, we can move faster—but we should do tiny acts of discovery first, then prototype, then initial build.

This template matters because we don’t create falsifiable hypotheses. A falsifiable hypothesis can be disproven. It doesn’t start with the hypothesis—it starts by taking inventory of what you do know, then a heart-to-heart about what you don’t know. Rank uncertainties by impact and unknown-ness, then write hypotheses and run experiments.

A question came in: how do you guard against positive bias in storytelling to validate pains/gains/JTBD?

Storyboards are cheap tests. You’ll have bias—fine. Use the storyboard to get fast resonance feedback. But you root out bias with tiny acts of discovery: interrogate assumptions, run tests that capture qualitative and quantitative data, and look for value to customers and viability for the business.

Example: define success with objective measures like adoption rate—e.g., 60% adoption of a self-service feature. If you get 30%, you step back. If you said 60 and got 40, you explore why you missed 20 before you pivot.

I shared a compliance example: experts said a patient finder idea was illegal. I scheduled time with legal and compliance, did a pre-read, and in 15 minutes got clarity. That’s an inexpensive test compared to shipping and ending up in a deposition.

Roger Snyder | 00:43:24 – 00:44:11
These are cheap and fast now. Even five years ago, storyboarding and explainer videos weren’t that hard, but now they’re much easier. The number one thing I hear is: “We don’t have time for discovery.” You do—and more than ever, you can validate before spending time and money building something nobody wants.

AI Demos: From Interview Notes to Storyboards, Videos, and Prototypes

Dean Peters | 00:44:11 – 00:46:46
I showed an explainer video example and then walked through how quickly you can generate outputs:

• affinity map pains/gains/JTBD
• frame a problem statement
• turn it into a six-panel storyboard
• generate an explainer video
• generate a storyboard handout
• prototype via HTML in tools like Gemini / ChatGPT canvas / Claude code

This happened within minutes—so when I hear “we don’t have time,” time has been compressed.

Cheat Sheet: What to Do When Each Fatal Force Shows Up

Dean Peters | 00:46:46 – 00:51:56
Here’s your cheat sheet:

• When urgency hits the room: “Can you give me a few days to talk to some people?”
• When the hippo rolls in: jobs-to-be-done mapping on pains/gains/JTBD
• Legacy bias: reframe the problem
• Busy building: meet it with storyboarding
• Confirmation bias: stomp it dead with tiny acts of discovery

Poll #2 – Starting Today, What Will You Do Differently?

Dean Peters | 0:51:56 – 00:53:44
We’ve got another poll. Starting today, what will you do differently?

Are you going to practice empathy over urgency? Map solution-speak to problem statements? Reframe problems with clarity? Socialize with storytelling? Validate with tiny acts of discovery before vibe prototyping?

It’s multiple choice—play more than one card.

We ended the poll and shared results: storytelling was popular, reframing was popular, empathy and tiny acts showed up too.

Productside Resources, Templates, Training, and Upcoming Events

Roger Snyder | 00:53:44 – 00:56:09
People asked: “How do I get these templates?”

The framing the problem template is available via the QR code and links in the chat. The voice of the customer workbook provides templates as well. Some prioritization techniques are in the larger Productside playbook—go to productside.com.

We’ve got training coming up:

In-person training in London: Optimal Product Management (full 3-day course) with Tom Evans in April. It will cover techniques you heard today.

March 11: Part three of our PM tension series—why speed without discipline can break your product team.

More courses coming up, including Optimal Product Management and AI Product Management. The AI training includes agents and prompts, and you get the templates too.

Optimal Product Management is your key to becoming a certified product manager.

Q&A and Closing Remarks

Roger Snyder | 00:56:09 – 00:56:30
Q&A. Another question: how can you help mature a legacy culture which relies more on “I know what needs to be done,” despite inviting them through discovery and showing validated customer data?

Dean Peters | 00:56:30 – 00:57:50
I’ve lived that experience where no matter how much data, leadership scoffs at it.

You might do everything right and still work with leadership that wants to push where they want to push. The best you can do is make the best of the situation. If they’re dead set despite data, use these techniques to make the best version of that direction possible with current information.

Roger Snyder | 00:57:50 – 00:58:58
Two thoughts:

Get agreement on business metrics—what matters to the business—then measure whether the current direction is achieving those outcomes. If not, it opens the conversation to alternatives.

Talk about opportunity cost. “We’ll go your direction, but here are the opportunities we are foregoing. Are we all agreed?” Then disagree and commit.

Also: can you pilot one small thing—land and expand—show a data-driven approach leads to better outcomes for one team, then scale it.

Dean Peters | 00:58:58 – 01:00:16
Show costs. Keep a decision log. Not all organizations are as functional as we’d like. Surround yourself with evidence—and how you pitch it matters.

Roger Snyder | 01:00:16 – 01:00:36
I think we’re at the top of the hour. Thank you so much everyone for joining us today. Thank you Dean for a fantastic overview of these five techniques to address challenges product managers face.

All right. Thanks for joining us. Take care.