The PM Tension Series: Part 2

Most product teams don’t ignore customers on purpose. But customer understanding gets actively crowded out. Urgency beats rigor. Authority beats data. Busy-building beats learning. The gap between internal confidence and external evidence opens slowly, then all at once. By the time you notice, you’ve already shipped to crickets. 

This session unpacks the 5 forces that kill customer understanding—and gives you proven Productside Playbook practices for real conversations, collaborations, and negotiations: Personas, Jobs-to-be-Done Empathy mapping, and Storyboarding to get out of the building and into what customers actually do. 

What You Will Learn: 

• Why urgency, authority, legacy bias, busy-building, and cognitive bias crowd out customer understanding 

• How to run Jobs-to-Be-Done collaborations to reframe executive mandates into customer problems 

• How to engage in Empathy mapping to surface what customers actually do versus what the boss thinks they do 

• How to use Storyboarding to socialize solutions and validate before you vibe fail a prototype 

• How to negotiate with data and discovery so you can push back on “we already know” without career-limiting consequences