The #1 Most Important Skill of a Product Manager (and Most Teams Miss It)
If you’re a founder or CEO, your Product Manager is one of your biggest bets. Their job is to turn customer insight into an evidence-based roadmap that drives growth.
Yet, most PMs are measured on shipping features, running ceremonies, or writing documents. These are outputs.
The single most important input — the skill that guarantees every other metric has a chance of success — is relentless, unblocked conversation with your customers.
This is the one PM skill that you must support, require, and build into your culture.
💡 Free Resource: The Customer Truth Playbook
Want to operationalize this in your team?
Download The Customer Truth Playbook here — a 90-day plan to talk to 50–100 customers and build an evidence-based roadmap.
Why? Because every time your team builds a feature based on an internal debate or an executive's gut feeling, you are burning runway. Every time a PM says, "I already read the support tickets," they are using second-hand data. You need first-hand, high-fidelity customer truth.
The 50-Customer Sprint: The First 90 Days
When a PM joins your organization, their first 90 days are not about getting access to Jira or perfecting a PRD template. They are about establishing a baseline of customer truth.
My personal playbook for joining any new org is simple: talk to 50 to 100 diverse customers as quickly as possible.
This isn't just an internal goal; it should be the foundation of their Q1 OKRs.
The goal is diversity: talk to your happy customers, your recently churned ones, your power users, and the ones who signed up last week but haven't activated. Crucially, your PM must also differentiate and track who they are speaking to: are they the end-user, the economic buyer, or an internal stakeholder (like a Sales leader)? Knowing the context of the feedback is everything.
The ROI of Conversation
This initial sprint is not about validating your existing roadmap. It's about asking open-ended questions to establish what is truly important to their daily workflow. This deep immersion is the quickest way for any PM to onboard and immediately start providing leverage to the business.
The outputs are measurable:
Validated Personas: You move beyond internal assumptions to high-fidelity, data-backed customer profiles.
Pain Point Clarity: You identify the non-obvious, daily frustrations that your product should be solving.
Evidence-Based Roadmap: Opportunities are identified where your product delivers maximum business value (higher revenue, reduced churn, faster cycle time).
The PM's first three-month deliverable should be a synthesis of these deep-dive learnings. Nothing else is more valuable.
Leadership’s Role: Unblock the Most Valuable Data
This critical work—the relentless pursuit of customer truth — is often neutralized by internal friction and a lack of executive support. As a founder or CEO, your role is to act as the chief unblocker. You must eliminate all institutional barriers to customer access and make this activity a required, non-negotiable function of the job, not an optional one.
Here is my mandate to leadership:
1. Make Customer Conversations a Mandate (and an OKR)
Your PMs must be incentivized to talk to customers. Make it an Objective: “Develop actionable insight into customer pain points and behavior.” Key Results would be the quantifiable measures: “Complete 75 in-depth, open-ended interviews across 4 key segments.”
2. Watching Recordings is Not Enough
"We have Pendo recordings," or "Just read the support tickets," is a classic mistake. Those sources are fantastic for what is happening, but they are blind to the why and the context. A PM needs to hear the tone, see the body language, and have the chance to ask the follow-up question in real-time. This is why watching a junior PM conduct a meeting is a valuable coaching opportunity and a great way to stay close to the market.
3. Do Not Block Access
This is the most critical instruction for your leadership team: Do not let internal teams block access to customers.
Sales and Customer Success teams must be informed of the PM’s plan, the goal of the conversation (which is non-sales, non-support), and the learnings must be shared with them immediately. A PM talking to a customer is not a threat to the relationship; it’s an investment in it. In my experience, customers are always excited to have a voice.
To streamline this, create incentive mechanisms — such as a User Panel or a Customer Advisory Board — to create a standing, opt-in pool of users for ongoing research. If you have a UX Research team, make sure their objectives include growing and nurturing this panel. If not, make it part of the PM’s objectives.
Beyond the Interview: Keeping the Data Fresh
Deep-dive conversations are a necessity, but they are not a one-time thing. The market shifts every quarter. Your customers are evolving.
The PM needs a system to maintain the relationship and keep the data fresh — think of it as their own internal “CRM” for qualitative data.
Continuous Check-Ins: Send a quick email to past interviewees to check in, or run short product validation surveys for immediate feedback.
The PM’s CRM: Maintain a live, categorized list of all users and stakeholders (who they are, when they were last spoken to, their core pain point). This is a crucial asset that must be frequently updated. A simple excel works.
The Product Manager who talks to customers deeply, consistently, and with open-ended curiosity is the one who will build a product that grows organically and stays ahead of the market.
💡 Get the Blueprint: Make Customer Truth a Mandate
Ready to turn this into action?
Download the 50-Customer Sprint Checklist — a simple one-page tracker to help you or your PMs plan, conduct, and synthesize customer interviews in the first 90 days.
What’s inside:
✅ Step-by-step goals for Weeks 1–12
✅ Interview tracker (name, role, segment, last contact)
✅ Sample open-ended questions
✅ Persona validation tips
✅ Template for summarizing insights
🧩 Use it to:
Set “Talk to 50 customers” as a measurable OKR
Keep your data fresh and structured
Share insights across Product, Sales, and CS
👉 Download the 50-Customer Sprint Checklist (PDF)
Founder’s Takeaway
If internal debates drag on, or engineering is stuck in the rework loop, the problem isn’t “process” — it’s a lack of customer truth.
You need to empower your PMs to be world-class customer investigators. Clear the path, require the output, and measure success not just on what ships, but on the depth and freshness of customer knowledge the team brings to the table.
