In this episode of UX Leadership by Design, Mark Baldino talks with Mauricio Steffen, Senior Director of Product Management at Ericsson, about the crucial role customer research and empathy play in successful product management. Mauricio shares his unique career path, transitioning from corrections officer to frontline support, then into product management, highlighting how deep, empathetic listening skills have been essential across all roles. The conversation explores how to scale customer feedback processes, synthesize insights effectively, and navigate stakeholder management. Mark and Mauricio challenge the common misinterpretation of Henry Ford’s quote about customer research, emphasizing the importance of genuinely understanding underlying customer needs. Practical advice is offered for breaking through organizational blinders, advocating for meaningful change, and maintaining balance when strategic initiatives seem misaligned with immediate customer requests.
Key Takeaways
- Empathy and Active Listening: Genuine empathy and active listening are key skills that transcend industry and job function, essential for product management success.
- Scaling Customer Feedback: Utilize scalable methods like AI (LLMs) to analyze and summarize customer feedback at scale, uncovering patterns and root causes effectively.
- Root Cause Analysis: Go beyond surface-level customer requests by digging deeper to uncover true underlying problems and needs, rather than just stated wants.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Engage stakeholders early, make them feel heard, and clearly communicate decisions to achieve alignment and minimize resistance.
- Embracing Customer Feedback: Treat customer feedback as a valuable gift; show appreciation and continuously demonstrate that input shapes your product decisions.
- Admitting Mistakes: Develop the courage to pivot or stop projects when customer and market feedback indicates potential failure; maintaining an honest, reflective process is key to sustainable success.
About Our Guest
Mauricio Steffen, Director of Product Management at Ericsson, is dedicated to delivering customer-centric WWAN Edge solutions. With seven years of experience in product management and a deep understanding of customer needs, Mauricio believes in the power of feature requests to shape products that truly solve customer problems.
Resources & Links
- Connect with Mauricio Steffen on LinkedIn
- Connect with Mark Baldino on LinkedIn
- Fuzzy Math
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction to Mauricio Steffen
- 02:09 Career Journey: From Corrections Officer to Product Management
- 06:57 The Role and Philosophy of Product Management
- 09:59 Influencing Stakeholders: Education, Listening, and Empathy
- 12:42 Scaling Customer Feedback and Leveraging AI
- 15:34 Why “Faster Horse” Is a Cop-Out: Understanding Customer Needs
- 22:49 Breaking Organizational Blinders with Customer Insights
- 26:07 The Challenge of Admitting Mistakes and Changing Course
- 29:37 Root Cause Analysis: From Wants to True Customer Needs
- 35:33 Empathy as the Key Skill for All Stakeholder Management
Tags
#UXPodcast, #CustomerResearch, #ProductManagement, #EmpathyInDesign, #CustomerFeedback, #StakeholderManagement, #UXLeadership, #ProductStrategy
Transcript
Mark Baldino (00:02.958) Hello and welcome to UX Leadership by Design. I'm Mark Baldino, your host. I'm also a co-founder of Fuzzy Math. Fuzzy Math is the user experience design consultancy that brings consumer-grade UX to business applications for B2B and enterprise tools. Today, I speak with Mauricio Steffen, who is a senior director of product management at Ericsson. Our conversation centers on a topic I'm passionate about, customer research. Mauricio has been in the customer research game for a long time across a diverse range of roles. from corrections officer to frontline customer support to product management. And he maps not only the process of gathering client feedback at scale, but what do you do with it? How can we remove our blinders during that process? How do we bring the rest of our team along for the ride? And in particular, we talk about that famous potentially improperly attributed quote to Henry Ford, if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Hint, when you hear somebody say that, it's a cop-up. It takes real conviction to speak to your customers. to hear them, to empathize with them, and then to take their answers and get from want to true need, and then turn those needs into better product direction. So I think it's a fun, it's an interesting conversation, and it's with somebody who's really passionate about their customer's role in product management and product development. So please enjoy this episode, and thank you as always for listening. Mark Baldino (00:01.77) Mauricio, welcome to the podcast. Mauricio Steffen (00:03.805) Hey Mark, thanks for having me. Mark Baldino (00:05.562) It's my pleasure. know we talked last year and have been planning this for a while, so I'm really excited to get you onto the podcast and appreciate your time today. Would love for you to introduce yourself and what you do and maybe give the audience a little bit of information on your background. Mauricio Steffen (00:22.493) Yeah, no problem. So I'm Mauricio Stefan. My current role is Senior Director of Product Management for Wireless WAN Edge at Ericsson in their Enterprise Wireless Solutions Division. That was originally an acquisition for Ericsson, a company called CradlePoint based out of Boise, Idaho. That's how I came on to Ericsson as I started with CradlePoint. I actually started with CradlePoint probably 13 years ago now, and I started in the support department, and at the time we made consumer products that were sold in like Best Buy's, Fry's. This was like, if you remember kind of cellular technology, this was like pre-mifi days, right? So, mifis, hotspots that you could get from your carrier weren't really a thing. You could get the USB sticks that you plugged into your laptop to get cellular internet. And the reason why I bring that up is because in the early days we sold to consumers a little Wi-Fi hotspot that you plug that USB stick in to get internet. And then the company evolved into more enterprise products. If anybody's familiar with Cradlepoint or Ericsson Enterprise Wireless today, we evolved into those more kind of business grade products over time. And now we mostly just focus on business to business. And then pre Erickson, actually, this is really kind of my second career. So right out of high school, I went into corrections and law enforcement here in the state of Idaho. And I did that for about 11 years. And then the job's a difficult job, as you can imagine. And so then I went back to college and got a degree in network engineering. And that's how I kind of ended up at cradle point and now Erickson. Mark Baldino (02:09.4) Wow. Okay, so corrections, a corrections officer or just in corrections in general? Corrections officer? Mauricio Steffen (02:16.136) Corrections officer. I spent about 11 years started off as a corrections officer, worked my way up to the rank of sergeant and you know that job just takes a toll on your mental health and your physical health as you can imagine and so you know kind of decided to move on and then that's this is kind of where my career took me. Mark Baldino (02:41.838) That Honestly, I love hearing about people's career arcs and what they got to, how they got to, where they are now. That's certainly an interesting one and I'm sure a pretty big shift. maybe, I mean, in the tech world, maybe a big shift, but in the grand scheme of things, a smaller shift. So you started in support and now you find yourself as a director of product management. What was that sort of transition like? Mauricio Steffen (03:09.405) Yeah, so, you know, funny enough, you mentioned this like a big shift and not a big shift. The funny thing is, you know, corrections, support, even product management, like there's one key skill that kind of ties all those careers together and it's talking to people, right? It's talking to people, understanding, you know, what they're looking for, getting to like kind of the root of what they're looking for, whether, you know, in corrections, it's a little more intense, but in technology, it's the same kind of thing, right? In support, you're trying to get to the crux of the issue that the customer is experiencing in product management. You're trying to get to what the actual problem that a customer needs to solve. And it just really all involves, you know, listening skills, active listening skills and communication skills. So as far as like going from support to product management, right? You know, I, Like I mentioned, I went from Corrections, got my degree in network engineering, and then was looking for a job. you know, Cradlepoint, I had a friend who worked at Cradlepoint, was like, hey, this is a great small startup company. You should come, you know, work for us, you know, kind of get your foot in the door while you're figuring out what else you wanted to do. You know, obviously I got my degree in network engineering, had my Cisco CCNA, CCNP, CCNA security, yada, yada, yada, and on and on and on. And so I expected to go work in an IT department in a Cisco shop or something along those lines. But I really started to enjoy support, right? Because it was something different every single day. It was a different challenge. You know, obviously there's a lot of the same stuff, resetting passwords, that kind of stuff. But there was also a lot of different challenges that allowed me to exercise a whole lot of different networks that I wouldn't have the opportunity to do. had I gone into the more traditional route working for an IT department, it would have been the same network infrastructure over and over again. And in the support department, I got to view all sorts of different network infrastructure. And then I kind of worked my way up over the years in support, from just being a support engineer to being a senior support engineer to running a support team to managing almost the entire support department. But one of the things that just kind of Mauricio Steffen (05:29.319) was of interest to me was how our products were developed, right? What were the decisions that went into how products were developed and how I could better influence that having kind of a unique perspective coming from support on what customers are looking for, what their needs are. And so at the time there was a little bit of change going into the product management department. This was probably, I wanna say five, six years ago. There's a little bit of change in leadership there. And so when the new leader came on, I had the opportunity to speak with him. A couple of people from the product management department kind of advocated on my behalf. And, you know, he was willing to give me an opportunity to move into kind of a more junior product management role. And so, you know, at that point, it was a little bit of a step back in my career because I was a manager in the support department kind of managing almost the entire support team. But it was a Mark Baldino (06:21.07) Thanks. Mauricio Steffen (06:24.805) a unique opportunity that I wanted to take advantage of. So I moved over to product management and took on a more junior role, worked under a couple of great product managers that kind of shaped how my product management philosophy, but allowed me to kind of move up and work on software and hardware and commercial models, different types of things within our company. until finally, you I was asked to kind of start to lead a team and that kind of evolved into the role that I'm in now. Mark Baldino (06:57.29) Awesome. It's a great journey. I think, as you've alluded to, it's given you a pretty interesting perspective on maybe the role of product management or the philosophy of. And you don't have to go philosophical here, but I do like to sort of ask people, what do think is the proper... How do you define product management? What do you think is the role? Or maybe if you just want to start with your personal take on this is how you feel about product management. It be helpful for maybe the audience to frame it. Mauricio Steffen (07:31.581) Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, you you mentioned philosophical. There's a lot of philosophies out there. Everything from you're the CEO of your product to, you know, and that one I don't necessarily ascribe to because the CEO has actual authority where a product manager may not have any actual authority. And most of your ability to get things done is through, you know, is through more soft skills, right? Through negotiation, through Mark Baldino (07:34.51) So, that's Mauricio Steffen (08:00.763) research and presenting, you know, your business case and making people buy into your business case and understand why the thing that you're doing is important. So I think, you know, one of the key things that I think is really undersold in product management is the education role in the rest of the business, right? Because as a product manager, you're expected to be the expert in your market, whatever that is, right? If you You know, in my case, it's wireless WAN technologies, it's cellular technologies. And your role is to educate engineering and other parts of the business as to why the things that we need to do are important, right? Whether it's important to be a market leader, whether it's important to show technological leadership, whether it's important because it's what your customers are asking you for. Mark Baldino (08:40.878) Thanks. Mauricio Steffen (08:50.609) So, but your role is to really socialize all of those aspects and why we should do the thing that we should do. And then ultimately, how is that thing going to make money? Because regardless of the industry, all businesses are in business to make money. So, you know, that has to be part of that evaluation. But I really think it is the role of the product manager to educate the rest of the business on why the things we do are important. Mark Baldino (09:04.705) you Mark Baldino (09:14.828) Interesting. And what are some, what's a tip or two to get people who either can't hear you, don't want to hear you, feel like there's a different perspective or priority? I you've talked about these are human to human connections. This is about communication and maybe gathering consensus. But what is a tip or two if you have some holdouts that you've learned along the way to get people on your side? Mauricio Steffen (09:39.975) Yeah, absolutely. mean, everybody's got an opinion, right? I mean, the great thing, the great thing about that is ideas can come from anywhere. They can come from engineering. They can come from support. They can come from even places that you might not suspect in a business, right? If your business is not finance like ours is technology, but even the finance people can have ideas about, you know, the technology and stuff like that. So I think one of the big things is make sure that you are actively listening and people feel like you do hear what they're saying because you can't always, everybody won't always agree on the direction. Everybody won't always agree on the prioritization. But one of the biggest things is having that discussion so that everybody feels heard and feels like their, their opinion or their information was synthesized as part of the decision. Because if you just blow people off, then that's when they're going to quite frankly, make it their mission to make sure that what you want does not happen. Right? And that's not the role. You don't want it to be adversarial. Everybody is on the same mission. Everybody wants the same goal. Everybody wants the company, their team, everyone there to be successful. And so it shouldn't be an adversarial thing, but you want to make sure that everybody feels heard because at the end of the day, even if their decision isn't the way that they go, if they feel heard and they feel like that their position was considered, then they'll understand and they can get behind the decision that was made. Mark Baldino (11:12.654) a of the art of stakeholder management is including them in on that process. And as you said, I think if people are heard and there's a space and they know that you're listening, even if it doesn't end up, you know, heading down a path that they had strongly advocated for, there's going to be a little less resistance. You also mentioned, it's a throughput of all of your roles is is talking to people, but in particular talking to customers and maybe who those customers have shifted over time. But how does that, how does talking to customers in your current role or previous roles, like how does that influence your thinking? How do you help it make a case? What do you do sometimes when the business and financial decisions are a little bit out of step with maybe what you're hearing from customers? But maybe just break down like what is your... customer outreach process and how do you incorporate it into the role of product management. Mauricio Steffen (12:15.537) Yeah, that's a great question, right? there's your customers are probably your most valuable resource of feedback, right? They're the ones that are using your product every single day, day in, day out. Well, hopefully day in, day out. Depending on the product, it may be more weekly or whatever it is, but they're the ones who really understand your product, probably better than anybody else. So they will understand, you know, where Mark Baldino (12:31.086) Bye. Mauricio Steffen (12:42.973) things are going well, where things are not going great. And then depending, but depending on the size of your company and the number of customers you have, you know, if you're listening to every single customer, read every single comment, know, synthesize that as part of your direction. But as you grow, you have to figure out ways to do that at scale. Like it's not feasible to do that. And then also, you know, while every customer is important, you want to be careful about, you know, over rotating on, on maybe customers who don't use your product as much or, or even over rotating on your largest customer that's, that's providing the, the maybe a lion share of revenue. Like those are extremes that you want to take into account what they're saying, but you want to synthesize it as well. And so you have to figure out a process to be able to collect that at scale and, and kind of synthesize that data at scale. Funny enough, you know, I'm going to throw out a buzzword. not a big fan of buzzwords, but I'll throw out the big one of the day, AI. In this case, AI can actually be a valuable tool because one of the things that AI is great at is taking a lot of written information and summarizing it for you, finding patterns, finding similarities, you know, that kind of thing. So getting a Mark Baldino (13:50.904) Yeah. Mauricio Steffen (14:10.405) a tool basically and I want to caution people here. had a great mentor that told me tools don't make process. So find your process first and then find a tool that fits into it. But among those tools, AI, especially LLMs today are super useful when it comes to synthesizing you through all of that written data and pull out those kind of common themes. common comments through your customers. And then, you know, an MPI process or some kind of survey scoring like that is also a valuable way of doing that because not everybody might take the time to go provide feedback. But a lot of times people will fill out that quick MPI survey because it's usually two questions, right? It's give me a rating one through 10. Tell me why you rated that. And a lot of times people will take that. extra 30 batter and different and you can get a lot of information again. So, you know, have a way of doing that. And then the other thing is don't simply just rely on those kind of tools. Go out and talk to your customers. Form, you know, form customer user groups. Form if you are a B2B kind of company and you sell through like channel partners, value-added resellers or distributors or things like that. Mark Baldino (15:21.218) Thanks. Mauricio Steffen (15:34.771) Form a partner user group because your partners, the people who selling your product, are gonna be a valuable source of information. And then listen to them, right? Don't just have the user groups and have the meetings to go through the motions. Listen to what they say, synthesize what they say, ask questions in those groups because a lot of times the first comment you get is just that surface level comment. You wanna go deeper to make sure that... you get to the actual problem you're trying to solve. I can never remember who said this quote, but the quote sticks with me, right? It's like, I think it's Henry Ford or it may have been Steve Jobs or someone like that, but it's like if you, and I'm summarizing here, it's like if you always do what the customer wants, we'd have the fastest horses on the planet, right? No one would have ever imagined the automobile as they're riding around on horses, right? And so, you know, Take what your customers are saying and your partners are saying with a grain of salt. I know I'm really being contradictory here, take what they say. But get deeper. Get into that next level. take all those things. then sometimes you may do things that your customers don't understand because you think it's strategic for your business. Sometimes you do have to make those decisions where Mark Baldino (16:37.528) I know. Mauricio Steffen (16:58.471) you you want to expand into a different market or expand into a different use cases and your partners have a hard time understanding why you're doing that and why you're not doing something else where they think that your time might be more valuably spent. And you have to bring that, especially when it comes to like, I mentioned partners, right? Especially when it comes to partners, like if you're selling channel partners, you have to bring them along on that journey. You have to help them understand. why this is important not only for your business, but for their business as well. And hopefully then you can get them to understand why, yeah, maybe they're not asking for this, but they understand why going this direction is important for your business to survive, as well as important for their business to help expand and thrive. So, and same thing with your customers. Your customers might not always understand why you do certain things as far as features, functionalities that you're releasing that you feel are strategic. or you feel are needed to demonstrate technical leadership, you just gotta be able to bring them on that journey and help them understand why those things are important. But then always, it's a balance. There's never enough resources. So make sure you are not just over-rotating on those things that are strategic, but you are delivering things that your customers are asking for as well that are valuable to them. Mark Baldino (18:18.798) Yeah, I mean, you mentioned balance a number of times and I think that's kind of key because I actually heard that Henry Ford didn't say that, although I do believe Steve Jobs quoted it. But I often hear it as a justification for not doing any research and not talking to customers and basically saying, we understand what our clients need or we think this is revolutionary. You couldn't possibly ask people how they would use something or what they want because they tell us what they want, they're just going to want a faster course. And it's almost this weird reflexive response. I had this clip sent to me by a number of clients. If any of you are happy to listen to it right now, you know who you are. Showing me Steve Jobs talking about the Henry Ford quote. But if they don't think Steve Jobs did it do market research, they're totally fooling themselves. If they don't think Apple started with prototypes and got feedback on that and iteratively improved their products over time. And that's how they did innovation that they're wrong. And so I think people sometimes use it as a shield to not expose their ideas to customers. And I mean, I know it sounds like maybe to you and your experience, or I don't necessarily know enough about Ericsson, like to say, of course you want to talk to your customers, but there are thousands and thousands of organizations out there that refuse to listen to their customers at any level and don't engage them. And to loop it back to your point about how do you engage stakeholders is by bringing them along for the process. That's how you should engage your clients is bring them along for the process. Yes, sometimes you're going to have to turn to them and say, we're not doing feature A or feature B because we don't see enough market demand or we can't do this for roadmap item. And obviously with a customer, you might not get that. Maybe with a channel partner, you would you might not get that specific with a customer. The idea is that you have to bringing people along for the ride and involving them in in the process and hearing them, listening, empathizing with them, and then demonstrating over time that, we did hear you, and this is how it impacted our product roadmap. That's really, really powerful. And I think too many people are afraid to ask those questions because they don't want to hear the answers or are afraid to ask their customers because they think they're going to steer them wrong or steer them in the wrong direction. So I never want to take it for granted that organizations that develop Mark Baldino (20:40.032) a product that human beings use. I never want to take for granted that those folks are actually spending a lot of time on customer development and working with customers and setting up panels and doing outreach and listening to them as it sounds like at Ericsson, at kind of all levels, all periods in the life cycle. Mauricio Steffen (20:56.935) Yeah, mean, you know, it's one of those things. I think that people do hesitate to talk to their customers because they don't want to hear their customers or their partners tell them that they were wrong. Like this feature was wrong. This direction was wrong. It was bad because, you know, they all even use myself as an example. A lot of a lot of time, effort, my personal, you know, My personal effort went into a lot of the features in the products that I developed and if people don't like them or don't want to use them That's a little personally devastating to me So, I mean I understand the inclination of not wanting to hear that feedback But you know, it's funny is like you're right that that quote People used to shield us. that's why I don't they they won't know what they want But but that's people who don't understand like you have to go to that next level. Yeah, they'll tell you I want a faster horse But is it really that I want a faster horse or that you just want to get from point A to point B faster and you don't care how that happens? And so I think it's a lot of just like, it's maybe is a little bit about ignoring that surface level ask and trying to get to that next level. Like what is the actual problem that you want to solve with this product so that I can understand because maybe with our collective wisdom, we could think of a better way to do it as opposed to just making a faster horse, right? Getting from point A to point B. Because now we have horses, have planes and trains and automobiles all for the point to get you from faster point A to point B. And back when it was just horses, no one would have ever imagined any of those. But they all wanted to get faster from point A to point B. And so yeah, so I think it's very important, like you mentioned, in all areas of the life cycle, everything from when it's an idea to... Mark Baldino (22:39.0) Yeah, 100%. Mauricio Steffen (22:49.925) even right before it's about to go out the door and beyond to continue to engage your customers and get that feedback. I think the other like really key piece, especially for me, is to really just, you know, you can never have enough people. Actually, let me rephrase that a little bit. When you have a group of people together, starts, you start to good, bad, or indifferent, you start to get that kind of hive thing. Right. People start to think the same way. They start to think about solving the problems the same way. New people come in and they provide you a fresh perspective. But depending on your organization, if you have a good organization, that might not happen very often. People want to stay like at Ericsson, the greater Ericsson, not just in my division. It is not uncommon to find just a decade, two decades, three decades. Right. And so it's you know, sometimes there's not a lot of turnover. And so you get that kind of high think where if you engage your customers and you engage your partners, it's really a free way to get new ideas, right? They start to either validate the way you're thinking or they challenge the way you're thinking so that you, you start to think outside of, of what you and everyone around you is normally thinking about how to solve a problem. Mark Baldino (24:12.59) I mean, I think that that's like an acute problem that many organizations have. Hivemind or just like they're blinded by their own assumptions and everyone's really, really close to the problem and we can't step back from it. And you definitely have to have the right processes in place and the right folks on your team to go out and do it. actually going out and getting a fresh set of eyes from your customers or channel partners, folks that are stakeholders. and then being willing to hear it and do something about it, because change is the hard part. Executing, going out and talking to people, mean, at scale, really, really hard, but it's like synthesizing hard. But then actually, if you're in your role, the product manager, talking to customers, partners, bringing it back, synthesizing it, trying to do next level, and then come back to the team and say, we should change course here, or we should... shift the roadmap. Like that last part is really, really hard, which is actually getting people or seeing it ourselves that I am too close to this and I do need to change. Because as you said, listen, I just recorded the last episode that was released. We talked about this, which is like, humans are not great at admitting that they're wrong. And so we put a lot of time and energy into our work lives. We're going down a path and to get confronted with something that, you know, contradicts with some of our assumptions or how we've been pushing forward is it's really hard, I think. And that's like a natural inclination. So you have to, maybe Erickson, you all have, you have to build that muscle memory of going back out, asking tough questions, and then being, like taking an honest look at it and saying, you know, were our assumptions wrong? Do we shift? Mauricio Steffen (26:01.033) Yeah, absolutely. takes a lot of, I think, uh, uh, self knowledge. It takes a lot of self reflection to be able to like, you know, unfortunately it happens sometimes it's happened to us a couple of times where we've gotten into product development and we're about halfway through a piece of hardware or a major piece of software and feedback starts coming in. Mark Baldino (26:01.954) really good. Mauricio Steffen (26:28.231) both from customers, from the market in general, that maybe this is not the right thing. And there's not just your own personal time and effort, but there's real money resources tied to having gone down there. And so it's hard to say, we need to stop. either this project is just going to stop here because we don't think it's going to be successful anymore, and we're going to save the rest of these resources knowing that you have just kind of wasted time and effort here and it's also the people who invested their time and effort here, it's hard to tell them, hey, all that stuff that you started working on, we don't know if it's gonna be successful, so we're just gonna have to put a pause on that and go do something else. And so it's really hard for people to really take that and then also from a professional standpoint, people worry about how that's gonna make them look, right? You know, I convinced everybody that we should go down this path We started down the path and now I'm the one saying we should stop and so it's it's definitely people kind of feel like one it's it's personally damaging to them and their self-worth But then they also feel like that might be damaging to their career But I would I would my feedback to people on that is like the thing that's going to be most damaging to your career is if you waste all the resources finish that product and it's a failure and And you know that you could have saved those resources and, and spent them on something else because I also had another mentor. One of his, one of my favorite sayings of his is we can do anything, but we can't do everything. So there's always opportunity cost in the decision of the thing that you decide to do and the thing that you don't decide to do. And so you don't want to do something that finished something that you know, it's not going to be successful. Mark Baldino (28:10.766) Please. Mauricio Steffen (28:26.031) in lieu of something that you could have started that might be more successful. Mark Baldino (28:30.894) No, 100%. And as you said, continuing to march down that same path, it might be shorter, but in the end, it could be more detrimental to, I mean, I don't want to say someone's career, but a group or an organization or even a company overall. And it takes a lot of strength and conviction to sort of stand up and raise a flag and say, I think we ought to reconsider this because there is a lot of risk, right? There's maybe lost money moving backwards and then it's going to take resources to sort of... shift that direction. I did want to go back to one thing, because I want to make sure that I'm understanding it correctly and how I heard it, which was this sort of balance between what a customer says they want and maybe what they need. I think your advice is to do maybe a little bit of deeper pain point and goal analysis, but also kind of root cause analysis, which is like, yes, they've stated this is what they want. but it's really going back down to the problem and then kind of continuing to do that root cause analysis to get into sort of the heart of the issue. Am I overstating that too much? Mauricio Steffen (29:37.531) No, I think you're stating it exactly right. It's like, you could have, so, you know, let's just say you have a hundred customers and 20 of them are asking for something that you think you feel is similar, but they've all phrased it a different way. Like I want, you know, this button that does this over here. I want to be able to do this workflow similar or simply or simplified. Sorry. in English today, you I want this workflow simplified, you know, something along those lines. But after you really dig into all 20 of those requests, it turns out they all want the same thing. They all have the same problem that they're thinking about solving in 20 different ways. And so, yeah, you just it's it's a little difficult and it does. And it is time an investment in time. I don't want to say time consuming, but it's an investment in time that will return dividends because Instead of figuring out which one of those 20 ways that you're going to, or one of those 20 things that you're going to do, that's going to satisfy that one customer out of 20. If you dug deeper, you could actually find that all 20 customers have the same problem and you could solve it for all 20 customers in one shot. So it is about not just looking at that surface level of, you I want X. It's Why do you want X? What problem are you experiencing that you need X for? And would you be satisfied? And then just kind of repeating that with the next customers. Like, hey, I understand that you're asking for Y, but it sounds like you have this problem. What if we solved it in that way? And you might find that you're able to satisfy more customer or partner requests that way. because you really understand the problem that they're getting to. you know, I think the things that I would say that do that is one, again, buzzword of the day, You know, find a way to synthesize a lot of written data quickly so that you can get to what those common things are and then you have a group of customers that you can talk about those common themes are. Spend time. Mauricio Steffen (31:55.593) Once you have that, spend time talking to those customers. Also, I would also recommend a way of walking in their shoes, shoulder surfing, right? If you have like a cloud software, there are definitely tools out there that will allow you to see customers interact with your solution. then you can start to, if you have that 20 customers, you can look at what they're doing and you can see commonalities in. you know, maybe they're having a challenge with the workflow or a challenge with a part of your software. So there's a lot of ways to do that, to start to gather data so that you can make those conversations, which are probably going to take the most amount of time, really meaningful. Because, you know, if you have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of customers, there's no way you're ever going to get to talk to all of them. And so you want to, when the ones that you do get to talk to, and not all of them are going to want to talk to you. So the ones that you do talk to, you wanna make sure that that time is well spent for both you and them getting to the crux of what they need. And then show movement or show value in that conversation. I think going all the way back to even those that are just submitting written requests or submitting like, know, net promoter score surveys or any kind of surveys, your customers that you value the gift that they just gave you because feedback is a gift because like you said, like we could do this in a vacuum and your business would likely fail. Maybe you get lucky and maybe you strike a chord with somebody. But if you're not listening to your customers, chances are you're going to fail. so treat that feedback as a gift and make sure that the customers understand that you feel that as a gift. Otherwise, they're just going to stop talking to you. Mark Baldino (33:49.806) I love it. Thank you for summarizing those sort of several points you've made throughout. And I'm glad you brought up the concept of a gift because it is. It's their time and energy. They don't need to provide it. And when they do and you utilize it correctly, you're giving them a little bit of a gift back. I'm sort of sifting through those gifts and figuring out which ones make the most sense. I'm not like, I think advocating for AI both in... taking large sums of data and summarizing, but also helping it do root cause analysis. Sometimes that can be hard. And asking it to help you dig deeper and give you potential root causes, well, it can do that faster, and maybe not all of them are right, and that's where humans come in to sift through that information. So I think it's great advice in how to do it at scale, how to synthesize it, and then how to help it or shift product direction. I'm gonna wrap with one question just because I thought of it at the start. And while you had a very succinct summary, hopefully I'm not gonna ruin it by asking one more question, which is like, you've dealt with a lot of different types of stakeholders in your career, in corrections, in support, you're dealing with people who are like frustrated this thing's not working and maybe a hardware issue or a software issue. Now you're working with a kind of a large array, which includes customers and stakeholders like, What's the most challenging dynamic to work in? I'm not asking you to throw your current team under the bus, but it's it's such a diverse like set of folks that you've listened to throughout your career and you've tried to advocate for them, listen to them and make changes. Like which of those is more challenging out of any of them? Mauricio Steffen (35:19.719) I think. Mauricio Steffen (35:33.417) I'm gonna use a little bit of a cop-out answer. Obviously, corrections is its own beast, right? You have people who are probably at the lowest points of their life and they're incarcerated, they're away from their families, they're away from everything that they know. Every aspect of their life is being controlled. everything from what they're allowed to have to when they're allowed to eat to when they're allowed to sleep. And so obviously that brings on its own challenges. you know, regardless of whether it's them or a customer with a technical issue or, you know, just in product management, you know, trying to align stakeholders, empathy is the key, right? People are people and you just have to empathize with what they need or what their situation is. The reason why I use empathy is, is you have to try and understand that doesn't mean you have to agree. doesn't mean you have to bend to their will. It doesn't mean any of those things, but you have to understand their point of view in order to be able to communicate effectively with them and hopefully come to some kind of consensus, you know, in corrections, whether it's getting them to do what they need to do or what they're told to do. in support, it's, you know, whether it's, it's getting them to just try that one thing where they're convinced that one thing isn't going to work, but please just do it anyway. So not because I have a script, but because I think it will work or, know, in business, it's like, you know, understanding that, Hey, I think that this is the key, you know, this is the thing we need to do. This is the direction we need to go and, trying to get everybody on board. think just that that is just empathy. understanding where the other person is coming from. Mark Baldino (37:30.264) Great. Well, I think it's very clear that you empathize with your customers, with constituents, with stakeholders, with the folks you've worked with throughout your career and your passion about the work you do. And that's fantastic. And I just want to say, including thank you for your time and energy, for joining me on the podcast, for sharing your background and journey. And really, I think are some very concrete ways that folks in product management, but also design and engineering and business can better empathize with people, ensure they incorporate customer feedback, user feedback, client feedback into their processes and help them sort of drive change within the organization. So, Mauricio, thank you very much for your time today. Mauricio Steffen (38:14.845) Hey Mark, thanks for having me. I really appreciate having me on. Mark Baldino (38:18.22) You bet. Thanks.