📣 How to build for customers who want different things

👋 Hey friends!

Somewhere in your Slack right now, there's a message that says some version of "we need AI in this."

Your customers didn't ask for it.

Your support queue is full of much less exciting requests.

And you're the one who has to decide what to do about it.

On Wednesday I wrote about how PMs have more than one customer: the people using the product, the business, and the funding side. Today is the harder part. What do you actually do when they want different things?

In Customer Success, I kept a running list of features I didn't understand. Things that shipped with a big launch email while customers were still waiting on fixes they'd asked about for months. I fielded the "why did you build this?" tickets and secretly wondered the same thing.

Then I became a PM, and pretty quickly I was the one shipping things customers hadn't asked for.

It felt a little like betraying my old inbox.

What I learned is that most of those features weren't bad decisions. They were decisions nobody explained, built by people who never connected the business goal to a real customer problem.

Making that connection is the job.

The user. They want their problem solved with less effort. Hear them through support tickets, interviews, usage data, and your CS team. You'll know you served them through adoption, repeat usage, and fewer tickets about that problem.

The business. It needs revenue, retention, or lower cost to serve. Hear it through company goals, sales and CS leaders, and pricing conversations. You'll know you served it through a number finance cares about, like expansion, churn, or win rate.

The funding side. Investors, your exec team, whoever is betting on the roadmap. They want to know the company is headed somewhere bigger. Hear them through strategy memos, all-hands meetings, and, at a public company, earnings calls. You'll know you served them when your work fits the story they're telling the market.

If you can't name the metric for one of these, you don't understand that customer yet.

These are the tensions you'll hit most:

I'll use AI as the example, since it's on nearly every roadmap right now.

1. Find the overlap before you argue.
Look for a top customer pain the business priority could actually solve.
If leadership says "add AI to reporting" and your top ticket theme is "building reports takes too long," then AI that drafts a report from a plain-language question is the overlap. You aren't bolting AI on. You're using it to solve a pain you already know about.

2. Separate the mandate from the method.
Leadership often owns the what "we need AI". You usually own the how.
If you can't change the mandate, then put your energy into shaping the method so it serves customers, rather than fighting a battle you won't win.

3. Name the cost out loud.
Every yes is a no to something else. Write down what customers lose, like the fixes you're pushing out or the trust you spend if the feature ships half-baked.
If you're deprioritizing a top customer request, then say so in the planning doc, with the ticket count. Make it a decision leadership signs off on.

4. Pick a metric that keeps you honest.
Launch-week will always look good for a shiny feature. Track repeat use and satisfaction too.
If people try the AI feature once and never come back, then bring that evidence to the next planning cycle. The business wants AI that works, so you're protecting its goal too.

5. Close the loop in both directions.
Tell customers why you built it and what problem it solves. Tell leadership what customers said after using it.
If you only report upward, then customers keep writing "why did you build this?" tickets. (👀 Ask me how I know.)

Pick the one item on your roadmap that customers didn't ask for. This week, not next sprint, write three lines:

If you can't write line 1, take that to your manager. It's the most useful question you can ask right now.

Customers, the business, and the funding side will rarely want exactly the same thing. That's normal.

The PMs who stand out find the overlap, name the cost, and make sure everyone knows the tradeoff was made on purpose.

Your instincts are what make you good at finding the overlap. Keep them.

Hit reply and tell me: What's on your roadmap right now that customers didn't ask for? I read and respond to every reply.

P.S. If you're coming from CS and worried you're "too customer-focused" to be a PM, you're not. You just need practice speaking the business side too, and that's exactly what we work on in my mentorship sessions. Book a time on ADPList.

One of your customers is the business, and in B2B that often means the sales pipeline. Aligned gives sellers one shared space with buyers so deals don't stall between meetings.

Aligned shows you the other half. See what buyers actually do between meeting. See what they open, revisit, and share; so you know the exact next step to move things forward. And your champion gets everything they need to win internally when you're not in the room.

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