Getting Rigorous Customer Feedback Can Save Your Business - Taylor Sell, Trainual

Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

Customer feedback is no trivial matter at Trainual. 6 hours of weekly customer calls are non-negotiable. It’s how they build a product that’s replica-proof.

At the beginning of the episode, Taylor shares the story behind Trainual’s restructuring exercise that they went through after discovering inefficiencies that were stopping them from scaling. In Taylor’s words “people were stepping on each other’s feet too much”. He explains how a new vertical structure helped free teams and streamline workflow.

About Taylor

Taylor Sell is the Director of Product at Trainual. When he first started out at Trainual in 2019 he made sure that weekly customer call days are a staple of their discovery process. In fact, customer call days are 6 hours long. They take place every Friday - and you can’t weasel your way out of them if you’re part of Taylor’s product team.

Key Web Links:

Product Board (product management system): https://www.productboard.com/

Grain (recording tool): https://grain.co/
Follow Taylor Sell: LinkedIn

Website: https://www.trainual.com/

SHOWNOTES:

0:10 | Who is Taylor Sell (Trainual)?

00:43 | The story behind the Trainual’s hyper-growth.

03:02 | Challenges that were hindering Trainual from scaling.

04:36 | How creating product lines helped Trainual operate at scale.

06:28 | Getting buy-in from employees before shifting the workflow.

08:27 | How long does it take to make a workflow shift in a start-up (and speed bumps along the way)?

11:41 | Opening avenues for relationship building when restructuring your start-up.

14:05 | How do you fill data gaps when you cannot get in front of your customer on time.

19:25 | Why customer call days have to be a pillar of your discovery process.

21:25 | How to prepare for customer calls, what to focus on, and how long to spend preparing.

23:43 | Should you focus more on iterating existing features or rolling out new features?

27:37 | Tools to help you track or discover new product requests.

29:37 | Why companies don’t invest in transparent product processes.

32:58 | How to avoid the distracting pressure of big clients.

34:40 | Shiny object syndrome: how to develop a product that cannot be replicated.

36:47 | Should you ask your users what you should build? (and how to phrase questions to extract useful information)

39:21 | How to determine the validity of building a new feature from customer interviews.

QUOTES:

“As product managers, as people in product, we are juggling so many different things. So if you really don’t carve out time to have those types of conversations or sit down with customers, you will fill it with a million other things that are on your plate. So, for us, we do customer call days every single week.” Taylor Sell - [17:50]

“Do we want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building something that could be wrong or do we want to take a little bit of time for a couple of individuals to do some of that validation early on and the chance of success - the chance of building something that’s actually going to valuable to our customers is going to go much much higher. And so if you think about it that way and the money you’ll spend on a product that fails vs. spending a few hours upfront or a day upfront to make sure the success of that feature or product goes up significantly - it’s a no brainer.” - Taylor Sell [20:49]

“It’s important to understand as a product leader, and as even product management, who is our customer? Who are we trying to solve for? What are the problems that they have? And how do we solve those problems a thousand times better than anybody else in the market? And that should be your focus - it is doing something so well that people can’t reproduce it and people can’t replicate it easily.” Taylor Sell - [35:13]