During a discussion with a UX designer and a development manager at a recent Product Management Consortium meeting here in Seattle, one of the topics that came up involved some of the things that Product Managers do or say that they find annoying, ridiculous, or just upsetting. And, interestingly enough, one of those was the insistence that Product Managers are the “voice of the customer.”
Initially, this shocked me a little bit, as one of the things that nearly every PM training program, certification program, and general rah-rah pow-wow reinforces in us is that we need to be the “voice of the customer” in everything that we do. Obviously, the fact that something so heavily ingrained in our profession causing such aggravation with the very people we rely on to express that voice is something worth digging into.