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PMs! Your Network Matters for Product Discovery

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PMs! Your Network Matters for Product Discovery

First published on jonschipp.com. This article was written entirely by the author, and then polished using AI.

Everyone seems to know how important it is to have a network to find new opportunities such as new jobs and collaborations but I don't think professionals especially Product Managers, use their network enough to make them more productive at their current jobs. Founders and executives are really good at this because they have to be but the value doesn't just apply to them, it applies to you too!

Let's start with a fact. LinkedIN is the best online tool with the widest net for developing professional relationships. Period.

Before proceeding, I have 4 litmus tests for you to determine whether this article will be valuable.

  1. You have a product or market question and don't have specific persons (not orgs) in mind to ask those questions
  2. It feels effortful to find the right people/personas to talk to, you may even feel like you don't know where to begin
  3. You don't know the names, or regularly talk to the key customer facing team members (e.g. sales, customer success, etc.) at your organization
  4. You're not logging into LinkedIn several times a week. You're not connecting with people that you do and don't know, and you're not regularly sending outreach messages to your connections.

If any of those resonate or hold true, then continue reading.

Let's start with an example, imagine you're a Product Manager performing discovery for a brand-new product and need to do early tests for initial Product Market Fit on how others would perceive that product if it came to market. To start, we may ask several questions like the following:

  • Do they find the product useful? Does is solve a problem they have?
  • Is it a pressing need now, or expected to be in the future?
  • Would they buy the product if it did the solve it said it was going to?
  • Do they have budget to buy it?
  • Who is the buyer and what is their buying criteria?
  • What would they pay for it?

I've seen PMs try to get answers for simple questions like over the course of several weeks, if not months. It shouldn't be like that. Wouldn't it go so much faster if you had relationships with who you needed to talk to, and had no barriers to scheduling an interview? To solve this, a lot of PMs will spend cycles asking around their organization for customers to talk to for feedback, almost begging for a list of customers to talk to and for someone to schedule those calls. I've even seen PMs push discovery off because of the perceived effort regarding time investment (Please, please do not do that). Now, imagine being able to schedule ~5 research calls in the same week you had came up with the questions you need answered, and then you also had those answers by the end of the week to give you direction on your next steps. This can be done, and it's something I regularly accomplish in practice because I spent time building my network.

A few weeks ago, I had a hypothesis for a new product that we should offer that is not a current core competency of our business. As soon as I had the idea, I wanted to get feedback quickly to determine if this was a viable direction for us and worth pursing. I started writing out the research questions I would use to validate the hypothesis. As soon as the questions and context were written, which only took about 1-2 hours, I had 8 calls scheduled across existing customers, channel partners, MSSPs, and even non-customers by the following day. I then continued using my network and had a total of 18 calls the following week, and as a result of those calls had almost everything I needed to not only validate the initial hypothesis but to start developing a business plan and construct a roadmap based on the challenges my interviewees were facing. How did I do that? I pulled from my network.

I keep several lists of customers, partners, practitioners, and leaders in the industry that I have met or spoken to throughout my career, all of whom I can ask for their opinions and perspective depending on the problem I am trying to solve. I work in cybersecurity so my list includes our most common buying persona and decision maker: the CISO, perhaps the CIO too, their leadership teams (VP, Directors, etc.) and the practitioners on those teams that have the subject matter expertise when I need to get into the specific pains, use-cases and jobs to be done.

You see, if you have a network, you can have answers to many of your questions in little to no time at all, and for nearly any product question you may have. It doesn't have to be fancy, it could be over an e-mail, it could be a quick customer call, it could be a full research session but if you know who to talk to (which includes their persona, name, title/role and background), and have basic rapport or mutual benefit, you can get to answers very very quickly. Most people, including myself, are willing to be helpful! Product discovery can be sped up 2x-3x; and in my experience running product management teams I've seen how ineffective discovery can be in practice. I've seen it where PMs and research teams several weeks, and in worse cases even months, to get customer calls scheduled because they didn't have that network in place. The PM became the middle man, often passing the buck to other teams and waiting to hear back.

By being able to talk to the right people, you control the pace, and can get answers more quickly. Those answers can be used to help shape the direction early and get your teams focused on the right value to deliver, ultimately leading to solving customer problems faster.

Your network should serve as your base from which to pull from but it may not be enough alone as you will naturally need a more diverse pool or sample size. Your network is not fixed, it should always be growing. To instrument that, it's imperative to build your indirect network (people that know people) through your customer facing teams like sales, customer success, and technical support. This becomes increasingly important as you face new business opportunities and challenges. Leveraging others is how you scale your network. If your network is small, and you don't know who to talk to, trust me, your customer facing teams do! These people are key to learn from and they should become your best friends.

Without belaboring the point further, I put together a simple list of actions you can take to help build and grow your network. It's a constant process, one to refine over time. Remember that your network is more than just your customers and friends, as that can be a biased sample: learn from non-customers, distribution partners, peers, competitors, vendors, and more to have a diverse set of opinions & experiences to draw from.

My practical advice to build your network is to think like both an influencer and a CEO. Use similar tactics. Be visible, be a face of your organization, or a face of your craft. If you do these things, I promise it will have outsized impact on your career. Here's some simple action items to follow:

  1. Be visible, be present, and be helpful in all conversations with those in and adjacent to your field. By being visible, I mean make yourself known: who you are, what you do, the value you bring, and how you contribute. People you meet won't just know those things about you so that involves offering that information whenever it's natural to. This next one is obvious but I still think it needs to be state: talk about things outside of work, share yourself, your passions, hobbies, lifestyle, and use that a way to connect with others beyond a transactional level. This will be key to building relationships in all other steps.
  2. Post regularly. Build your brand on LinkedIN. Post about your expertise, interesting industry articles, and what you're working on or building. Use hashtags and best practices for marketing on LinkedIN. There's several articles out there that can help. If you post interesting things, others are more likely to start following or connecting with you, effectively growing your network further!
  3. Attend local meetups, conferences, and other related groups where you can connect with other professionals in person or virtually. After, connect with each person you meet on LinkedIN. Reach out to them appreciating their insight, having met and start a deeper conversation further from there. Go out for coffee, lunch, check if they will be at the next event, etc.
  4. At your organization, build relationships with customer facing teams, understand what segments and geography they focus on, and the challenges they're having. Be valuable to them: let them know about new features, ask them for feedback on what they're hearing on the product / from customers, offer to help them with their pitch, ask if you could be of assistance on any key accounts, and this one is really really important: actually solve the problems they're facing in the field. That's the most effective way to build trust, and a strong relationship with your customer facing teams. It's also how you make your business more successful. Engage with them frequently. They will help you build your indirect network which enables you do your job better, and ultimately makes theirs easier as well! At any point you should have at least 5-10 named team members that you can get feedback from, and regularly check-in with.
  5. For any customer, prospect, or professional you talk to, build a meaningful relationship, understand their pains, ask for their opinions, and connect with them on LinkedIN after. tada! that's someone new in your network. Thank them for the time and let them know they can reach out at any time if they need anything.
  6. For non-customers/prospects, use your indirect network or you can search for people on LinkedIN or on other networks (Reddit, tech forums, etc.). On LinkedIN, see who is popping up in your feed, and also try out the suggested / recommended connections. Reach out to those people to see if you can interview or chat with them. Find something that's mutually beneficial. For example, I send messages on LI every week. I just had a Zoom call with a CISO that I reached out to where we had no previous business or personal relationship but they had the experience in the domain I was researching for and offered 30m of their time to chat about their pains & market perspective. In fact, I learned they used a competitor of ours, and the call was very valuable. You never know who is going to respond!
  7. Do the same things above but for distribution partners such as MSPs/MSSPs and VAR / resell partners of your organization. They have broader market knowledge and experience with many different solutions including your competitors' solutions. This is one of your best sources of information, DO NOT SKIP. You should know the names of your most engaged partners and have regular correspondence with their key leaders or team members, including their sellers.
  8. Do the same things but for former employees that you know that have moved onto other relevant companies, and do the same thing for peers in the industry.

None of this is rocket science: it's intuitive and just makes sense. Influencer tactics, but yet many product managers don't do it. It's time to start! By following these suggestions, you will build your network brick by brick, and eventually you will have a strong foundation that you can leverage for not just product research but for much much more. You will be thankful later.