Human-Centered Product Development

The best product managers I know spend more time with customers than in conference rooms. At both SelectQuote and TBC Corporation, I learned that continuous customer discovery isn't a phase—it's a practice that should never stop.

Early in my career, I made the mistake of thinking customer research was something you did once, at the beginning of a project. You'd gather requirements, build the product, and ship it. The problem? Users change, markets evolve, and your initial assumptions are probably wrong.

At TBC, I established regular touchpoints with dealers and consumers. We conducted interviews, watched users navigate our platforms, and analyzed support tickets and feedback. This wasn't delegated to a research team—product managers need to be in the room, hearing frustrations and observing struggles firsthand.

One particularly eye-opening session involved watching a dealer try to schedule service appointments through our B2B portal. What we thought was intuitive took them over five minutes and multiple phone calls to our support team. That single observation led to a complete redesign of the scheduling flow.

At SelectQuote, I implemented continuous discovery habits with our product teams. We talked to customers every week—not just when we had specific questions, but to build ongoing relationships and understand their world. This led to insights we never would have discovered through surveys or analytics alone.

The key is to focus on the problem space, not the solution space. Ask customers about their goals, their struggles, and their context—not what features they want. Features are solutions, and customers aren't always the best at designing solutions. But they're experts at experiencing problems.

Customer-centric product development isn't a methodology—it's a mindset. It means being humble enough to know you don't have all the answers and curious enough to keep asking questions.