Hello Reader,

When was the last time you spent more time preparing for an internal review than talking to a customer?

Not because you're lazy. Not because you don't care about customers. But because the internal systems have gotten so complex that navigating them well feels like it has become the entire job.

Stakeholder alignment meetings. Quarterly planning rituals. OKR calibration sessions. Status updates for three different audiences. By the time you get through the internal maze, there's no time or energy left for the person the product is supposed to serve.

Here's the catch. This doesn't solely happen at companies with bad processes. It also happens at companies that have invested heavily in getting their internal systems right. They've built operating models, defined decision rights, created governance structures, established planning cadences. All good things. All necessary.

But somewhere along the way, the process became the product. Teams measure their success by how well they execute the internal playbook: roadmap delivered on time, OKRs hit, stakeholders satisfied. The customer becomes an input to a process rather than the reason the process exists.

How companies lose the customer signal

This is something Denise and I wrote about in Product Operations. Most product managers understand they need to be talking to customers. We've been hammering on this message for the past ten years. So why are they still not doing it? Mostly, because of the nightmarish logistics that build up as organizations scale.

Sales and customer success start acting as gatekeepers, restricting access to accounts. Management worries that product teams will burden customers by reaching out too often.

PMs end up contacting the same handful of users over and over, creating an echo chamber. And the insights that do come from research get isolated to the team that conducted it, so nobody else benefits.

This is well-intentioned organizational design that has the unintended consequence of cutting off customer signal. The company built protective layers for good reasons, but those layers quietly made it harder for the people building the product to stay connected to the people using it.

Optimize globally, not locally

One of the hard parts of fixing this is making sure you are optimizing globally, not locally. When businesses start to introduce process optimization, a lot of the time they silo it.

In one of our old podcast episodes (Episode 65), Jeff Gothelf shared a story that illustrates this perfectly. Marketing optimized for acquisition so aggressively that they destroyed retention. Their numbers looked great inside their own silo but customers were leaving. The teams were executing their internal playbooks perfectly and the customer experience was falling apart.

If you are trying to optimize your Product Operating Model, you need to look at the entire picture of how you serve customers end to end. That means not only across product and engineering teams, but also across marketing, sales, support, and operations. To do that well, you need to always be focused on your customer.

The question nobody asks in planning meetings

Most quarterly planning sessions start with "what did we commit to?" or "what's the status of our roadmap?" Almost none start with "what have we learned about our customers in the last 90 days?"

That's the tell. If your planning conversations are dominated by internal status and delivery tracking, your teams are optimizing for the org chart. If they start with customer learning, patterns from research, and shifts in behavior, your process is doing what it's supposed to do.

The fix isn't to throw out your operating model. The fix is to audit where your teams actually spend their time. Map your typical week as a product manager. Count the hours spent in internal meetings versus customer-facing work.

Look at what gets celebrated: is it shipping features or discovering insights? Check whether customer research has a recurring place in your cadence or whether it only happens when someone makes time for it.

The process should point outward

I wrote Escaping the Build Trap because I kept seeing teams build features nobody wanted. After all these years, the build trap hasn't gone away. It's just wearing better clothes now.

Instead of shipping without thinking, teams are planning without listening. The internal machinery has gotten more sophisticated, but it's still pointed inward.

What would change if your next planning meeting started with customer insights instead of a status update?

Until next time, Melissa Perri Founder Product Institute, Board Member, and Teacher

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