Listening is hard

Both product managers and product marketers have to be top-notch professional listeners. Among other consumers of the insights that come from listening, the development team depends on product management to be the conduit of useful information from the outside world. Arguably,  listening to users, stakeholders, partners, and other "outsiders" is the supreme skill among skills for PM. If you fail to listen, every other PM responsibility falls apart.

Unfortunately, for professionals on the move, listening is inherently hard. There's always the next appointment, the urgent e-mail, the distractions from what you're doing right here, right now. To compound matters, there's the company's own agenda, or your personal agenda, that interferes with your listening ability. The mental HUD that overlays your conversations with customers puts bright and flashing circles around the statements you want to hear.

But don't feel too bad. Everyone struggles to be a good listener. In a Fresh Air interview this week, Lisa Sanders, who just wrote a book about the alarmingly high frequency of medical misdiagnosis, cited a study that found that doctors wait an average of only 20 seconds before they interrupt their patients' account of their symptoms. Even when the stakes are, quite literally, life and death, doctors can't shut up long enough to hear all the important details, even though any particular detail might be critical for the diagnosis.

Product managers and product marketers also struggle to listen. For instance, you might pay attention just long enough to hear an IT person say that your boffo collaboration tool should help them solve a particular problem. Unfortunately, for psychological and organizational reasons, you might overlook the critical qualifier, should.

For the same reasons, when the IT person starts talking about some of the obstacles they've faced when rolling out collaboration tools, you might jump immediately to the 101 sure-fire ways to  overcome these obstacles. Swallow those suggestions. At this point, your job is just to listen carefully, and to think about the other people in this organization, beyond IT, you might also need to hear—you know, the people who are actually using your tool, and not just implementing it.

Comments

[Dr. Jim Anderson]

I'll confess to being guilty of poor listening if you will. You know that you have a problem when you find yourself not really listening, but rather waiting for the other person to shut-up so that you can start talking again!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
http://www.TheAccidentalPM.com
The Accidental PM Blog
"Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager"

Subscribe to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter now - Click Here!: http://www.theaccidentalpm.com/subscribe-to-the-accidental-product-manager-newsletter"