The Leadership Blind Spot That Cost This Product Manager a Strategic Client

OK. Um, so, um, So, so, so, so I was a, a senior uh PM back uh back then about, uh, in the last two years. Uh, we had successfully onboarded a, uh, strategic customer, um, which was Nextera Energy, which was one of the largest, um, which is the largest, um, generator, uh, of electricity in the US, and they were using our platform to operate in two different markets. Um, the problem was that over the next, uh, uh, 6 to 8 months they they scaled their business and it went through a reorg. Where our primary users changed from um the energy analysts that we normally work with to investment bankers uh or investment banking style analysts. Um, and this was my and the company's first experience with, with this kind of an abnormal, uh, but strategic user persona. Um, and the, the problem was that these new users didn't have any background with energy markets and were and were not able to efficiently export, uh, data to support their accounting workflows using the five step wizard process that my product had at the time. Um, over the next 6 months, the customer created 17 tickets, uh, to get help with, with the reporting, uh, uh, uh, reporting data, uh, and to mitigate the situation in the short term. But first, let me pause to check if, if the situation and the problem makes sense.

Yeah. Um, and, um, the task in was, um, so in the short term to mitigate the situation, I, I scheduled a requirement gathering session with the users. I requested hypercare access to their production environment, uh, from our client services team. I had to fill up a a little bit of, uh, paperwork, uh, and then I created the reports myself for them. Um, um, the first request took about 4 days to deliver and, uh, in the coming weeks they had about 4 more ad hoc requests. Um, so it was clear to me that the users wanted to be independent, um, and didn't want, uh, to spend time explaining what the requirements are to me over the phone or via email, um, so I raised the red flags, uh, with my manager and, uh, and the account executive, um, uh, I even scheduled a two day training session. Uh, with, with these users. Um, um, um, but, however, but you know, in spite of all these efforts, the new users had higher expectations on standardization and automation. For their energy accounting workflows. And before I could fix the product gaps, they decided to not renew the license, which was about 800K a year with the, with the 6X potential because they operated in, in, in six other electricity markets that they were using competitor um softwares. Um, and so it's essentially in summary at that, you know, my, my, uh, at the time my reporting product didn't cater to, um, investment bank analyst, um, kind of user persona, and, uh, two years later I, I, I realized, uh, you know, like recently I, I, I realized that they, they went with an internal reporting tool. Uh, for, for their workflows. But

Yeah, so I view this as a as a failure even though existing customers were were satisfied with the reporting capabilities uh was because I, I could have challenged the norm and made the process much more simpler before it became an issue. Um, I, I didn't think big, big enough, um, to determine sort of where the waste is in, uh, from a time perspective when, when customers are reporting, and I realized that, uh, that, that the product performed pretty poorly because I myself was trying to do exactly what what they had asked and it took me quite a bit of time to, um, so, so really this was a fairly big product gap that nobody had complained about. Um, and people were OK with it for the time being. Um. And so, so, so this led to me working with, with the VP of software to redesign our reporting solution such that it um it works more as a one click solution, um, uh, where you can just export what you what you need in a, in a couple clicks, uh, and it has some standard, uh standard reports for month end accounting and for the, the standard use cases, um, that our customers have.

Um, so, so the problem with this new user persona was that they didn't know exactly what they needed because they didn't know what the market, um, uh, what market terminology, um, and things like that. So the first ticket came in and it basically said how do I export all volumes as well, so there are, there are about, um, I don't know, uh, about 800 or so volumes. Um, in, in the energy bills that we have, so which ones do you want? So right, so I had to figure out, um, you know, which one, and then so I had to work with them, like either get them on the call, and sometimes they didn't just show up even when I went for training, they actually didn't show up, so I just went to Miami Juno Beach for for nothing.

Yeah, the, the IT manager said they would be there, uh, and you know, you know, we look forward to having you and things like that. And so, so two people went there, me and the, the account executive. OK, fair enough, so that, yeah, OK.