Transforming Customer Rage into Innovation: How One PM Turned Feedback into a Winning Product Strategy

Uh, so when, when did I have to use, uh, when I got

That is the governance space for you. Like when I joined, when I joined the team and when I took on this role. Um, in fact, I had like a month of transition time, uh, between, like, you know, my previous role and coming into this new role, and I had told my manager that, hey, I want to, like, sit in on these customer conversations even before I transitioned to the role, and my, my then current manager was OK with it. And so I would join these customer conversations and all of them were just so angry all the time. And I was like, what kind of a space am I getting into? Like, you know, if, if people are just like angry with us all the time, uh, but Uh, what I did was, um, I, I, I, I, I spoke to multiple customers, understood what are the key customer pain points from a data exfiltration standpoint, uh, and why are they blocking power platform deals. Like this got so bad in late 2019 and early 2020 that large enterprises started, uh, blocking the use of power platform across their organization. And so, yeah, and so, um, I, I, I spoke to like 15 to 20 customers, understood what are their pain points, and like I said, some of the things that they said they wanted was, hey, we want the ability to block connectors. We want the ability to, uh, block connector actions within a connector. If we don't want to block the entire connector itself. Like, for example, I want my, uh, marketing and sales team to be able to read a tweet for sentiment analysis, but I don't want them posting tweets, right? Um, so I, I, I collected, um, like, you know, what, what are the, uh, pain points that customers are facing and therefore, what are the, uh, features that like the 20 to 30 features that could potentially go into a roadmap. And I, uh, uh, uh, after that, I, I, I surveyed like 50 to 60 customers, uh, got their feedback on the high priority items, did usable studies on some of usability studies on some of the UI based, uh, pain points, and, uh, I, I built a product vision based off of that. And because the customer evidence was so solid and I had used a mix of, uh, qualitative as well as quantitative, uh, uh, information, I had also looked at telemetry. Uh, this is something that That clarity was something that the team really needed and the leadership really, really appreciated. And so once I developed the roadmap, the next step was to obviously build these features. Um, and the challenge there was that, um, the challenge was twofold. Uh, one part of the challenge was that customers were obviously very angry, uh, and they wanted like 5 or 6 features at a time, which we could not have delivered within a quarter with the resources that we had. And like I said, there were 4 or 5 partner teams, like each vertical has, um, uh, you know, a ring-fenced set of developers that work with me on, on implementing these governance policies on their end. And it is really hard to get them to prioritize things given that every team has its own set of priorities, uh, that they, uh, that they have to weigh this against, right? But again, that's, that's where the customer evidence and, uh, what is the impact to each partner team before you get to,

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so, uh, like I said, I, I collected a list of like 20 to 30 features, um, and I created a survey. In the survey, I put it into 4 buckets, Essentially, uh, like, you know, some of these features pertain to, hey, we want powerful controls, like I said, uh, to, to block connectors, etc. Another bucket was around, uh, hey, we want strong fundament fundamentals, like even the one governance feature that you have right now, it does not work on, uh, existing apps, for example.

00, this was in the survey I had grouped it into 4 buckets based on features that I gathered through interviews and field feedback, etc. Um, the third bucket was, um, customers were asking, uh, for us to integrate better with some of the existing Microsoft governance called Microsoft Information Protection. So Microsoft Information Protection integration with our platform was the 3rd bucket, and the fourth was for a more intuitive, uh, UI experience, OK. Uh, and so when I sent out the survey, it wasn't like, hey, here's a laundry list, and, you know, just help me prioritize, but I was like, hey, help us prioritize across these four different buckets. And then if you go into each bucket, what are your top features? And then overall, if you look at overall, what would be, and if you had like $100 to spend and uh you, you have $25 to spend on each feature, what would be your top four features? Um, and so based on that, I got, uh, guide I, I, I got guidance on like, you know, what are the biggest big rocks that are pain points for the customers, as well as within that, uh, how should we prioritize across different features. Uh, does that help?

Yeah, absolutely, um, and so, yeah, as I was saying, um, this is something, uh, uh, so, uh, impact doesn't, what was the impact after we delivered the features? OK, OK, uh, so first of all, um, there were, like I said, there were 20 or 30 power platform deals that were blocked, and one of them, like Shell was blocked for 2 years before I joined. Uh, so after we delivered these features, we actually unblocked, um, those, those 20-30 deals. Currently, there are no deals that are blocked in power apps and Power Automate because of the lack of governance controls anymore. Uh, so, the, the point of these governance controls is to is to actually increase our large tenant usage. Uh, and in fact, my success metric, one of my success metrics is. Uh, to get 100 customers, uh, by end of fiscal year that have, uh, over, uh, 200 monthly active usage and, uh, right now we've reached, uh, uh, 50, uh, and so that is a great start,

Uh, monthly active users.

Correct. Per per customer, 200. OK, so yeah, 2 should have more than 200 users and, and then it's considered as a large customer. And so

Uh, it, it was. I think we had like 5 customers when I started with, uh, not even 5, it was under 5 customers, um, so this was 10x growth so far. OK. Yeah, and then our aspiration is that in the next 6 months, we want to um bridge and get to 100. Yeah. OK. Yep, uh, and, and I think the most, the biggest impact for me as a product manager is that our conversations have completely turned. Like yesterday, I was presenting this to an NPR and, uh, in an NPR and this is what my CVP also alluded, like the conversations that we used to have one year ago have completely, the vibe has completely changed. It used to be like customers being really angry with us, and now when we look at the kind of comments that we're getting, it's excitement and it's, it's hope, um, and so. So, uh, yeah, uh, that's, I, I, I think there's impact both from a customer happiness and, uh, customer satisfaction standpoint, and my NSAT is through the roof, by the way. The, the aspirational NSAT goal, customer satisfaction goal we have across the org is 1, uh, 120, and, uh, my customer NSAT for data loss prevention policies is 165. So, uh, we've seen impact in multiple ways.