Customer engagement for product teams
You know your customers. Have you met one?
Most teams know their customers through a persona, a dashboard, or a summary from Sales. I help product teams find and engage their Crucial Few, the handful you sit across a table from rather than study, and build the programs that keep those conversations going.
"We don’t know which customers we should be listening to."Find your Crucial Few
"We’re deciding based on secondhand information."Measure your Conversation Debt
"We hear good things and nothing changes."Find your traction gapAll three are free.
A report goes stale. A relationship gets sharper.
A study is a project with a finish line. You run it, you get a deck, and the deck starts aging the day it lands. A real relationship with your Crucial Few works the other way. It gets more useful over time, because they remember your product’s history and you remember theirs. The same interviews and sessions still happen. They just feed something that keeps paying off instead of ending in a slide.
The CRUCIAL hallmarks
Seven traits mark one of these people. Together they spell CRUCIAL. The more of them a person hits, the more their voice is worth to you.
Committed
They care more than the average customer, and they show it without being asked.
Spot it: they come back on their own, again and again.
Reciprocal
They give a lot and get real value back, so the exchange stays balanced. This is the everybody-goes-home-happy trait.
Spot it: the relationship feels two-way, not like you are pulling from them.
Unfiltered
They tell you the truth, even when it stings.
Spot it: their feedback is specific and honest, not polite noise.
Connected
They bring other customers together and reach the people around them.
Spot it: others listen to them, or they link people up.
Inventive
They run ahead of the market and bend your product to do things you never planned.
Spot it: they hack, extend, or ask for what is next before anyone else.
Allied
They are on your side and want you to win, even when they disagree.
Spot it: they push you toward something better and stay in your corner.
Loyal
They stay through the rough patches and stand up for you to others.
Spot it: they defend you when you are not in the room.
Two signals, easy to mix up.
Volume
Volume is who talks the most. It's the easiest signal to pick up, which is why teams end up trusting it without meaning to. Some customers are loud because complaining costs them nothing.
Investment
Investment is who has their own job riding on your product. They planned their week around it and put their name on it inside their company, so when they flag a problem, it comes from real use. A lot of them are quiet, because they're busy.
The part that is hard to hire for
Telling volume from investment is the first hard part. The loud ones find you and the invested ones are busy, so sorting them takes more than a customer list and a hunch. Then they start talking, and the second hard part begins. When your biggest account asks for a bulk export, they usually mean their weekly report takes hours and nobody trusts the numbers. The export is their guess at a fix. Finding the right people, then turning what they say into what your product team should build, is the whole job. I've spent twenty five years doing both halves.
Finding them is only the start.
Knowing who to listen to doesn’t help if your company has no way to hear them. The Customer Conversation Compass is the five places that break once you know who matters.
How this looks in practice.
It does not stop at your roadmap.
What you learn from these customers points in more than one direction. It shapes what you build next. It shows where peer to peer support could carry weight your team is carrying now. It tells you whether that unofficial Reddit group is worth showing up in, and what you should sound like when you get there.
Consumer
LEGO
At LEGO, adult fans were about 1% of the audience. That one percent shaped products, caught problems early, and held the community together. I built the program that engaged the fans and integrated their voice into the company. Today the adult fans make up more than 45% of the LEGO business.
B2B
Accounting software
In B2B the Crucial Few look different. It’s the controller who built spreadsheet workarounds around your month-end close and knows exactly where it breaks. It’s the implementation consultant who deploys software or process across forty firms and sees patterns no single customer can see. It’s the person who calls you angry when you change something, because it impacts their work directly.
Building for your most invested customers is how products get bloated. Everyone has the scar. Somebody’s biggest account asked for a feature and the team maintained it for years.
That’s a different mistake. The Crucial Few are not a voting bloc, and this isn’t a request line. They tell you what’s actually happening in your product. You still decide what to build.
The difference is in what you ask them. “What should we build next?” turns a customer into a product manager, and they’re not good at that job. “Walk me through the last time this got in your way” turns them into a witness, which is what they’re actually good at.
“Jake understands not only how a community should work, he knows how to make it work, for real.”
Three ways in.
What I sell is simple. Each one starts by finding your Crucial Few and building a way to keep hearing them.
Compass Audit
Half a day with your team, then a written map of who you actually talk to, how often, what gets written down, and where it goes missing on the way to the people who decide. You get the readout the same day.
Sprint Workshops
Focused working sessions scoped to one problem. A field debrief, a debt debrief, an architecture review, or a tuning lab where your PMs practice with live coaching. Starting at $1,500.
Compass Engagement
We build this into how your company runs and stay with it until it holds without me.
Also here
I've built a set of free tools to show you where your team's customer conversations are working and where they've gone quiet. There's also a field guide, a podcast, and a monthly gathering you can join.
Ready to meet your customers?
Find out how I can help your team sit across the table from customers and build the relationships that change what you ship.
Book a call with Jake