The biggest thing I have learned throughout my career is that all of my best ideas are not mine — they are my customer’s. Over many years of working with customers, including six years at Salesforce, I’ve seen this idea validated time and time again. In order to tap into the deep well of customer insights, you must listen to and engage with the customer early and frequently. Not once the product has been built, or once you’ve demoed it at an event. Innovative ideas come from making your customers a part of the development process consistently in a way that almost becomes second nature in your product development cycle.

In a way, every customer is like a product manager, and they are helping us understand what they truly need to take their business to the next level, and they’re excited to go on that journey with us. Nobody can build a successful product without the customer’s input and leadership. If you truly ground yourself in the ethos that your best ideas are not yours, they belong to your customers, that just changes how you approach the entire interaction.

That being said, at times you must go two steps ahead of your customers, because they are often coming from a reactive perspective.

There’s a famous Henry Ford quote, “If I asked my customers what they would have wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse.’” And he’s right. But that’s where you as a product owner and product leader must come in and try to understand what they’re really asking for. In this case, what Ford’s customers were really asking for was a faster mode of transportation — just get me from Point A to Point B in a faster amount of time. They think it’s a horse. Why? Because of confirmation bias — the only mode of transportation their brain was aware of at the time was a horse cart. As the saying goes, listen to understand, not to respond. That is the art of product management: You have to listen to the problem the customer is expressing, and make it your job to think of the solution.

As humans beings, we like to find certainty in everything, but you have to accept uncertainty when it comes to innovation. You can’t sit in a room for a year just writing product requirements — that’s not how true innovation happens, and that’s not how you provide your customers with the best possible version of your product. At Salesforce, we deliver innovation fast and predictably. We listen, iterate and innovate.

Of course Salesforce has changed in the past six years that I have been with the company, and the world around us has changed as well. From the social media boom to the smartphone takeover, and now artificial intelligence, the macro forces powering our society have changed, and in many ways Salesforce has influenced these trends. But along the way, what’s amazing is that our values at Salesforce have always stayed the same: they are trust, growth, equality and innovation. I’m always appreciative of how profound it is for these values to stay consistent while the world around us shifts dramatically.  

Trust is one of core values, and one of the areas where this is most clearly demonstrated is in our seasonal releases. Not only have we shipped over 50 releases, what makes our releases really special is that they happen like clockwork in a way that customers can rely on. The dates for our Spring, Summer, and Winter releases are set many years in advance, which creates immensely valuable predictability so that customers can prepare accordingly. Because just shipping a product isn’t enough — customers have to adopt it, which often involves change management. Predictability is fundamental to our product lifecycle.

It’s simple, but the results are incredible. Additionally, when we do a major release, there is no interruption to the customer. Whatever we ship, customers just get the new features without any customizations being lost or broken, which takes away the basic angst when it comes to accepting change. It takes away the angst and builds trust.

Shipping a release offers a particular opportunity to demonstrate a value that can be lost or misunderstood — empathy. Often you’ll be sitting around in a room and thinking, “This is such a great feature, I don’t know why nobody is using this awesome feature.” Or, “this customer is slow and their processes are subpar.” But you have to have empathy in order to understand what that customer or that company is going through, because without that understanding of their fundamental challenges, you will not be able to deliver value to them. There is a reason that a particular feature is underutilized or a customer’s processes are slow, and you need an empathetic approach in order to get to the root of those problems and make the proper adjustments.

In 2017 remember to listen to your customers. They hold all of your best ideas.