Scaling customer obsession through product ops

As your product operations career progresses, staying deeply connected to customers gets harder. 

What used to feel natural – jumping on calls, reacting to feedback in real time, and course-correcting on instinct – quickly becomes chaos when teams scale, functions multiply, and systems start to crack under complexity.

That’s why customer obsession has become such a defining advantage for modern product organizations. 

Customer obsession: Then vs. now 

When I think about “customer obsession,” my definition has changed a lot over the years. Early on, it meant staying close to users in the scrappy, startup way – everyone talking to customers, absorbing feedback firsthand, and iterating like our lives depended on it. 

But as my teams grew, I realized something important: obsession can’t rely on individual heroics. It has to become a system.

For me, true customer obsession now comes down to two things:

1. A structured, always-on voice of customer (VoC) program
2. An operating model where every decision starts with three core questions: For whom? To do what? And how is this better than their alternatives?

I often tell our customers, “You don’t scale customer empathy with adrenaline – you scale it with clarity and repeatable habits.” That’s exactly what happened inside my own teams. 

Customer obsession evolved from passion to precision, from intuition to evidence, and from individuals caring deeply to the organization caring deliberately. This allowed us to scale this function from an individual competency to an org-wide system.

Why customer-centricity matters more than ever

Right now, everything in product development is accelerating – discovery cycles, experimentation, competitive pressure, the whole thing. And yes, AI has made it possible to build almost anything. But it hasn’t made it easier to know what to build or why to build it.

As we say at Productboard: “Speed doesn’t fix stupid.” If you're moving fast in the wrong direction, you’re just compounding risk.

Today, the teams that win are the ones with the deepest, most continuous understanding of their customers. Switching costs are rising, expectations are shifting constantly, and differentiation from a feature standpoint is shrinking. 

Customer-centricity is key because engineering velocity isn’t the bottleneck anymore – deep market understanding is.

The pivotal role of product ops

This is exactly why I see product ops as the connective tissue inside an organization. Product ops helps to align teams towards one goal: customer obsession. 

In practice, that means product ops is responsible for:

• Standardizing segmentation
• Unifying customer insights
• Reducing decision drag
• Building rituals that anchor teams in reality, not opinion
• Creating one source of truth for feedback
• Driving consistent learning loops
• Ensuring cross-functional alignment

As a leader, I’ve learned that my job isn’t to add layers, but to remove friction. Culture doesn’t shift because you announce it; you need to design the systems that make the right behaviors feel natural and inevitable.

When product ops turns feedback into strategic clarity

When product ops works well, customer insight becomes a strategic asset. 

One of the clearest examples of this came when we built a unified VoC program. Before that, feedback lived everywhere, as small nuggets of information hidden away in sales notes, support tickets, success calls, and community posts. We had insights, but they were scattered and siloed.

Once we consolidated everything, patterns started emerging that we simply couldn’t see before. We could slice themes by sentiment, urgency, ARR impact, recurrence, and behavior across accounts. That level of visibility changed everything.

It helped us make a major roadmap adjustment: prioritizing a capability that wasn’t the loudest request, but represented millions in customer value across multiple accounts.

In that moment, we stopped letting opinions guide our roadmap and let the evidence steer us.

Of course, you still have to make the hard calls and manage the trade-offs, since you can’t make everyone happy at once. But with real insight, you get to clarity faster, and you align teams far more easily.

And we’re not the only ones seeing this shift. Autodesk and other leading organizations have made the same transformation: from six-month best-guess roadmaps to multi-year strategies grounded directly in customer signals.

The rituals that sustain customer empathy every day

Systems matter, but so do habits. There are three rituals my teams rely on to keep customer empathy alive day-to-day – especially when we’re moving fast or working across distributed teams.

1. Weekly learning reviews

Every week, we pause, summarize what we learned, and decide what happens next. This ritual is especially powerful when you’re building a new product because you're searching for product-market fit and shaping the early experience to make sure it lands well.

2. “Customer for whom” framing

Every product brief starts with one question: Who is this for, and why now?

When that’s paired with a clear product strategy, segmentation, and priorities, the daily decision-making becomes faster and cleaner. Plus, it prevents drift as teams stay focused on the core segment instead of wandering into edge cases.

3. Cross-functional insight sessions

Every six weeks, we bring together sales, engineering, support, customer success, and PMs to look at shared patterns across the organization. 

These sessions keep everyone grounded in real customer problems and create a shared understanding across functions. The discussions are active, energized, and consistently productive.

Together, these rituals create a rhythm of learning and alignment that reinforces customer obsession at every level.

How Productboard supports customer-obsessed teams

Productboard gives product teams the operating system they need to turn customer feedback into action. It centralizes all customer inputs, calls, tickets, notes, surveys, and connects them directly to ideas, problems, and roadmap items.

That means teams can slice insights by:

• Segment
• ARR
• Criticality
• Adoption
• Competitive context

Strategy becomes visible. Prioritization becomes evidence-based instead of opinion-driven. And now, with AI surfacing themes, patterns, and early signals, we can sense customer needs long before they turn into escalations.

Research shows around 65-80% of features often go unused. Productboard helps teams focus on the ones that actually matter.

What I hope you’ll take away in London (and why you shouldn’t miss it)

It’s not too late to join us in London.

Next week at the Product Operations Summit, I’ll be sharing what customer obsession really looks like when you treat it as an operating system.

The key takeaway of my session is: Customer obsession isn’t an attitude – it’s an architecture. 

My session tackles a challenge most product teams feel every day: we’ve optimized for speed and efficiency, but we’ve drifted from truly understanding the people we’re building for. I’ll walk through the systems, rituals, and real examples that show how leading teams turn constant streams of feedback into clarity, alignment, and confident decisions.

Because in a world obsessed with velocity, speed only matters when you’re heading in the right direction. And product ops is uniquely positioned to make that happen.