Your team just spent 3 months and $500k on a 'game-changing' new feature. You launched it yesterday to crickets. Your customers either hate it or, worse, didn't even notice it.

You didn't build a 'game-changer.' You built a P&L-killer.

This isn't an engineering failure...it's an alignment failure. Your team is building what they think is important and not what your customer is willing to pay for.

Fluent PM Playbook #20: The Stop Guessing Fix

As an MBA and a PSM, I don’t just align the team to the business. I align the business to the customer.

My playbook is simple: We stop guessing. We start listening.

I bridge the engineering team directly to the customer’s pain:

1. Engineers on Sales Calls: I have my tech leads shadow sales calls. They hear the customer’s pain, objections and “must-have” requests firsthand.
2. Support Tickets = The Real Backlog: I analyze every support ticket. This is not a “cost center”. It’s a goldmine of customer data telling us exactly what’s broken and what’s valuable.
3. P&L-Based Prioritization: We don’t build the ‘coolest’ idea. We build the feature that our top 10 clients are all screaming for.

We stop saying: “I think this would be a good feature to build.” We start saying: “Our clients have threatened to churn without this feature. The cost of not building it is $2M in ARR.”

Stop letting your backlog be filled with your team’s assumptions.

Start filling it with your customer’s direct problems.

One is a guess. The other is a business case.

You're burning money on "wasted work." You feel the friction, but you can't measure the cost.

Stop guessing. I built a 60-second calculator to find the real number.

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P.S. It's free. No email required