Ask Teresa: What Should You Do With Insights That Don’t Come from Customer Interviews?

Teresa Torres argues that product teams should monitor customer signals from support tickets, sales conversations, surveys, and behavioral analytics, but should not treat these fragments as a substitute for customer interviews. Such inputs usually reveal what customers request or do without the underlying why, and customers often request many different features that share one underlying need. Sales and analytics can instead serve as inspiration, guiding which customers to interview and what to explore. Teresa recommends limiting opportunities on the opportunity solution tree to those the team has explored or observed firsthand. The advice helps teams avoid overbuilding and keep their discovery grounded in real context.

01Key takeaways

• Treat support, sales, and analytics inputs as signals to investigate, not as finished requirements.
• Look past feature requests to uncover the underlying need and the story behind it.
• Use recurring requests and behavioral patterns to choose which customers to interview.
• Interviews give fuller context than observations and are more sustainable week over week.
• Only add opportunities to your opportunity solution tree that you have validated firsthand.

02Key sections

Fragments Without Context

Support tickets and sales requests show feature asks but rarely explain the need, timing, or goal behind them. Without that context, teams struggle to build the right solution.

Feature Requests Hide Shared Needs

Different customers may request different features that stem from one underlying need, leading teams to build too much when one solution would work.

Limits of Sales and Analytics

Sales teams rarely collect story-based context, and behavioral analytics show what customers do but not why. Both need follow-up to understand intent.

Use Signals to Guide Interviews

Recurring requests, support pain points, and interesting behavior are useful prompts for choosing whom to interview and what to ask. Interviews remain the most effective and sustainable way to get full context.

Ground the Opportunity Space

Keep opportunities on the opportunity solution tree to those the team has explored or observed firsthand so the opportunity space reflects reality.

03From the post

“Regular touch points with customers are a pillar of continuous discovery. If you’re not regularly talking directly with your customers, you increase your risk of building a product that no one wants or needs. However, even when product trios commit to weekly interviews with customers, their companies may have”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.