Why Product Managers Make Terrible Customers
When product managers become customers themselves, they seem to forget their craft and instead fire off wish lists as if they were talking to Santa Claus.
The moment product managers encounter friction in a tool they often become the worst kind of customer: impatient, certain, and serenely oblivious to their own hypocrisy. It resembles another professional failing: physicians make notoriously dreadful patients. The expertise that ought to aid instead narrows their field of view, as noted in How Doctors Think. PMs have the same cognitive bias, just with slide decks instead of stethoscopes.
When dealing with other people’s needs, PMs rely on interviews, journey maps, jobs-to-be-done, and a relentless focus on the value of problems rather than dreaming up solutions. But when it comes to their own needs, that discipline vanishes, just as empathy is often absent in the doctor–patient relationship. Their own frustrations acquire metaphysical importance. Friction they experience becomes self-evident, universal, and more importantly, worthy of immediate implementation. Meanwhile, other users’ problems remain subject to scrutiny, nuance, and the tedious pace of discovery. That asymmetry is not incidental: when it is my pain, no investigation is needed.
Psychology calls it egocentric anchoring: people treat their own experience as the baseline for reality. Overcoming it requires effort. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith suggested an “impartial spectator” who judges our emotions objectively as if we were not the protagonists of our own lived experiences. Most PMs attempt no such mental construct; they mistake proximity for privilege. Their feelings cease to be anecdotes or even data points and instead crystallize into commandments.
Instead of identifying a workflow failure, they prescribe a feature. Instead of talking about a job-to-be-done, they describe the mechanism they think would soothe their pain. Crucially, they rarely say why it matters.
It is a textbook case of Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality: they substitute an intractable question (the underlying problem in a complex context with gnarly constraints) for a tractable one (the feature request). In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman shows that users routinely mistake symptoms for causes and then request fixes that address neither.
The irony is that PMs recognize this behaviour instantly when someone else does it. They roll their eyes when a stakeholder demands a feature without explaining the problem. They lecture juniors about outcomes over outputs. They sigh when people talk about solutions before they have even articulated the problems. But when they are the users, they become the customer they most dread: the one who never explains the problem and never justifies the value.
Such behaviour is, according to Donald Schön in The Reflective Practitioner, not out of ignorance, but because of the illusion of mastery, or technical rationality as he calls it, in which experts can only see reality from within their own hall of mirrors rather than viewing it from the outside as with Smith’s impartial spectator. The antidote is to adopt the perspective of an impartial spectator, so PMs and doctors can remain objective as users and patients, explaining their pains without smuggling in their own biased diagnoses.
Until that moment, the product manager as a customer remains a contradictory creature: a patient who already knows the cure, and in thinking so, often misdiagnoses the disease.