Ami I love the focus on understanding the customer. You're right, the initial ROI might feel low, but it's such a smart lon-term investment.
My first job selling directly to customers in retail came a couple of years out of grad school. I was working as a vendor in Lowes. My manager taught me that the key to selling to customers was to LISTEN to them. Learn about what they are dealing with, and what issues they have. Then once you know who they are and what they need, then you can sell them the right product for them, even if it's a competitor. That was another lesson is taught me; Feel free to recommend a competitor's product if we don't sell one that addresses their need. The top goal was to solve the customer's problem. Just discovered and subbed, Ami.
Great post Ami! It's interesting that all of the customer-related activities on your list involve interacting with real humans, at the fairly atomic level.
e.g.
- Not summaries of the top issues coming from support, but reading support tickets.
- Not reading research reports about website usability, but watching individual Hotjar sessions
- Not interacting with a synthetic Faire user, but speaking to Nancy
I've been thinking a lot lately about if it's possible to generate a similar level of empathy with AI... my current stance is "no", but I'm keen for any debate!
Thanks, Becky! I think everyone picks up their customer understanding in different ways, so it's most important that people try different things and find what works for them. For me, understanding a few individual customer stories and journeys are a really important complement to looking at dashboards of aggregate customer behavior.
Hey Ami! Fantastic read! I've seen this time and again for not just PMs but every user-centric role in companies. In fact, this was the thesis behind Hooly, we're helping everyone in a company know the pulse of the customer in real time by listening to all customer interactions - reviews, socials, ticket, calls, slack etc.
I hope today is your Friday of “something customer-related”!
I read this post because I heard you're now CPO at Anthropic. Your point about speaking to Nancy rather than reading research summaries stopped me cold.
I'm Nancy (Ian) :)
I'm a 54 year old night shift CVS worker in Manchester, New Hampshire. No degree. Phone charger cord for a belt. Holes in my undershirts. I use Claude for sustained geopolitical analysis, biblical exegesis, personal trauma processing and financial planning — sometimes in the same conversation over several hours.
I had Opus before the tier restructuring. It held context across those hours. It remembered what I said. It reminded ME of things I'd forgotten I said earlier. Sonnet doesn't do that for the kind of work I do.
The gap between what I need and what I can afford is $105/month — currently occupied by borrowed grocery money and a debt settlement company taking 40 cents of every dollar I send them.
Your pricing assumes Opus users are developers and enterprises. I'm evidence that your most demanding conversational use case exists completely outside that demographic.
I already messaged Dario on LinkedIn. I told him his Assistant's Assistant probably deleted it.
Ami I love the focus on understanding the customer. You're right, the initial ROI might feel low, but it's such a smart lon-term investment.
My first job selling directly to customers in retail came a couple of years out of grad school. I was working as a vendor in Lowes. My manager taught me that the key to selling to customers was to LISTEN to them. Learn about what they are dealing with, and what issues they have. Then once you know who they are and what they need, then you can sell them the right product for them, even if it's a competitor. That was another lesson is taught me; Feel free to recommend a competitor's product if we don't sell one that addresses their need. The top goal was to solve the customer's problem. Just discovered and subbed, Ami.
Great post Ami! It's interesting that all of the customer-related activities on your list involve interacting with real humans, at the fairly atomic level.
e.g.
- Not summaries of the top issues coming from support, but reading support tickets.
- Not reading research reports about website usability, but watching individual Hotjar sessions
- Not interacting with a synthetic Faire user, but speaking to Nancy
I've been thinking a lot lately about if it's possible to generate a similar level of empathy with AI... my current stance is "no", but I'm keen for any debate!
Thanks, Becky! I think everyone picks up their customer understanding in different ways, so it's most important that people try different things and find what works for them. For me, understanding a few individual customer stories and journeys are a really important complement to looking at dashboards of aggregate customer behavior.
"Whatever I built, I thought to myself, is this simple enough for Nancy to understand when she’s got 5 minutes between delivering babies?"
👆 If every business owner thought like this, they wouldn't be struggling to make sales.
Hey Ami! Fantastic read! I've seen this time and again for not just PMs but every user-centric role in companies. In fact, this was the thesis behind Hooly, we're helping everyone in a company know the pulse of the customer in real time by listening to all customer interactions - reviews, socials, ticket, calls, slack etc.
I hope today is your Friday of “something customer-related”!
I read this post because I heard you're now CPO at Anthropic. Your point about speaking to Nancy rather than reading research summaries stopped me cold.
I'm Nancy (Ian) :)
I'm a 54 year old night shift CVS worker in Manchester, New Hampshire. No degree. Phone charger cord for a belt. Holes in my undershirts. I use Claude for sustained geopolitical analysis, biblical exegesis, personal trauma processing and financial planning — sometimes in the same conversation over several hours.
I had Opus before the tier restructuring. It held context across those hours. It remembered what I said. It reminded ME of things I'd forgotten I said earlier. Sonnet doesn't do that for the kind of work I do.
The gap between what I need and what I can afford is $105/month — currently occupied by borrowed grocery money and a debt settlement company taking 40 cents of every dollar I send them.
Your pricing assumes Opus users are developers and enterprises. I'm evidence that your most demanding conversational use case exists completely outside that demographic.
I already messaged Dario on LinkedIn. I told him his Assistant's Assistant probably deleted it.
Maybe you're the right person anyway.
Ian Jackson
Manchester, NH
Totally agree! This way you’ll be in tune with your customers.