My first boss ran customer service
One of my first bosses in product management was a customer service manager who realized he was spending more time acting like a PM than managing customer service. He convinced leadership to let him create a new product team and hire dedicated PMs. I was his first hire.
What shaped me more than any MBA course was his view from working with customers and sales teams every day. He showed me what customers sounded like, unfiltered, when they were struggling with our products in the field. He worked at the edge where our company met the real world, and that's where I've looked for new ideas ever since.
To this day, whenever I start a new PM role, I spend my first day sitting with customer service agents and salespeople, then reach out directly to key customers. It builds trust, and I come away with an honest read on how the product is doing. It also shows me who the edge thinkers are, the people I'll go back to later.
A taxonomy prototype with no budget
A few years later I was working with a technical architect who understood that properly structuring our unstructured data would make a big difference for our chatbots, AI, and reporting. He started prototyping taxonomy solutions in his spare time, for fun.
When he showed me his demo, I was impressed. It addressed real problems I'd been hearing from customers. We had no budget for that kind of infrastructure work, so I encouraged him to keep exploring.
Later that year our company acquired a rival, and suddenly we had a cross-organizational integration project with real resources. The obvious move was to dump their data into our existing system. I remembered the architect's taxonomy work and asked him to demo it to the integration team, and both teams saw the potential right away.
The project was a massive success. It generated millions in additional revenue through better AI capabilities, new efficiencies, and lower system costs. If I hadn't built a relationship with that architect and given him room to share his ideas, we would have missed it completely.
Seniority decides whose ideas get heard
In the organizations I've worked in, ideas get valued by the seniority of whoever had them, and much less by what they could do. Product people report the same pull. In Product-Led Alliance's State of Product Management research, 57.8% said leadership direction and internal priorities shape product strategy, a little more than the 54.9% who said customer needs and user insights do.
The architect's taxonomy work almost got ignored because infrastructure ideas from individual contributors don't get airtime in executive strategy sessions. My CS-manager-turned-boss saw opportunities that executives missed because he spent his days with real customers. The people closest to the problems were the ones who saw what everyone else was missing, precisely because they hadn't been conditioned by "that's how we've always done it" thinking.
Relationships made both stories work. My first boss built one with me and showed me what unfiltered customer feedback looked like. Years later, I built one with that architect and gave him room to keep exploring. A suggestion box or an innovation committee wouldn't have produced either breakthrough. Someone had to take the time to listen at the edges and then act on what they heard.
I'd start with customer service, junior engineers, and new hires. Give them a regular way to tell you what they're seeing, unfiltered, and when someone shows you a prototype they built in their spare time, pay attention.