5 Secrets of Product Leaders with Successful VoC Programs
Insights from Ross Webb’s masterclass episode on transforming your product career with Voice of Customer (VoC)
Building a career in product management without understanding your customer is like trying to cook the perfect meal without tasting your ingredients. You might have the right tools and techniques, but without that first-hand feedback, you’re just guessing what your users crave.
That’s the analogy Ross Webb used to kick off his recent product leadership masterclass. He was joined by five seasoned product leaders who’ve all discovered the same truth: mastering the voice of the customer isn’t optional—it’s the secret sauce of product success.
Here are the five biggest takeaways. Whether you’re a solo product manager or leading a scaled product org, these lessons will help you strengthen your VoC programs, align your teams, and drive customer-centric decisions with confidence.
#1: Don’t Drown in Data—Distill It
Product Leadership Coach Phil Hornby (for product people) knows firsthand how hard it is to wrangle customer feedback. Between discovery interviews, support tickets, sales conversations, and social listening, the data is overwhelming. “We're almost like the mental Rolodex of all those different data sources and all those different data points,” said Phil. “And frankly, humans aren’t that good at huge amounts of data and actually being accurate.”
Phil’s tip? Stop trying to do it all manually. Instead, apply AI to synthesize that feedback and reduce noise—especially when operating at scale. Tools like Productboard Pulse use AI to analyze vast quantities of feedback and surface emerging trends, giving product managers a data-backed jumping-off point for decisions.
Phil also emphasized the importance of using “three lenses” to make sense of VoC:
- Data from tools and surveys
- Anecdotes from discovery interviews
- Intuition built from market and user empathy
With AI taking care of the heavy lifting, you can spend less time organizing and more time thinking critically about what your customers really need.
#2: Share the Feedback Feast with Your Whole Team
Product managers aren’t the only ones who should “taste” the customer’s perspective. According to Vandebron’s Head of Product Philipp Katzenstein, spreading VoC across your teams builds a deeper, shared understanding of the end user. Here’s his suggested approach:
- Ask developers and designers to join or lead user interviews
- Use feedback channels, like surveys for internal users and widgets for external users
- Set up weekly or biweekly check-ins to align on prioritization outside of sprint reviews
- Host ad hoc validation sessions to ensure you’re still solving the right problem
“On one part, you have to sprint review. The other part is finding mechanisms to gather feedback—making it a bit less official, but more as a routine,” explained Philipp. By involving the broader team, you move VoC from a one-person job to an enterprise-wide mindset. This improves collaboration, sharpens prioritization, and strengthens product intuition across disciplines.
#3: Let Data (Kindly) Win the Argument
Ever been in a meeting where strong opinions drown out customer needs? Justine Salter has. Thankfully, over her 15+ years as a product professional, she’s developed a savvy way to manage stakeholder expectations with empathy and evidence. According to Justine, “Everybody loves to sit in a room and have an opinion. But if you've got something in black and white in front of you… you have a chance of swaying it and changing it.”
Her secret? Use Voice of Customer data as a gentle equalizer, as opposed to a hammer. When a stakeholder pushes for a vanity project that customer data doesn’t support, Justine suggests pausing the conversation and doing more discovery instead of shutting the idea down outright. This approach saves face while keeping the team aligned with user needs.
The result is a collaborative culture where data speaks louder than egos—and where product decisions feel less personal and more purposeful.
#4: Feedback Systems Must Be Structured to Scale
When Anna Peterson took ownership of the VoC program at Housecall Pro, she discovered something that many teams struggle with: scattered feedback and inconsistent customer outreach. “Before Product Ops owned it, [our VoC program] was very disparate,” admitted Anna. “It was just our product teams going and trying to connect with our customers. So we've actually built a structure for that, making sure that we are reaching out to our customers in a consistent way and that our asks are more clear.”
Anna was tasked with building a structured, multi-tiered VoC program that aligns with both customer behavior and internal workflows. Her toolkit includes:
- Customer panels for interviews and usability testing
- A ride-along program for product teams to observe users in the field (especially valuable for trade professionals)
- Feedback aggregation from tools like Intercom, Facebook, NPS, and more
- A monthly VoC digest shared across the org to influence product, design, and business teams
The result is a scalable, cross-functional feedback engine that not only fuels roadmaps but empowers every product decision with context.
#5: Balance Internal and External Customer Needs
In financial services, your customers aren’t just the people applying for loans—they’re also your internal teams who help make those loans possible. That’s why Giancarlo Herrera (VP of Consumer Product Operations Manager at BOK Financial) takes a dual-customer approach to VoC. By treating both external users and internal partners as customers, you can:
- Build strong trusted relationships with frontline teams to gather candid feedback
- Collaborate with a dedicated intelligence group that proactively brings insights to product teams
- Feed that feedback into prioritization discussions so product managers aren’t working in a vacuum
By blending the needs of internal and external customers, you create a more holistic product experience—and avoid the trap of optimizing for one audience at the expense of another. As Giancarlo put it, “We want to make sure that we are proactively coming in to the product manager with awareness of all the data.”
The Right Ingredients, the Right Tools
Each product leader in Ross Webb’s masterclass offered a different ingredient for VoC success. But together, they delivered one clear recipe: successful product teams make customer feedback a shared, strategic asset.
And just like the best chefs rely on quality tools in the kitchen, the most effective product leaders rely on a robust platforms to scale their VoC programs. That’s where Productboard Pulse comes in. Pulse helps teams:
- Centralize customer feedback from every source
- Use AI to uncover emerging themes in minutes
- Validate intuition with data
- Turn insights into prioritizable work items in your product backlog
Hearing the Voice of Customer is great. Acting on it with clarity, speed, and confidence is better.
What Will You Cook Up?
Whether you’re leading product at a startup or scaling a mature organization, your Voice of Customer program is your signature dish, setting your team apart and turning insights into impact.
Want to learn directly from Ross and his expert network? Join us on April 22nd to get insights on the Future of Product Operations webinar.
