Viable’s Product Team Alignment Strategy: Breaking Down Enterprise Feedback Silos
Product teams in large enterprises face a paradox: they’re responsible for customer-driven decisions but are often furthest from direct customer feedback. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Daniel Erickson revealed how recognizing this disconnect led Viable to reshape their entire go-to-market strategy.
The Hidden Problem in Plain Sight
“Product tends to be the team that needs these insights from those other teams,” Daniel explains. The challenge wasn’t a lack of customer feedback – it was that feedback was scattered across multiple systems and teams. As Daniel notes, “80% of data that is collected by companies today is unstructured text” including “survey responses and App store reviews and social media mentions and call transcripts and help desk tickets.”
This fragmentation forced product managers into a constant cycle of internal information gathering. They had to “go to each one of these and they go talk to people about this and inevitably what happens is these people are like, it’s not their job to distill all of this stuff down.”
From Symptom to System
Viable’s breakthrough came from recognizing that this wasn’t just an inconvenience – it was systematically preventing product teams from making truly customer-informed decisions. The evidence appeared in how teams were forced to operate: they could only report on “the most recent thing or the loudest thing,” missing the broader patterns in customer feedback.
The scale of the problem became clear when they discovered that even highly efficient companies like Superhuman “were spending about 12 hours a week just analyzing that data.” If companies known for operational excellence were struggling this much, it signaled a deeper industry-wide challenge.
Building for the Product Team’s Reality
Rather than building analyst tools, Viable took a different approach. “What’s different about us is that we are actually building analyst,” Daniel explains. “We’re not building tools for analysts. Our end user is the business user who would normally be going to analyst to get this information.”
This distinction shaped their entire product approach. Instead of requiring product teams to learn new analysis tools, they built a system that could answer direct questions about customer feedback. Product managers could ask anything from broad questions like “what do customers love about our product?” to specific queries like “which video chat services should we integrate with our calendar invites?”
The Enterprise Validation Journey
Their focus on product teams as primary users shaped their go-to-market strategy through three phases:
- Initial validation through investor networks, which Daniel considers “probably the best way to sort of get your flywheel going”
- Targeted outreach specifically aimed at product teams, focusing on understanding “who is the actual buyer here, who are the users, what’s our best way in”
- Building content that spoke directly to product team challenges, leading to “about 50% month over month increase in website traffic”
The Future of Product Feedback
Looking ahead, Viable is evolving toward what Daniel calls “generative analysis,” focused on “tying company goals back to customer feedback and helping you use customer feedback to achieve those company goals.” This vision extends beyond simple feedback analysis to actively helping product teams achieve their objectives.
Framework for Enterprise Product Alignment
For founders building tools for enterprise product teams, Viable’s experience offers several key insights:
- Look for manual processes that successful companies still haven’t automated
- Focus on eliminating cross-team friction rather than just improving individual team efficiency
- Build for the business user, not the analyst
- Align product capabilities with existing team workflows
- Think in terms of outcomes rather than just analytics
The meta-lesson? The biggest opportunities in enterprise software often come not from creating new capabilities, but from eliminating the friction that prevents teams from using their existing capabilities effectively. As Viable demonstrates, helping product teams access and act on the feedback that already exists can be more valuable than generating new kinds of feedback.