The cadence of speaking to customers

I got this email from calendly today, a nice prompt to share my thoughts on the cadence of talking to our users.

The product folks will tell you, that you should be talking to the customers all the time. I don't, and I'll tell you why, I am averaging 2 customer calls a week I wouldn't say I am constantly talking to customers. I would love to get this number up, but with all the other pressures I find it hard to do so. I would love a constant stream of engagements with customers and users. I just can't find the time in the day to manage the overhead.

For me, it is more fits and bursts. When I have a need to learn something, usually a new feature being developed, I go and seek the answers to disprove our ideas. 

It isn't just customers, I got what I thought was a spam sales email from usertesting.com last year…

Turns out I was top of the class after the email was corroborated with my line manager. I don't have the data on this one, but I would be aiming for similar numbers so I imagine it is ball park in the same region of 2 users a week. So 4 users a week at my peek. Usually compressed into waves where I would be doing 2-4 a day for a week.

Then there is the proxy customer. Our customer facing people calls, I don't track those explicitly and the relationship is different. They'll come to me, and we'll chat, and sometimes when I'm researching I'll go to them.

What is a good cadence?

If you can get a regular cadence great please share how you do it and the uplift you get over my more ad-hoc approach. 

The moral of this post is, if you listen you will unlock one of the many doors on your way to success. Does it matter if it is weekly at 4.30pm or just whenever you can fit it in, or in blocks… not nearly as much as not talking to customers in the first place.