How do product teams prioritize what to build next? They listen.
We spoke with 10 product professionals and found that no matter the size of the industry, the best product teams constantly listen to their customers.
Just ask John Barrett, group product manager of AI and customer experience at FourKites, an AI-powered supply chain software company.
“Something I really value about the FourKites culture is how closely we work with our customers,” Barrett said. “We embed ourselves in their operations to learn how the business actually runs, rather than showing up to collect requirements.”
John Lago, principal product manager at legal AI company GC AI, also views customer feedback as the key to building impactful products.
“I spend a lot of time on calls with customers discussing new product ideas and approaches,” Lago said. “We’re constantly drawing signals and insights from our customer Slack channel, in-app feedback and sales calls to discover new products.”
According to Lago, his employer values openness and transparency, so all of their qualitative and quantitative data is accessible to anyone in the company — regardless of role.
Read on to see how these leading product teams stay connected to their customers while moving products forward.
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iManage develops an intelligent, cloud-enabled, secure knowledge work platform
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
Our customers are law firms, corporate legal departments and professional services organizations, which means the software we build sits underneath work where security, defensibility and governance are not negotiable. That raises the bar on everything. A feature that is merely clever does not survive when met with the critical rigor of these environments.
On the platform side specifically, product managers own foundational capabilities that dozens of downstream experiences depend on; infrastructure, APIs, security and governance controls. The scope is wide and the leverage is real, but so are the constraints: You are rarely the only stakeholder and you cannot ship your way out of a bad architectural decision. So the job rewards people who are comfortable going deep technically, think in systems and who can hold a two-year arc in their head while shipping something useful this quarter. All of this while building agreement across teams that do not report to them.
The reality is that it’s more influence than authority. People who find that energizing do very well here!
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
We start from the customer’s problem, not from a feature request and we try to stay honest about the difference. A request is a solution someone has already picked. Our job is to work backward to the underlying job they are trying to get done, because that is usually where the better answer lives. From there it is a loop rather than a ranked list. We map opportunities against the outcome we are trying to move, identify the assumptions a given bet depends on and test the riskiest ones before committing engineering capacity. Every initiative has to connect to a company-level outcome. If a product manager cannot draw that line in one sentence, that is a signal the work needs rethinking, not better slideware. We then review the whole portfolio regularly, pairing leading and lagging indicators deliberately. Lagging metrics tell you whether the bet worked. Leading metrics can tell you whether it is working in time to do something about it. Reporting only the lagging number is how teams discover problems a quarter too late. The last piece is decision rights. Ambiguity is what turns prioritization into a volume contest and platform teams are especially vulnerable to it. We work hard to be explicit.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
The pace is fast, but the payback horizon on platform work is long. Those two things coexist and candidates should go in clear-eyed about it. You will ship continuously and some of your most valuable work will not visibly pay off for several quarters.
Platform product managers operate in a data-driven environment where decisions depend on evidence. Disagreement is welcome and frequent. What we ask is that people be able to answer two questions — what do you believe and what would have to be true? If someone cannot answer the second one, they are not arguing a position, they are defending one. It’s important on our team to do both.
Collaboration is heavily cross-functional. Platform product managers work daily with engineering, product marketing, security and the product teams (among others) building on top of what we deliver. The most effective people here are the ones who treat internal teams as customers with the same care and curiosity as they apply to external ones.
Monte Carlo is the agent trust platform that unifies data and agent observability to monitor, troubleshoot and improve production AI systems.
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
I work on agent observability, helping teams see what their AI agents are actually doing in production and it’s a category new enough that there’s no playbook to inherit. The expectation here is that you form your own point of view from primary evidence, like sitting in the customer calls, reading the traces yourself and working the problem alongside engineering. We also run the product against our own internal agents, so we live with our decisions before customers do.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
We focus on detecting failure modes we can point at in real production data. An agent that loops fifteen times and burns a million tokens while reporting success, or one that answers a revenue question confidently without ever querying the database. Those earn roadmap space, because they’re what erodes trust in agents at scale. Each bet runs as an explicit experiment with an owner, a ship date and a readout where we graduate it, extend it or retire it. The discipline that actually matters is being honest at the readout about what didn’t work.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
The ground under this category moves quickly, with new models, new agent frameworks and new telemetry standards, so we optimize for short decision paths over airtight plans. It’s normal for someone to post a broken thing in Slack in the morning and have the fix shipped by the end of the day.
MarketAxess Holdings, Inc. is a fintech company with the goal of digitally transforming one of the world’s largest financial markets, enabling the shift from analog, phone-based trading to a fully electronic marketplace.
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
It’s a fast-paced, challenging and highly collaborative environment. Product management sits at the intersection of business, technology and client needs, making partnership across teams central to how we work and make decisions.
One of the most rewarding aspects of the role is developing deep subject matter expertise while tackling increasingly complex initiatives. Over time, you build the market, business and technical knowledge needed to connect customer needs with scalable solutions. Working closely with engineering is a core part of the job, from product design and technical trade-offs to long-term platform decisions.
A key lesson I’ve learned is how to navigate ambiguity. Not every challenge comes with a clear path forward, but we’re empowered with the tools, data and support to break down complex problems and make informed decisions.
The best advice I received was that every few months you may feel like you know nothing. If that happens, it’s often a sign that you’re learning, growing and pushing yourself into new territory. In many ways, that mindset reflects the culture of the team.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
Customer feedback is the foundation of our roadmap. We spend significant time engaging with clients, identifying recurring pain points across user segments and looking for ways to solve problems at scale rather than through one-off solutions.
We also closely monitor the competitive landscape and rely heavily on data to validate assumptions and guide decision-making. By analyzing user behavior, adoption trends and engagement metrics, we gain insight into where demand is growing and which workflows are gaining traction.
We then evaluate opportunities against implementation effort, technical complexity and strategic value. Prioritization becomes a balance between solving meaningful customer problems, delivering business impact and investing in long-term growth.
Throughout the process, we partner closely with product specialists and leadership to ensure roadmap decisions align with the product’s broader vision and strategy.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
Candidates who enjoy solving complex problems, working across teams and learning quickly will do well here. It’s a dynamic environment where attention to detail matters and priorities can shift as new information becomes available.
Product decisions often impact client workflows, technical systems and business objectives simultaneously, so balancing detail with strategic thinking is an important part of the role. Decision-making at MarketAxess is highly collaborative and data-driven. We work closely with engineering, product specialists, sales teams and clients to understand situations from multiple angles. At the same time, we strive to remain flexible. If customer feedback, usage data or market dynamics point us in a different direction, we’re ready to adjust priorities and pivot quickly.
BigTime is a software company that helps consulting firm teams do their best work. The company’s flagship product is a SaaS-based system that is custom-built for accounting, architecture and engineering, consulting, creative, government contracting, IT services and law firms.
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
No two days are the same on the product team at BigTime and that’s one of the things I love most about being on this team and what keeps me energized. From my view in product operations, I get a front-row seat across our product lines and I have the opportunity to see initiatives come to life, from early planning and customer discovery, all the way through launch and adoption. I also get to connect people and teams across the business, helping ensure everyone has the right level of context and visibility needed to turn these initiatives into meaningful outcomes for our customers.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
Data, data, data! We spend a lot of time collaborating with our partners across the sales and customer experience teams, talking directly with customers and looking for patterns in what we’re hearing. Our bi-monthly product advisory council also gives us a regular opportunity to bring customers into the conversation and learn directly from their experiences. In parallel, insights from Pendo, Gong and Zendesk help us validate that feedback, connect the dots and understand which challenges are coming up most often. We then balance those insights with our product strategy, business goals and technical considerations to thoughtfully decide what to build next and where we can make the greatest impact.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
Because no two days are the same, it’s important to be comfortable adapting and pivoting when new information emerges or priorities shift. Collaboration is a big part of how we work, both within our product team and with our cross-functional partners. What I also appreciate is the autonomy we have to make decisions rooted in data and facts, while still staying curious and open to experimentation. That means being willing to get creative, see what resonates, learn through trial and error and use those insights to find the best path forward.
Huntress is an enterprise-grade, people-powered cybersecurity company.
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
Product managers function as CEOs of their product lines. They’re responsible for setting defensible focus on the biggest problems/opportunities, articulating mid-long term outcomes that propel the business forward and leave our customers massively more protected and ensuring we’ve got a roadmap that progressively delivers those outcomes and drives continuous learning. Whew, that was a little like the speed-talking disclaimers you hear on pharma commercials.
Honestly, it’s a kick-ass job to have if you are driven by wrecking bad guys, keeping the non-enterprise 99 percent of businesses safe, and if you like being in the trenches with some of the world’s top security minds — ‘ethical bad asses’ as we call them here. Together we’re advancing thinking and tactics in the security community and giving scale to those protection mechanisms by way of our managed product line.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
Pretty simple. We ask what wrecks the most adversaries, what makes it easier for our partners and customers to do business with us and what makes our business run better?
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
Freaking fast — move fast, learn quick, level it up quick. We’re in an interesting confluence of forces — adversaries are always speeding up their malicious tricks and Huntress is rapidly scaling up the surface area it protects and the customers it’s reaching, and we proudly hold onto the startup hustle our founders have imbued in our cultural DNA.
Metropolis Technologies, Inc. is an artificial intelligence company whose computer vision platform enables checkout-free payment experiences for the real world.
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
Working on the product team at Metropolis is dynamic, collaborative and high-impact. Because our team is lean relative to our overall business, product managers hold substantial autonomy and ownership. You own broad domain areas and make direct decisions that shape how people interact with our technology in the physical world.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
It starts from company strategy and OKRs — what our vision is for the next few years and which direction we’re heading. From there, I look at how the work in my area supports those goals. Then it’s a combination of stakeholder input across the company, consumer data and effort sizing with engineering to determine scope. Rather than starting from a fixed spec, we start by understanding the underlying problem and defining what’s actually worth solving, then build the roadmap from there.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
The pace is fast and people with a “can do” attitude tend to do best here. There isn’t always a playbook laid out for you. A lot of what we’re building is new, so part of the job is seeking out the right people across the company and working through it together. The team is genuinely collaborative. People are quick to point you in the right direction and help you think things through, even when there’s no established answer yet.
AI has changed the pace completely. It used to be a defined cycle: write a product requirements document, hand it to design, kick off with engineering, engineering writes a request for comments. That process could mean it took weeks before a feature was fully scoped. Now I can take an idea, build a working prototype in a few hours using Claude Code, hand that to design to iterate on, get feedback from customers and get something much closer to real in front of engineering.
Flywire is a global payments enablement and software company, providing digital payment solutions across education, healthcare, travel and B2B sectors.
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
Working on our platform product management team means operating at the intersection of customer and vertical needs, business strategy and complex payments technology. We are not simply building features, we are scaling our payments platform globally for our business to expand.
Our product managers are expected to understand the “why” behind what they are building, develop a clear point of view and connect technical decisions to business outcomes, economics, risk and operational scalability.
Given we support multiple verticals and the complex business needs of the underlying SaaS platforms, we are constantly evolving the platform to create distinct advantages for our customers with complex needs to operate in cross-border and domestic scenarios offering local payment methods for payers. We move fast, make decisions quickly and roll out features collaborating with multiple teams across the company.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
We employ a disciplined, outcome-oriented prioritization framework to evaluate initiatives. We assess opportunity size, revenue potential and core economics and weigh every decision against our long-term strategic platform capabilities. At the core of our decision-making process are four key pillars — grow, scale, protect and delight — which help us look at every opportunity from all angles.
Our three-year strategic roadmap acts as our North Star, keeping us focused on where we want to go. By identifying target verticals, regions and client segments, we establish clear directional requirements for the platform. As a payments business, we also rigorously account for regulatory requirements, system reliability and scalability.
Once impact is understood, we weigh it against effort, urgency, dependencies and strategic fit. Our goal isn’t to build based on the loudest requests; it is to leverage platform capabilities to solve systemic problems and drive outsized value. We evaluate trade-offs, make final prioritization calls and embrace a ’test and learn’ methodology to iterate based on performance and deliver a frictionless experience.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
Our team thrives in a fast-paced, dynamic environment where we balance rapid delivery with long-term platform integrity. We don’t operate in silos; we succeed as a team. Every product manager owns a piece of the puzzle, but our ultimate success relies on deep cross-functional collaboration. We keep the customer front-and-center, ensuring that every integration and feature solves a holistic problem rather than just a product feature or a technical ticket.
Our decision-making comes down to staying aligned on strategy. We partner closely with our business verticals to make sure the platform roadmap directly supports company goals. With that shared clarity, tough trade-off discussions don’t feel like friction — they become natural, data-driven decisions. If you love tackling complex problems, doing great work with great teams and seeing your impact on how people move money globally, you’ll love it here.
FourKites combines real-time digital twins of orders, shipments, inventory and assets with AI-powered digital workers to help companies prevent disruptions, automate routine tasks and optimize performance across their supply chain
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
What I enjoy most about working in the supply chain space is how tangible the problems are. I can always connect what my team is building to something with real-world impact; like whether a hospital receives a temperature-sensitive drug shipment before it spoils, whether a grocery store shelf is stocked ahead of a holiday, whether a truck driver is stuck waiting at a dock or will make it home in time for dinner. It’s easy to care about work like that.
Something I really value about the FourKites culture is how closely we work with our customers. We embed ourselves in their operations to learn how the business actually runs, rather than showing up to collect requirements. Our customers are the experts in their industry and their operations. What we add is the view across the industry. We see the same problems surfacing at hundreds of companies, so a challenge one customer walks us through can turn into something the whole network benefits from.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
We see it like a funnel. At the top we take in a lot of signals. Such as our IdeaExchange, where customers post and vote on ideas; direct conversations with the end users doing the work; market research; and the FourKites Graph, our decade-plus of shipment and order data across 1,600-plus enterprises. Any single company can see inside its own four walls. The FourKites Graph shows us how the broader industry is actually behaving, so we can spot trends and emerging problems that no one customer could see on their own. It regularly points us toward work nobody thought to ask for.
From there we narrow. We look for the same problems surfacing across many customers and we get specific about the outcome they’re trying to move, like less detention spend, fewer missed appointments or fewer manual touches per order.
Finally, we validate before we commit. AI-accelerated prototyping has transformed that process. Putting something functional in front of a customer in days instead of weeks means we can test more ideas and kill the ones that don’t hold up before we ship.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
The pace is faster than ever. An idea can go from a conversation to something tangible in front of a customer within days, so we spend less time debating in the abstract and more time reacting to something real. That means getting comfortable showing work before it’s polished and letting a customer tell you where you’re right or wrong.
Almost nothing here gets decided by one function alone. Product, design and engineering sit in discovery together and we lean heavily on our customers and our peers at FourKites who are closest to them — customer success, solutions and support. By the time we make a decision, we usually have real customer evidence instead of theories about what customers might want.
This is also an incredibly hands-on team. Product managers here are expected to be in customer conversations themselves, to dig into the data and build prototypes of solutions rather than simply describe them. Supply chain is a deep domain and nobody shows up knowing all of it, so curiosity matters more than credentials. The people who do best seek to learn the operation from the people running it, then work out how software can help, rather than the other way around.
GC AI is an AI platform built specifically for in-house legal teams to solve the high-precision workflows they face every day.
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
Being a product manager at GC AI means working at startup speed with direct access to customers, leadership and every major function. The role combines product craft, commercial strategy and hands-on execution. In addition to the traditional PM functions of managing roadmaps and deciding what to prioritize, you may find yourself coding and designing prototypes, opening pull requests or partnering with sales to develop a full go-to-market strategy. The environment is intense, collaborative and guided by a clear product philosophy.
Because legal AI is a rapidly evolving space, with new products, challenges and ideas emerging daily. Product leaders are expected to cut through the noise to focus on what matters most for our customers and the business. Knowing how to prioritize and quickly respond to change is critical for the role.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
One thing I love about GC AI is how passionate our customers are about the product and how much great feedback and guidance they provide. I spend a lot of time on calls with customers discussing new product ideas and approaches. We’re constantly drawing signals and insights from our customer Slack channel, in-app feedback and sales calls to discover new products. We value openness and transparency, so all of our qualitative and quantitative data is accessible to anyone in the company, regardless of role.
We also value shipping fast and testing new ideas in the market. Product managers have the autonomy to move quickly from an insight to a working product, collaborate directly with design and engineering and learn from real customer behavior. We favor focused experiments over lengthy planning cycles, so we iterate quickly based on what we learn.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
Product manager at GC AI ship. The handoff to engineering usually isn’t a spec or a ticket, but a working prototype or a pull request you’ve built and tested yourself. Our product team spends real time in the codebase building and testing new features, iterating and collecting feedback. We value driven leaders with a builder mindset.
Collaboration is direct and low-ceremony. You’ll work day to day with engineering, RevOps, sales and finance. Expect your reasoning to get challenged — and expect to change your mind when the evidence moves. You also have direct access to our executive and founding team, so you can stay close to our business and product strategy during your day-to-day work. You will be trusted to identify important problems, bring people together and turn ideas into products that create measurable value for customers and the business.
FloQast offers an accounting platform that enhances the way accounting teams already work to help them operate more efficiently.
What’s it like to work on the product management team at your company?
Product management at FloQast sits between tech and accounting. Much of the job is interpreting how each world works and translating between them to solve real customer and market problems. The team is widely distributed — geographically and across domains -— spanning application and platform areas and working closely with design to bring a leading AI accounting platform to market.
How does your product team decide what to prioritize and build next?
Prioritization balances our longer-term strategy as an AI accounting platform against immediate customer and market needs. FloQast is built by accountants, for accountants, so there’s never a shortage of feedback — our teams are constantly engaged with customers — existing and prospective. That gives us real empathy for what accountants deal with day-to-day and a genuine drive to understand their business and help them.
What should candidates know about the pace, collaboration or decision-making style on your product team?
The pace is high. Engineering maintains strong velocity and ships to market quickly, which creates great opportunities to iterate and adapt as we learn from customers. With many application and platform areas and a fast-moving market, collaboration is constant — across product teams and the company as a whole. Decisions tend to be made close to the customer, with a bias toward shipping, learning and adjusting rather than waiting for perfect certainty.
