Insights Unlocked
How great product teams use customer insights differently with Jeff Lash
23 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What insights does Jeff Lash bring to product management?
Welcome back to Insights Unlocked. In this episode, we're joined by Jeff Lash, a longtime product leader, to explore how teams can turn voice of customer insights into smarter product decisions. We dig into why asking follow-up questions matters, how to balance qualitative and quantitative feedback, and what separates high-performing product teams from the rest.
If you care about building better products, this one's for you. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager at UserTesting. And our host today is Mike McDowell, one of UserTesting's Principal Solutions Marketing Managers. Welcome back, Mike. Always glad to be back. Thanks, Nathan. And our guest today is Jeff Lash.
Jeff is a seasoned product management leader and advisor, currently VP of product management at Insperity, with decades of experience helping B2B teams turn customer insight, voice of customer, and product strategy into better decisions and stronger outcomes. Welcome to the show, Jeff.
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Chapter 2: Why are follow-up questions crucial in understanding customer feedback?
It's nice to be here. Thank you very much for having me.
Excellent. Well, Jeff, we just talked about this a little bit in the pre-show, but let's revisit it for the audience here. You've just had such an interesting path going from UX all the way back in 2002, usability specialist, really rare title to research and product management, leadership, advising across industries.
Just can you, would you mind walking us in the audience through like really what shaped the way you think about customers, product management, and even decision-making in today's fast-paced world? Yeah, I think maybe I was always naturally going to end up in product management, but I, like many people, did not take a straight path to it. So I always grew up around technology.
My dad had always lots of technology computers at home. If you can see the background on video, I got a whole bunch of old tech. So I grew up with technology, but I was never really a programmer. I just liked it. I went to school and studied marketing in my undergrad, and this was right around the time that the Web was taking off.
And I was kind of anxious to start applying some of those ideas to dot com and Web stuff and not necessarily the quote unquote old school stuff that we were learning a lot of at school.
This was back in the day, as I like to say, when knowing HTML was a very valuable skill to have, when the same person would set up the Apache server, design the graphics, write the copy, and maintain the webmaster of the site.
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Chapter 3: How can product teams balance qualitative and quantitative insights?
A webmaster, that's it. A webmaster, yeah. And so I did that for a number of years, you know, or I did that originally, you know, both on the side and kind of for a year or two, let's say. And I very quickly realized, oh, this is going to get very fragmented. You know, there's specialization that's going to come out of this. I was not a great programmer, though.
I figured out how to write, you know, CGI, Ben and PHP and all that stuff. I didn't. taken some art classes in college, but I was definitely not a graphic designer by any means. But somehow kind of stumbled upon this whole idea of usability and user experience and information architecture. And it just kind of clicked with me.
For whatever reason, it resonated in this idea of, yes, we should be making websites and products that you know, are easy to use and meet the needs of users. Seems like that makes sense, but I was also experiencing so many products and websites that were not doing that. So I kind of refocused in that direction and did that for about maybe four or five, six years.
Chapter 4: What common pitfalls do product teams face with roadmaps?
And as I was doing that, I really liked it. There was a great opportunity to, you know, make products better, make digital products and technology better.
But I also realized I was hitting a point where I remember at one point saying to my boss, if I learn to run a usability test 10% better, how does that help the business versus if I can make the product 10% better, that's going to have a much bigger impact. And so there was an opportunity for me to move into product management at the company I was in. At the time, that was a pretty rare thing.
So this was early-ish in the 2000s. And product management was still not really well understood. More broadly, user experience was not really well understood. And my company, no one had ever moved into a product role from UX. And more broadly, that wasn't a common path. Now it's very common. But back then that was, you know, I wouldn't say unheard of, but it was fairly uncommon.
But it made sense to me. And I remember about two months in to that job, kind of realizing it just clicked. And I started learning about what real product management is.
Chapter 5: How can teams prioritize effectively without firefighting?
And so much of it overlapped with everything that I had done up to that point. So the technology, obviously, from growing up around it, the marketing and positioning and branding stuff that I learned in school, and then a lot of the user experience concepts, doing customer interviews and understanding needs and prioritizing and things like that. So it really, to me, is this
combination of all the different things in my background. And so that, you know, I've been doing that for two decades or so now since just following along that path. So I think, you know, long answer to your question of what shaped me, it's really those different things.
Like I am probably, you know, there's different types of product managers, some people that come from more of a, you know, technology background or a sales background. I come from probably more of the UX and business background. Like I'm always thinking about you know, what can we do that would be good for our customers, but that also will be successful for the business.
That's kind of my dominant mentality. There's other people that know technology better than me and even the nuances of your experience, but really it's about, I think what's really shaped me is that idea of if we can create products that are good for the customers, it will also be good for our business. Yeah, we we have very similar backgrounds.
When you were talking about product management didn't really exist. We called it business analysis when I started.
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Chapter 6: What role does the voice of the customer play across teams?
And, you know, now that means something totally different. But, yeah, going through the data, data organized, data oriented process. Like, hey, if I can improve this by 10%, if I can get this experience, this error experience, 20% of the way to the mean conversion rate, things like that.
It really shaped the way that I went from being that webmaster with my SQL and active server pages and Microsoft log file analyzer and all that into truly designing things, mapping out flows and running usability tests or certainly having people do it for me. It was a huge change. you talk about moving into different organizations over your career. You've had to do that.
You've done that a bunch of times. When we think about product management, we always think about product roadmaps, things like that. How dangerous is it really for organizations just to rely on things like a roadmap or pure reports? And when you do join a new company, what are some of the signals that you look for to say, do these guys really know what they're doing?
Or do they know what their customers think? Or do they just think they know what their customers think? I think one of the things that my background in UX taught me and has really helped me a lot in product management is really to ask follow-up questions.
Chapter 7: How does a growth mindset influence product development?
So for example, if someone says, I have a roadmap, rather than me in my head picturing what I think is a roadmap and assuming that's what they have, ask like, great, can I see that roadmap? Because roadmaps is a great example. I've seen hundreds of different roadmaps. And some of them are things I would not label as a roadmap, right? So I don't really care what someone calls it.
To me, it's what is it? What does it look like? What's information on it? What's the intent of it? A great example that stuck in my head is I remember when I was in a UX role, I did a lot of work in healthcare. And I was interviewing a nurse one day and we were talking about she worked at a hospital that had access to our product. And I was talking to her about how often she uses it.
And she's like, oh, I don't really use it a lot because of the accessibility. And I'm like. Hmm, interesting.
Chapter 8: What advice does Jeff have for new leaders in product management?
Can you tell me more? She's like, yeah, it's not accessible. Now, of course, as a UX person, I'm thinking 508 compatibility, accessibility, screen readers, font sizes, things like that. And so I said, can you tell me more about that? She said, oh, yeah, your product is only available at the nurse's station. There's only one computer at the nurse's station. And a lot of times that is busy.
Other people are using that computer for other things. So it's not accessible to me. So it had nothing to do with 508 accessibility or, you know, low vision disabilities, things like that. It was just literally, I could not access it. So to me, that story is probably over 20 years old, but it stuck with me.
So when someone says, oh, roadmap or persona or requirements, I learned to not really just, I don't want to say take it at face value, but like, wait, let me see it. Let me see what it is. Because again, I've seen lots of different roadmaps. I've seen lots of different release planes and things like that. And they... all might be different to different people.
So I always, you know, when I was, when I've taken a lot of roles where I've taken over existing products, or I did spend about a decade in more of a consulting advising role. And so, you know, seeing what the team is already doing, seeing what the person's doing is a great way just to understand where they're at, not from a judgmental perspective, but just for a, Hey, let me understand you here.
What are the artifacts you use and how do you document things? And that helps me understand where, the context, the industry, the product, but also how they're actually doing product development or doing product management. I love that. I didn't see that coming, that little twist there. That's a great story. It makes me think of, you know, I think of everything in terms of movies.
White Men Can't Jump, when Wesley Snipes is explaining to Woody Harrelson, no, you can hear him, or you can listen to him, but you don't hear him. You know, I think it's one way or the other. And the idea of You know, hearing someone say something, but not really listening to know that it means something else, like to go a little bit deeper and asking that follow up.
And so much of it is understanding the why. Like, OK, you told me what's going on. But when you explain the why, then I'll then I'll understand, you know, you're not talking about the fact that like, oh, you wear glasses and so you need a higher contrast or you need a higher font size. No, you literally mean I cannot access the computer to access your website. It's literally a roadblock to me.
That's a great story. Yeah, so I think, you know, I think the artifacts are always helpful. I mean, you know, and in fact, I will also say lack of artifacts is also helpful, right? I've been in a lot of situations where I asked to say, hey, can you show me a roadmap requirements, business case, product overview, whatever. And that doesn't exist or it exists in pieces. And the fact that
it exists in someone's head or it exists in 10 different places scattered across the organization, that also is informative, right? It tells me like, oh, okay, so this stuff is not documented. There's not a consistent process. There's no one reviewing these. Maybe other stakeholders aren't aware of these things. So it's not that those artifacts are necessarily good or bad.
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