When Luke Hefson, now Senior Product Manager, first joined the product team at GitHub he was curious, as most PMs are, about what users honest thoughts were on the product. So he tweeted a simple question asking GitHub users what, if anything, annoyed them about the product.

Unexpectedly, received hundreds of responses, retweets, and follow ups from the open-source web dev community. Almost all of the responses and requests they received through were not necessarily groundbreaking, innovative ideas – but “papercuts,” or small areas of friction within the user experience that were causing users large annoyance.

“These papercute are degrading to the overall experience, however typically difficult for companies to prioritize at a macro level,” explains Luke. This realization inspired the formation of GitHub’s dedicated “papercuts” team that focuses on maintaining an open, engaged feedback loop with customers and then working to prioritize and fix these annoying experiences.

“Your customers don’t care about your business strategy, they care about being heard and getting answers to the problems they experience everyday,” Luke says, this is why it’s important to establish a strong, easily accessible feedback loop with your users and take action on what you learn.

On this episode of People Driven Products, Luke deep dives into GitHub’s customer feedback loops and how his team synthesizes and prioritizes requests, specifically “papercuts,” in order to build a roadmap that balances short term wins with longer term innovation. He also shares advice on how to get executive approval on “papercut” projects that may not necessarily drive revenue, but will build customer loyalty.

A lot of product teams like to say they are agile, but when it comes down to it most teams continue to be driven by sales, roadmaps, and the same “waterfall” strategy of the past.

“Most teams are good at delivery but lacking in discovery,” says Marty Cagan, author of Inspired. Cagan notes that frequently product teams are just shipping products and features to launch and don’t give enough attention to the step that actually qualifies a team as agile.

Agility is “not about the religion or process of building a product,” Cagan advises, rather it’s about constantly testing assumptions, uncovering new problems, and learning from your customers.

Conducting continuous discovery will allow your team to answer three key questions prior to building (risk, solutions, and end goals) and therefore help mitigate risk and ensure you are investing in products that your customers will love.

On this episode of People Driven Products, Marty Cagan defines the true meaning of “agility” and how product teams can partner together to deliver valuable, innovative solutions to solve customer problems.

To succeed in a constantly evolving industry, Product Managers can’t afford to settle for the status quo and need to be constantly hungry for new answers to old questions.

“Every great product manager is an entrepreneur,” Vlad Gasan, Principal Product Manager at OfferUp and author of The Ultimate Guide To Becoming a Product Manager, says in the episode.

Vlad shares how his experiences as a business owner and “side hustler” have helped him learn how to quickly adapt to new and ever-changing product markets, a skill he says is critical for PMs.

He encourages product managers to trail blaze innovative products by constantly re-evaluating current strategies or solutions as “questions remain the same but answers change over time” in fast-moving markets.

In this episode of People Driven Products, Vlad discusses the top qualities he looks for when hiring product managers and how PMs can tap into their entrepreneurial spirit in order to unlock a unique product vision.