Why Customer Support is the Secret Ingredient to Great Product Management

In product management, we often get caught up in the buzz around innovation, roadmaps, and hitting launch dates. But there’s a critical piece of the puzzle that often goes underappreciated: customer support. After years in the industry and having worked at companies like Opsgenie and Atlassian, I’ve seen firsthand that customer support is more than just a reactive team answering tickets—it’s an integral part of how successful products get built, improved, and sustained.

I want to talk about how essential customer support is to product management, and why it deserves a bigger seat at the table.

Customer Support: The Bridge Between Users and Product Teams

When we think about customer support, we tend to view it as a service that exists to fix issues after the product is live. But what if I told you that support is where some of the most valuable insights for product development come from? Your customer support team interacts with users in ways that product teams can’t—they hear the pain points, the bugs, the small annoyances, and the wishlist items directly from the source.

At Opsgenie, in our early years, I could read every single support ticket myself, and we learned so much from them. But as we scaled, that became impossible, and we started losing the ability to stay close to the pulse of our users. That’s a pivotal moment in every product’s growth, and it’s where the real importance of support becomes clear.

Support doesn’t just react to problems—it gives us the data we need to prevent them in the first place. Customer support is the feedback loop that informs how we iterate, improve, and innovate. Without it, product teams are flying blind.

From Feedback to Actionable Insights

One of the most powerful things about customer support is the feedback loop it creates. Every interaction is a data point that helps us understand user behavior, friction points, and where our products can improve. At Actioner, we’ve built AI-driven features to make sense of this feedback at scale because, trust me, once your customer base grows, staying on top of these insights becomes harder than you’d imagine.

Take qualitative data—things like feature requests and user frustrations from support tickets. This rich, unfiltered feedback tells us exactly what users need and want, but without a system to collect and analyze it, it can get lost in the shuffle. Then there's quantitative data, like how long tickets take to resolve, which features trigger the most support interactions, and customer satisfaction metrics (CSAT). These numbers tell us whether we’re hitting the mark or falling short.

At Opsgenie, once we hit a certain size, the process of turning this data into actionable insights became slow and cumbersome. It was a challenge to stay ahead of the feedback curve. That’s why tools like Actioner focus on making this process easier, providing teams with real-time insights and clear action points, so you’re not bogged down trying to piece together what’s important.

Customer Support and Product Management: A Natural Partnership

I’ve seen companies where customer support and product teams work in silos, and I’ve seen companies where support reports directly to the product department. Let me tell you—the difference in outcomes is night and day. Product managers need to hear the customer’s voice directly, and customer support is the amplifier. There’s a reason why some of the best PMs I’ve worked with have backgrounds in customer support—they understand the problems on a visceral level.

Support-driven product management helps you stay focused on what matters most: your users. At Actioner, this is what we’re all about—giving product teams easy access to the insights support teams gather every day. It’s not just about responding to complaints; it’s about understanding where the real friction lies and what features or fixes will have the most impact.

Increasing Customer Lifetime Value Through Support

Beyond keeping customers happy, effective customer support can have a huge impact on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). A happy customer isn’t just less likely to churn—they’re more likely to upgrade, renew, and even refer others. Support teams play a pivotal role in this, not only by solving problems but by identifying opportunities to proactively engage customers.

In the context of Actioner, our product is designed to help teams spot patterns early—whether it’s detecting customer churn risks or identifying upsell opportunities based on user behavior. By giving teams a clear view of how support impacts the customer journey, we’re making it easier to prioritize features that boost CLV and keep users coming back.

Bringing It All Together

Customer support is more than just a service—it’s a strategic advantage. When product management and customer support are aligned, great things happen. At Opsgenie, we learned this early, and it’s been one of my biggest takeaways as a PM: the best products are built when you have direct access to the user’s voice. As we’re building Actioner, we’re keeping that principle at the core of our mission.

At the end of the day, customer support is the unsung hero of product management. It’s not just about fixing bugs or answering questions; it’s about closing the feedback loop, enhancing product development, and creating a better user experience from start to finish.