Episode Timestamps
0:00 – Introduction & Guest Introduction
2:22 – What Makes a Product Loved by Users?
3:49 – The Challenges of Balancing Innovation and Changing User Habits
6:03 – How to Prioritize Features in Product Management
8:09 – Best Ways to Gather User Feedback
11:58 – How to Validate a New Feature Before Launch
14:16 – Balancing Stakeholder Demands & Avoiding Feature Creep
17:44 – Tools for Product Managers to Manage Feedback & Roadmaps
22:16 – The Biggest Challenge in Handling Customer Feedback
24:06 – How to Maintain Customer Conversations Regularly
27:24 – Advice for UX Researchers Moving to Product Management
30:51 – The Power of Customer-Centric Thinking in Product Growth
38:47 – Final Advice for Product Builders
40:50 – Closing Thoughts
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Main Insights From The Conversation
In a world saturated with software solutions, creating a product that users genuinely love isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s the foundation of sustainable growth. Arttu Haho, Co-founder and Product Manager at Trustmary, has spent eight years navigating this challenge, transforming his company from a video testimonial service into a comprehensive customer feedback platform used by customers in nearly 100 countries.
Working from Inari in northern Finland—just two hours from the Arctic Ocean—Arttu brings a refreshingly practical perspective to product management. His journey offers valuable lessons for anyone building products, whether you’re a product manager, UX researcher, or entrepreneur.
The North Star: Building What Users Love
At Trustmary, “build an app that users love” isn’t just marketing speak—it’s an official company objective tracked through their OKR framework. But Arttu is quick to acknowledge the inherent challenge: “It’s something that you never reach. You just always find a new level”.
This mindset shift is crucial. Product excellence isn’t a destination but a continuous journey of improvement. User habits evolve, competitors innovate, and what delighted users yesterday may be table stakes tomorrow.
The Framework: Prioritizing in a Sea of Feedback
One of the biggest challenges in product management is prioritization, especially when feedback comes from multiple channels daily. Trustmary receives between 5 to 20 pieces of feedback every single day. How do they decide what to build?
Defining Your Core and Your Ideal Customer
Two structural decisions have helped Trustmary cut through the noise. First, they clearly defined what sits in the core of their product versus what are additional “nice-to-have” features. This creates a lens for evaluating every feature request.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, they developed a detailed Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This profile serves as a prioritization filter—feedback from ideal customers carries more weight than feedback from edge cases.
From Feedback to Customer Problems
Rather than treating every feature request as gospel, Trustmary organizes feedback around customer problems. When someone requests a feature, the team digs deeper: What’s the actual problem this would solve? Who specifically needs this? What value would it create?
This approach prevents feature creep and helps filter out requests that are “only an idea of our internal user” but lack clear customer value. If a stakeholder can’t name the customer who needs a feature or articulate the problem it solves, it doesn’t make the roadmap.
Gathering Feedback: Lower the Barriers
Trustmary uses multiple channels to collect user feedback, but Arttu emphasizes one critical principle: “You need to keep the barrier low”. The easier it is for people to share feedback, the more authentic insights you’ll gather.
Primary Feedback Channels
- Slack channel for internal teams: Customer success and sales people can instantly share feedback in a dedicated Slack channel, creating a steady stream of real-world insights
- Customer feedback surveys: Using their own tool, Trustmary automatically collects feedback at different stages of the customer journey—starting right after sales meetings and continuing throughout product usage
- Direct customer calls: Arttu personally joins customer calls every week, sometimes multiple times per week, to hear firsthand about challenges and needs
- In-app feature requests: Users can submit feature requests directly within the application
This multi-channel approach ensures no valuable feedback falls through the cracks, while the low-friction design encourages honest, timely input.
Validating Before Building
Before committing significant development resources, Trustmary follows a structured validation process, especially for major features:
- Understand the problem completely: Ensure crystal-clear understanding of the customer problem, sometimes validating the problem definition with customers
- Develop a solution MVP: Create something as simple as a clickable prototype
- Test with real customers: Schedule calls to walk customers through the prototype and gather reactions
- Launch early, iterate fast: Get something functional into users’ hands as quickly as possible, even if it’s not perfect
This philosophy—”we try to get something live and to hands of our customers sooner rather than later”—enables real-world validation and prevents building in a vacuum.
Balancing Stakeholder Demands and Avoiding Feature Creep
Internal stakeholders often have strong opinions about what features should be built. Arttu’s team has a simple litmus test: every feature request must connect to a specific customer problem.
When someone proposes a feature, the team asks: Can you name the customer who needs this? What’s the actual problem this solves? What value does it create? If these questions can’t be answered clearly, the feature doesn’t move forward.
This customer-centric filter helps “make a lot of that noise more silent” without creating conflict. It shifts conversations from opinions to evidence, from features to problems.
The Product Manager’s Tech Stack
Trustmary’s product management stack reflects their emphasis on visual thinking and integration:
- Linear: Manages development projects, issues, and support tickets (they migrated from Jira in just one day)
- Productlane: Organizes customer feedback with seamless Linear integration
- Figma: Handles designs, workshop sessions, and roadmap visualization
- Trustmary: Their own platform for collecting and analyzing customer feedback
Arttu still manages the product roadmap in Figma because “it’s so visual you can see the whole road map easily”.
What Sets Trustmary Apart
In the crowded review and feedback management space, Trustmary’s differentiation comes from consolidation. Where companies previously needed three to five different tools for:
- Collecting customer feedback
- Gathering reviews
- Managing reviews across multiple platforms
- Displaying reviews on their website
Trustmary brings all of this into a single platform. This simplification resonates strongly with users, as reflected in recent customer feedback: “This has been the best platform for reviews. It’s the easiest to use, integrates seamlessly, and your email updates provide incredible value”.
The Sales-Led to Product-Led Journey
Perhaps the most instructive part of Arttu’s story is Trustmary’s evolution between go-to-market strategies. The company launched their software product in 2019 with a sales-led approach, closing annual deals through direct sales conversations.
When they decided to expand internationally, they realized building sales teams in every country would be prohibitively expensive. So they pivoted to a fully product-led approach, enabling self-service adoption. This strategy successfully acquired users in 180 countries and paying customers in nearly 100.
However, they encountered a new challenge: getting customers to adopt the full “Trustmary method”—the complete workflow from feedback collection to review display—proved difficult without guidance. The complexity of their value proposition didn’t lend itself to purely self-service adoption.
Today, Trustmary operates with a hybrid model: an easy-to-use product that customers can start using independently, combined with strong sales support and customer success resources to drive deeper adoption. This “somewhere between” approach leverages the best of both worlds.
Key Lessons from the Pivot
The experience taught Arttu a crucial insight: “It’s 100 times more challenging to build a certain feature in a level that someone can start using it by themselves… compared to something that someone can use when the sales guy is telling them what to do”.
This reality check helps explain why product-led growth works brilliantly for simple, single-problem solutions but struggles with more complex, multi-faceted platforms. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer—the right strategy depends on your product’s complexity and value delivery model.
The Transition from Sales to Product Management
Arttu’s background differs from many product managers who come from engineering. He previously worked in sales, marketing, and even managed finance responsibilities. This diverse experience proves advantageous in product management.
“The product manager role is also quite a lot the same kind of role than sales,” he explains. “You need to have those discussions with customers and you need to be listening what their issues, what their problems are, and then you try to solve them”.
His advice for anyone transitioning into product management, including UX researchers: “You need to be doing it together with your customers. You never have too many customer calls or customer discussions, but 99% of the time you have not enough of those”.
From Software Engineer to Product Engineer
Trustmary’s team regularly discusses the distinction between software engineers and product engineers. A product engineer, in Arttu’s view, “really understands what is the actual customer problem we are solving here and they are solving things for the customer, not just creating a feature”.
This mindset shift—from feature factory to problem solver—represents the evolution needed in modern product development. As AI and automation handle more routine coding tasks, the differentiating skill becomes understanding customer problems deeply and crafting elegant solutions.
Maintaining Customer Connection at Scale
As Trustmary grows, Arttu uses several strategies to maintain close customer contact:
- Proactive participation: Regularly asking sales and customer success teams to invite him to customer calls
- Targeted involvement: When launching new features (like their rebuilt HubSpot integration), joining every implementation call with the developer to observe usage firsthand
- Direct sales involvement: Maintaining a direct sales role himself to stay connected to customer conversations
This hands-on approach ensures that even as the company scales, product decisions remain grounded in real customer needs rather than assumptions.
The Danger of Conflicting Feedback
What happens when different customers want contradictory things? Arttu’s approach involves three filters:
- ICP alignment: Prioritize feedback from ideal customers over edge cases
- Problem understanding: Dig deeper to understand the root problem—often, seemingly conflicting requests stem from different expressions of the same underlying need
- Honest communication: When a request doesn’t align with the roadmap, communicate transparently rather than making promises you can’t keep
The Data Must Connect to Reality
“It doesn’t matter if you have a ton of quantitative data or whatever numbers or statistics, you need to be in a close connection with customers if you want to understand the data in the right way,” Arttu emphasizes.
This insight challenges the notion that data alone can drive product decisions. Numbers tell you what is happening, but customer conversations reveal why. Both are essential for making informed choices.
Essential Resources and Principles
Arttu recommends Marty Cagan’s book “Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love” as essential reading for product managers. The book’s principles align with his core philosophy: get something into customers’ hands quickly, then iterate based on real usage.
His guiding principles can be distilled to three:
- Launch fast: Get something live that customers can use as soon as possible
- Iterate together: Make the product better in partnership with customers
- Stay connected: Spend as much time as possible with customers—it’s never too much
Final Thoughts: The Customer as North Star
In an era where AI is reshaping every aspect of product development, Arttu’s message is refreshingly human-centered. The skills that matter most aren’t about mastering the latest tools or frameworks—they’re about understanding people.
“If you don’t have a customer, then you need to have a prospective customer. It’s the closest to customer you might have,” he notes. Whether you’re validating a new concept or improving an established product, customer proximity remains the essential ingredient.
For product builders working in fast-paced environments where priorities shift and stakeholder demands multiply, Arttu’s framework offers a practical path forward: define your ideal customer clearly, organize around customer problems rather than features, lower barriers to feedback, validate quickly, and above all, maintain constant connection with the people you’re building for.
Building products users love isn’t a formula to be executed but a discipline to be practiced—every day, every week, with every decision. The goal may be unreachable, but the pursuit itself creates products that matter.
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Join the Conversation Before Everyone Else!
Dive into user research, product strategy, and design with industry leaders. New insights drop every month. Don’t miss out.
