Main idea

Facing the same customer situation, a Product Manager sees a product problem, a Product Marketing Manager a perception problem, a salesperson an objection, a CSM an adoption friction, support a repeated pain. Each of these readings is correct, and each is partial by virtue of that very correctness: it is produced by the position it is made from.

An organization where these readings stay with the people who produce them doesn't add up its points of view, it juxtaposes them. One function's blind spot stays covered by another, with nobody in a position to notice.

Bringing those lenses together into one body of material guarantees nothing, but it changes the odds: what a PM alone would not have seen has a better chance of surfacing when the same situation is described from five different positions.

Why it matters

This shifts the remedy expected against blind spots. The usual attempt is to correct one person's judgment — more interviews, more rigor, more distance — whereas what is missing is structural: a position only has access to what it sees.

It also gives a non-hierarchical reason to have the other functions contribute to customer knowledge: the point isn't to keep them informed, it is to recover what their position alone lets them see.

Nuances and limits

Accumulating lenses also increases the noise: five readings of the same situation sometimes produce five incompatible versions, none of them wrong, and it still has to be settled which one matters.

And each function's contribution isn't neutral: each reports more readily what justifies its own request.

Open questions

• How do you collect a function's lens without it arriving already translated into the vocabulary of what that function is asking for?