This has been my second experience handling an early stage product and the advantage (or the disadvantage, whichever way you look at it) in handling early stage products is that as a Product Manager, you get the opportunity to really soil your hands with everything from sales to customer support.

While a lot of companies prefer to hand a script to their customer service executives and measure their performance based on adherence to the script, very few give them the freedom and the opportunity to react as human beings.

Yes, taking this approach is well tested and guarantees predictable results and measurable metrics that can be assigned to a manager whose job it will be to improve performance on those metrics. But in all this, the opportunity to connect with the customer is lost.

When you're the first person customers reach with their problems, and if you happen to be a Product Manager, you have a great opportunity to gain first-hand feedback that is really felt by the users. And the knowledge of how the product is about to shape up in the coming weeks and months will guide how each customer query is treated. And I can guarantee that there will not be a script to follow while answering customer complaints.

This results in some customers not having a great experience and some others having a great experience, but that will be a judgment call to say not all customers are equal and important, that what the customers did to get themselves in the position they are in is an important factor to decide which are the better customers.

If all customer executives could take a similar approach, the results may not be easily predictable and metrics measurable, but the good customers, who genuinely need help and who will be delighted by a good experience will end up having a good experience at the expense of those who don't deserve (or even expect) such an experience.

Don't seek to be average to everyone.