When Christian Bonilla, VP Product at UserTesting and former Founder at UserMuse, surveyed Mind the Product readers about the biggest challenges facing product managers, the responses were clear.

“I’m trying to make decisions about how to improve the product with no data about which features of the product are most valuable to users.”

Although the survey itself is now dated, Bonilla’s findings reflect something we still see all too often with prospective clients.

It’s the job of a product manager to ensure that their organizations are building the right product, but many don’t feel like they’re able to do that.

The reason? Time.

• Lots of product manager time is spent writing and clarifying specs, requirements, stories, or tickets.

• Product managers are often managing JIRA backlogs, running agile rituals, and keeping teams unblocked.

• And we can’t forget all the time spent in meetings and developing presentations.

We all feel accountable to our colleagues, and that’s one key reason that these internal demands often push out important work around customer feedback, user research, and strategic work.

But real customer insight should always drive the vision. It’s important to both the career of the product leaders AND the results of the company.

So what’s a product manager to do? Invest in design and research.

• Hire a team to help you gather user insight. Screening, scheduling, incentivizing, and analyzing can take a ton of time. Professional user researchers and UX designers can handle the logistics of it all so that you can cut straight to the themes and representative clips.

• Hire a team to design things out. A picture is worth a thousand words, and clear mockups that consider all the states and cases will reduce the amount of time you spend in spec-writing land.

The ideal partner might be a research AND design firm, that can help you with all the above. With the right team, you can understand the user deeply, and deliver continuous improvement rooted in user needs, without working around the clock. (If you’re considering an outside partner or in-house team, we discuss what factors to consider.)

The investment will pay off. Odds are, your competitors' customers will prefer the product built by a team that understands the market.