Implementation is the New Sales Enablement

What product managers can learn from the folks who make the product actually work for customers.

Product managers love talking to customers. Or at least, we say we do. We run discovery interviews, usability tests, and satisfaction surveys. We build personas and map journeys. But too often, we overlook one of the richest sources of customer insight: the implementation team.

These are the people in the trenches—customizing, configuring, and calming down frustrated customers after they've signed the deal and suddenly realize, "Oh no, now we actually have to use this thing."

And yet, implementation teams are often treated as the duct tape between product and reality. That’s a mistake.

Implementation isn’t just about setup. It’s sales enablement 2.0. It’s the moment when the promises made during the sales cycle are either fulfilled… or exposed as hype. And product managers who tune in to implementation teams can surface game-changing insights that never show up in a roadmap review.

From “Friendly UI” to “Power Tools”

A few years ago, our team had worked hard to design a clean, intuitive interface—something you’d feel good demoing to an exec or handing to an everyday user. We were proud of it. It aced the usability tests. It made the product look easy.

Then our implementation team came knocking. “This is great,” they said, “but we need something faster. We need power tools.”

Their pain? The user-friendly UI was too slow and too manual for enterprise onboarding. These weren’t casual users—they were power users, running implementations across dozens of customers. They needed to spin up environments, set configurations, and import large rulesets quickly and repeatedly. Clicking through setup wizards one screen at a time just wasn’t cutting it.

Their ask? A bulk-import tool that would let them define and reuse implementation profiles—essentially templated setups they could deploy in minutes.

The result? We built it. And the time to implement dropped from three months to three weeks. That’s a product win, but it wasn’t found in the backlog. It came from the field.

What Product Managers Miss

Product managers are wired to think in terms of end users. But, for complex enterprise products, the first people who wrestle a product into working shape are often the implementation and onboarding teams. And if you’re ignoring them, you’re missing the earliest, most honest feedback loop.

Here’s what implementation teams can tell you that your analytics dashboard can’t:

• Where customers stumble first. Implementation sees where expectations meet confusion. What seems obvious in Figma may be baffling in the wild.

• Where “configuration” becomes “customization.” These are the places where your product starts to crack—and where you’ll be asked to do one-off fixes instead of building the right abstraction.

• Where your pricing model falls apart. Ever tried onboarding a new customer only to realize your plan tiers don’t align with actual usage needs? Your implementation team has.

Implementation as an Early Warning System

Think of your implementation team as a kind of pre-sales QA. They’re the ones who have to work around broken assumptions, conflicting requirements, and incomplete features. And they see patterns before you do.

Here are a few signals that should prompt a product team check-in:

• Repeated workarounds: If your implementation team has a shared doc of “hacks we use to get this working,” pay attention.

• Support tickets during implementation: If you’re logging tickets before customers even go live, something’s off in your setup flow.

• Excessive handholding: If implementation requires a Zoom call every time a new user is added, your admin tools are underbaked.

Tapping Into the Goldmine

So, how do you learn from your implementation team without drowning in noise?

• Attend new client kickoff calls. You’ll see what was promised versus what’s actually being delivered.

• Sit in on onboarding sessions. Watch customers react in real-time. Take notes on where they hesitate or ask “what does this do?”

• Review implementation templates. The ones they’ve created often reflect the “real” product architecture that customers need—not the one you imagined.

• Build an implementation feedback loop. Treat your implementation leads like power users. Invite them to roadmap previews and discovery sessions.

The Roadmap is Downstream from Reality

Implementation is where the rubber meets the road. If you want to build a product that sells, you talk to buyers. But if you want to build a product that works, be sure to talk to your implementation team.

They’re not just a service team; they’re product experts. Power-users. They know which features turn into friction, which workflows feel brittle, and which aspects of the product make customers call support.

And sometimes, they’re the ones who see the real opportunity. Like the time we thought a slick UI was the solution—until they asked for a power-user tool that transformed our onboarding model and delighted enterprise customers.

Implementation isn’t just a phase. It’s where the truth lives. And smart product managers would do well to listen.