What is a Customer Advisory Board?

A Customer Advisory Board is a group of current customers that meet regularly to discuss your product. It’s made up of people who represent the varied demographics, firmographics and use cases of your customer base. This group will share how your product meets their needs and expectations and provide feedback on how the product can be improved. 

As the Product Manager, you should engage with this group of customers in regularly scheduled meetings. These sessions are goldmines and can give you the highest quality, most valuable insights to inform your product planning and ensure that the product you’re developing perfectly matches what users want and need. 

Why do you need a Customer Advisory Board?

Every feature of your product should be created to benefit your customers. To do that, and to make sure you don’t become a Feature Factory churning out unneeded updates, you need a good understanding of what users need. 

As a Product Manager, you don’t want to be shooting in the dark about what you think customers want. You know this right?

You probably have a bunch of different feedback channels right now. Maybe you have one of ProdPad’s Customer Feedback Portals, or you’re pulling in feedback from your support tool. Possibly you have a few in-app feedback prompts, or you join the odd customer call. 

But a Customer Advisory Board can be one of the most valuable and fruitful feedback mechanisms available to you, especially when following Customer Advisory Board best practices. If you haven’t already established a CAB, we strongly recommend that you do! 

But why are the thoughts of one small group of customers so valuable? Well, if you’ve followed Customer Advisory Board best practices, their feedback will be illustrative of your entire customer base. Addressing the concerns of those people in your CAB will likely appease your entire customer base too. 

Simply put, having a Customer Advisory Board can seriously supercharge your feedback game and become a key part of your Customer Feedback Strategy.

What are the benefits of a Customer Advisory Board?

We’ll be honest with you now. Putting together and maintaining an effective Customer Advisory Board is a lot of effort. That said, it’s well worth it.

When following Customer Advisory Board best practices, you’ll get: 

Regular access to customer feedback 

Having easy access to in-depth customer feedback is the main reason Product Managers should have a Customer Advisory Board. A CAB is a direct channel that you can leverage throughout the year to get insights you can action. 

Once recruited, you’ve got a reliable group of customers on standby who can give you a clear understanding of your product’s strengths and weaknesses.

You don’t even have to wait till your next meeting to get feedback. Once you’ve built up close relationships with your CAB members, one Customer advisory board best practice is to engage them with simple surveys and questionnaires, or just fire them a quick email to get answers to your burning questions. Nice. 

Customers invested in your product 

Over time, the customers in your Customer Advisory Board will develop closer relationships with you. This makes them more invested in your product, increasing the chances that they become an advocate. 

By demonstrating to key customers that their opinions matter, you’ll build loyalty which may be rewarded in word-of-mouth recommendations, referrals, and more. 

When running a successful CAB, the members inside it can become a useful marketing channel, shouting about your product and helping you to drive the acquisition of new customers. You’re also likely to find that you’ll prevent customer churn from these members in particular, and reduce churn across the whole user base thanks to having a product that so tightly meets the needs of its users!

A chance to validate new ideas

Not sure what product ideas and hypotheses will work? Instead of throwing Ideas against the wall to see what sticks, you can instead turn your CAB into a sounding board. 

You can approach these group members with new ideas that you believe are worth exploring to see how real customers feel about them. This is a great way to test the worth of your ideas before sinking development time into them. 

In a nutshell, running new ideas by CAB members stops you from wasting time and money on building the wrong things. 

Opportunity to perfect your sales pitch

Let’s get this clear now: a Customer Advisory Board Meeting is not a sales pitch. You shouldn’t be trying to sell new features to your customers or encourage them to upgrade their current packages. Not directly in the meetings anyway. 

But, what you can do – once you’ve got a strong relationship with your CAB members – is ask them about your value messaging and positioning. 

Finding out what propositions best resonate with their pain points and challenges can help you build a more compelling sales pitch for the similar customers that each member represents.

And hey, you should make sure your Customer Advisory Board members are first to hear about new features and functionality. If you’ve done a good job of listening to their feedback and building the solutions accordingly, then you’ve got a high chance that they’ll be buying – you won’t need the hard sell. 

What are the best practices when recruiting for a Customer Advisory Board?

A Customer Advisory Board is an invitation-only group of people. Think of it as a secret society, or your very own Justice League of customers.

When thinking about the people you want to invite to these ongoing sessions, consider what each person brings to the table. You want customers who are going to be open, responsive, honest, and engaged. They also need to have enough expertise in their organization and know its needs, which is why senior roles are often prioritized.

Once you’ve picked the people you want in your CAB, you just have the small matter of convincing them to join. 

With a CAB, you’re asking customers to give up their time to help you make your product better. This can be a big ask. To help recruit for your Customer Advisory Board, you need to showcase what’s in it for them. Highlight some of the benefits of the Customer Advisory Board, such as: 

• It’s a place for them to voice concerns and make recommendations to improve a product they rely on. 
• It’s a chance to network with peers and build professional connections. 
• They’ll be able to learn the best practices and added uses for the product. 
• They’ll get insight into new features and functionality of your product before it’s live.

Should you incentivize people to join a CAB? 

If the people in your CAB are only there because you’ve promised them a goodie bag and free lunch, then it’s likely that they’re not going to be as invested in these discussions as they should be. 

A CAB meeting allows participants to voice their opinions and make your product easier and more effective to use. The chance to influence your product development to suit their needs should be incentive enough. 

Now this doesn’t mean you should strip back on your offerings. Just don’t focus on free coffee and gifts as the main way to attract customers to join the advisory board.

How big should a Customer Advisory Board be?

There’s no specific size your CAB should be. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, so the right one depends on your goals and capabilities. 

Customer Advisory Boards with fewer participants are easier to manage and allow your customers to build stronger relationships with your organization. However, you run the risk of lacking diversity and perspectives. 

Larger CABs allow you to access a wide range of perspectives and better represent your entire customer base. The challenge is that it can be super difficult to manage all these people and run meetings. Imagine trying to organize loads of people with everyone all trying to get their opinions across – a bit of a nightmare, right?

The sweet spot for most organizations hovers at around 10-20 members. This amount still allows you to get broad insight without losing control of the discussion.

Who should you invite into a CAB?

Don’t invite any old average Joe to your Customer Advisory Board. The goal is to get specific insights representative of your entire customer base, so be tactical when sending your invites. 

Focus on a wide range of customer types to get a deeper understanding of what the wider market thinks of your product. 

For example, if your product has customers in the tech, healthcare, and construction industries, you won’t get a true reflection of your customer base if all your participants are tech-folk. 

Similarly, if you only have representatives from large enterprises on your Customer Advisory Board, the feedback won’t represent the pain points of smaller businesses in your audience base.

Think carefully about your different types of users and try to enlist a varied set of people who can act as a flagbearer for each audience type. 

Of course, don’t only add customers who are based close to you so that you can facilitate in-person CAB meetings, as this can lead to you excluding useful demographics. 

It’s best practice for a Customer Advisory Board to meet in person, but we understand that might not be an option for some companies. You could have a global customer base, meaning that finding one central location that everyone can travel to is tricky, if not impossible. 

In this case, don’t be put off from going virtual. When you do, think about ways to make this as comfortable and special an experience as possible. Think of ways to make the session feel different from your average Zoom call. 

The Best Practices for Creating a Customer Advisory Board

So you want to put together a Customer Advisory Board that’s up to snuff? Follow these Customer Advisory Board best practices to make sure you get the most out of these groups. 

Keep the people in your CAB consistent

After you’ve selected the people you want in your CAB, stick with them. You don’t want members switching out for others, as this can damage group cohesion and impact the quality of insights. 

By focusing on the same people, it’s easier to build continuity from previous meetings, and members will feel more comfortable with each other, stopping them from being guarded about their business needs and issues.

Set specific goals for your CAB

Before launching your CAB, establish clear objectives for what you want to achieve. By knowing what you want to find out, you’ll create focused and productive meetings. Some goals might include gathering product feedback, exploring market trends, or validating strategic initiatives.

Set an agenda for your CAB meeting

To get the best feedback, you want your CAB members to be prepared. In the invite, send an agenda of what you propose you’ll discuss in the meetings. This ensures that participants are ready to go and helps prevent the meeting from going off-topic.

Ask pre-meeting questions

Before the meeting, send a questionnaire or survey to your CAB members to get initial statistics and feedback that you can discuss in more detail in the meeting. For example, you can ask simple questions about product usage and satisfaction, allowing you to get key statistics to spark a more nuanced discussion. 

Host meetings at the right frequency

When scheduling in-person (or indeed virtual) CAB meetings, you want to make sure you get the cadence right. You don’t want infrequent meetings, yet you also don’t want to run them too often and burn your participants out. 

It’s best practice for a Customer Advisory Board to have a meeting once a quarter, giving users enough time to prepare. To further your connection, you can also introduce more frequent calls or online surveys to help you gather insight all year round while keeping customers engaged but not overwhelmed.

Respect their time

Customer Advisory Board members are putting in a lot of their own time to provide feedback. Be sure to respect this. Make sure that the insights you’re looking to find require the dedicated time of the people involved. If it can be answered in a survey or questionnaire, it doesn’t merit being included in a CAB meeting.

Equally, if your goal for a CAB session is too far-reaching, you may struggle to hit your objective in the allotted time. You cannot let these sessions overrun! It’s just downright rude. So make sure what you’ve put on the agenda is realistically achievable in the time. 

The topics should also resonate with the board. Asking them in advance what things they might like to cover can ensure that you’re talking about highly relevant topics for real-world customers.

Customer Advisory Board meeting structure

So it’s meeting time. 10-20 customer representatives are getting ready to speak with you in person or virtually. They’ve taken time out of their busy schedules and they’re expecting a worthwhile experience that respects their time. No pressure. 

To make sure that the CAB meeting is effective for both you and your invited members, it’s a very good idea to have a pre-arranged structure in place to guide the session. 

What you discuss in your meeting will differ each time, depending on the goals and pre-determined topics of the meeting gathered from your pre-meeting agenda and questionnaire/survey. That said, each meeting can follow the same flow to help you stick to your timings and expertly guide the discussions.

Here’s a comprehensive outline for an effective CAB meeting. Do play around with it and make changes to find something that best fits you. 

1. Introductions: Welcome guests and outline the objectives of the meeting. You can also touch on the agenda points you sent out when scheduling the meeting. Make sure everyone introduces themselves so that they’re encouraged to speak and be heard early on in the meeting.
2. Product Update Presentation: Include a brief presentation going over some of the key changes to your product since the last meeting. Go over things like your company’s progress and product updates you think the customers will be interested in. 
3. Feedback Session: Begin your feedback sessions with an open discussion focusing on any proposed updates or features you want to learn about. In this session, you can use the statistics gained from pre-meeting questions and dive deeper into the ‘why’. 
4. Discuss Market Trends & Challenges: Discuss some of the emerging market trends and challenges that your customers are facing surrounding your product. Get feedback on how your customers think your product can address these challenges and trends to make it more effective. 
5. Show Your Product Roadmap: Showcase your current plans in your product roadmap and share your visions for the future. In this session, you can gather thoughts and opinions on your plans and input on what features or initiatives they would like you to prioritize. 
6. Open Discussion: End your CAB meeting with an open forum Q&A. Let customers share their burning feedback and insight and add extra concerns and suggestions. Discuss any missed items from the agenda, or open up to new considerations that have been sparked in previous meeting sections. 
7. Conclude Meeting: Summarize the key takeaways from the meeting and the action items, assigning responsibility to internal team members for follow-ups. Talk with your customers about the next steps and any touchpoints for the next meeting.

What do you do after a Customer Advisory Board meeting?

Once everyone’s heading home or logging off, as the Product Manager, your work isn’t done. One of the first things to do after a Customer Advisory Board meeting is to get together with your product team for a post-mortem. 

Here you should discuss key insights gleaned from this meeting while it’s still fresh in your mind. Focus on any top-priority discoveries and be sure to also assign action items so that everything is followed up on. 

You’re probably going to want to tie specific feedback to certain product Ideas. Have a look at how you can do that in ProdPad. 

You can also review the success of the meeting to generate ideas on how you can improve it for next time, and also evaluate participants to make sure that everyone involved is still a good match going forward. 

To prove to the participants that their feedback has been actioned and appreciated, create follow-up communication to showcase how you plan to use their insights. Share how their input affected your roadmap and influenced your decisions regarding new product ideas.

7 Tips for leveraging your Customer Advisory Board

By now, we’re all clear that following Customer Advisory Board best practices are great ways for you to get feedback on your product through regular meetings. But what if we told you that you can leverage your Customer Advisory Board for far more? As we said, having direct access to your key customers is invaluable, so it’s best to squeeze as much juice out of it as possible. 

If you’re looking for creative ways to leverage your CAB, here are some additional things you can try: 

1. Use your CAB for Beta testing

So you have a new, exciting product feature that looks like it’s ready to go. It’s been through rigorous alpha testing and now needs to be put through its paces in a real-life environment. 

To get the most out of beta testing, you want people who actually use your product to give it a go. This is where you can utilize CAB members for a closed beta test. This benefits the customers as it gives them a first look at the new feature in action, and benefits you because it’ll help you find bugs and fix issues before it’s available to the wider market. 

2. Get case studies from your CAB 

Case studies act as valuable trust signals, showcasing to prospective customers how your product is solving the issues and meeting the needs of businesses similar to them. When you have a Customer Advisory Board, you can ask them to provide detailed descriptions of how they use the product to turn into case studies. 

3. Ask members to be webinar guests

Got customers in your CAB with a large amount of expertise in a specific area? Do you have people lining up to learn more about that subject? Then you should get them to be a guest in your company webinar or podcast. 

Hosting a webinar with your Customer Advisory Board members helps position both your companies as thought leaders and also acts as great promotion and lead magnet material. 

4. Collaborate with CAB members for content

You can also use CAB members to help you create other content. Think about using CAB members as guest blog writers to share their knowledge on a relevant subject. You can also collaborate by sending them whitepapers and e-books to share on their websites. 

If you scratch your customer’s back, they’re likely to scratch yours, so make sure to return the favor and produce content for them. 

5. Involve them in your product discovery

A great way to leverage Customer Advisory Boards is to get them involved in your product discovery process. Ask them some of your product discovery questions to get invaluable insight to build a more customer-centric solution. 

Doing this will help you uncover the most valuable product concepts. Need help with your product discovery process? We’ve got a step-by-step guide.

6. Use them for market research

So you’re designing a product or feature for a specific market – it’ll be good to get some insight about that market to guide you. Your CAB members are experts in the markets they operate in, so be sure to leverage them for market research. 

Use CAB members to discuss industry trends and gather insights on competitors. CAB members can provide valuable perspectives on market shifts and emerging opportunities.

7. Add them to an online community

By adding CAB members to a preexisting online community, you’re providing them a place to network, interact, and share ideas. This helps to create a space to provide ongoing feedback and insight that can be valuable for you as a Product Manager. It provides continuous engagement and helps all members grow more invested in your product. 

If you’re looking for product-focused Slack groups to join, check out our list of 17 Slack groups for Product Managers. 

Get on Board with the Customer Advisory Board

Customer feedback is essential for Product Managers to have any hope in hell of building a product that meets their needs. A CAB remains one of the best ways to get high-value, direct feedback from the customers you trust most, especially when following Customer Advisory Board best practices.

Of course, getting feedback is one thing, recording it and actioning it is a whole different kettle of fish. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Product Management tool that comes with feedback management functionality? 

Guess what, ProdPad offers exactly that! 

Tie your customer feedback directly to the Ideas in your backlog for better products that solve the right problems for your customers. Have a look at how it works in our ProdPad sandbox.

The post Customer Advisory Board Best Practices: How to Unlock the Power of a CAB appeared first on ProdPad.

We will cover:

• Why it’s important to train them
• What does useful product feedback look like? 
• The challenges of getting good feedback from your customer team
• How to train your customer teams to speak to the roadmap 
• How to structure a training session
• How and when to deliver the training
• Examples of good product feedback to show them
• Don’t let them forget! 

You’ll also get a downloadable, editable, ready-made slide deck to use with your teams to deliver this training.

But first…

Why is it important to train your customer teams to get useful feedback?

Because it will make your job easier, faster and more successful. Simple as that.

If what your customer teams submit as feedback from users is the best it can be, it will significantly cut down the amount of time you have to spend deciphering, interpreting and extracting insight from each piece of feedback. 

It’ll require less follow-up questions from you, less digging and delving. If you’ve coached your customer team mates to ask the right questions and capture the right insight, then that is a job you don’t have to do. 

Nearly all the Product Managers we speak to have experienced the same problem at one point or another. A Support rep submits some user feedback to the Product Team which just reads “customer wants a calendar integration”. Sigh. Now you have to send the customer an email, or pick up the phone and ask them why. Why do they think they need a calendar integration? What is it that they think a calendar integration will do for them? Are they hoping to reduce the number of missed appointments? Are they just wanting to cut out the need to manually update their calendar? Or maybe they want everyone else in their family to know about the appointment? What is the problem they need to solve? 

Because it’s only once you know the fundamental problem they have, that you can evaluate the best way to solve it. And yes, that might end up being a calendar integration, but it might equally turn out to be a new push notification or an automated SMS. 

If you don’t uncover the problem to solve for each piece of user feedback, then you’ll end up in what Janna Bastow (our CEO and Co-Founder and inventor of the Now-Next-Later roadmap) calls The Agency Trap. If most of the pieces of feedback your Customer Teams send over are actually feature requests, then you can easily end up building to order. Functioning like a software agency rather than a product-led organization. 

So, to be truly effective as a product company, you’ll want to be finding out the problems your target customers have and solving them in the best possible way. And training your customer teams to get to the heart of the problem, is one of the important ways you can achieve that. 

What does useful product feedback look like?

Before we launch into how to go about this training, let’s decide what the end goal is. What exactly is useful feedback? What does it look like? 

Here are the core principles of useful product feedback.

• It’s clear who the user is and what type of customer they are  
• It explains what the customer is trying to achieve
• A problem or challenge has been articulated
• There’s an understanding of how often this problem is felt
• There’s an indication of how important solving this problem is for the customer
• The situation or context of the customer is noted
• The motivation for getting this task done has been identified

Now, I must caveat that list. That is the absolute dream. If every bit of feedback ticked all of those boxes you would be flat out winning at Product Management and Customer Experience. The reality won’t be quite so perfect… but this gives you something to aim for! 

What it boils down to is this… you want feedback to tell you the customer is trying to achieve, what problem they have encountered and how important solving that problem is to them.  

The challenges of getting ‘good’ feedback from your customer team

Over in our article 5 Ways to Get Customer Teams to Share User Feedback, we covered the reasons why it’s often hard to get any sort of feedback shared by your Customer Teams. But here we’re concerned with the quality of that feedback. 

So why is it hard to get the right kind of feedback from these colleagues? 

The customer is always right

You’ve heard this right? Customer Service or Support reps will have this mantra gently whispering away to them all day long. They’ll have grown up on this principle – it’s ingrained and underpins all their customer interactions. You don’t disagree with the customer, you don’t argue with them!

And, of course, we don’t want them to disagree with the customer! We just want them to delve a little deeper. We want them to help the customer really understand what is at the heart of their request. It’s about not just taking what they’ve said at face value and reporting it back to Product verbatim. 

But this isn’t easy and maybe it doesn’t come naturally to Customer Teams. They aren’t therapists after all. 

It takes longer

Customer-facing colleagues are often super busy (isn’t everyone ), so taking the time to dig deeper can often be something they don’t have the time to do. 

It is far quicker to just make a note of what the customer has said and ping it over to Product. Done job. 

How to train your customer teams to speak to the roadmap 

This is another advantage of having your Customer Teams well versed in delving into the problems underlying their customers’ feedback. 

Let’s say a customer declares that they need a certain feature. Once your customer teammate has successfully taken that request back to the underlying problem they want to solve, now they should be able to talk to the different ways that problem is already being looked at by the Product Team (if it is). 

This is why it’s important to have your roadmap structured around problems to solve. It makes it super easy for a CSM to hear a problem, find said problem on the roadmap and advise the customer of where that sits in the priorities. And maybe even give them some sneaky previews into the different ideas that are being explored as a part of the initiative to solve that problem. 

They can even invite the customer to be part of the discovery or testing of the solution! That will go a long way to making them feel listened to, valued and invested in the product.  

They will have flipped a simple feature request into an exploration of the customer’s struggles or desires at the same time as giving them a window into the scientific workings of the Product discipline, tirelessly working to discover the best solutions. Trust me, the customer will walk away from this feeling impressed. It’s win/win. 

How to structure a training session

By now I think we’re clear on what useful feedback looks like and why it’s important to coach the Customer Teams to be able to deliver it. But how do you actually go about coaching this stuff? How should you explain it to them? What tips and advice can you give to help them coax out the most useful insights? 

Here’s how you should structure your training. 

1. Tell them why it matters
2. Explain what is in it for them
3. Be clear about what the most useful feedback looks like
4. Give them examples of great feedback
5. Outline the questions to ask
6. Show them examples of flipping feature requests into useful feedback

Tell them why it matters

When it comes to training your colleagues around this, the first job is to win their enthusiasm for the task. You need to convince them that working to delve deeper into customers’ feedback is worth their time and effort. So start by focusing on winning them over to actually being coached in the first place. If you fail to explain how important this is, in a way that means something to them, then they ain’t gonna be listening all that well. 

Explain what is in it for them

Which is why it’s worth giving them the overall benefits to the organization – providing you the right insights to ensure you can build the most valuable product for your customers and therefore increase retention and acquisition – but ALSO the more immediate benefits that will directly impact them and their job. 

Those might include:

• Better relationships with their customers (thanks to talking for longer, digging deeper and increasing their understanding), making communication easier and interactions happier.
• Being able to deliver more positive news more often – rather than saying ‘no we don’t have that feature’, they can say ‘we’re actually exploring how to solve that problem in a better way’.
• Having to deal with far fewer disappointed customers who expected a feature request to be actioned, but instead understand that their problem is going to be explored.

Be clear about what the most useful feedback looks like

Next, you’ll want to be explicit about what useful feedback looks like. So take the principles we’ve covered above and explain them to your trainee. But don’t just use the theory, make it crystal clear with some concrete examples. 

Give them examples of useful feedback 

Whether you actually find a great example from your real feedback inbox, or you make something up to illustrate the point, make it crystal clear by showing them something concrete. 

Outline the questions to ask

Now they’ve seen what the end goal is, take them through the best ways to get there. Here you need to arm them with a list of questions to help them dig deeper, help the customer unpick what it is they need, and get to the heart of the problem. 

Those questions could be:

• What do you think that feature would do for you?
• Why do you feel you need that particular functionality?
• What is the problem you believe that feature will solve?
• What are you trying to do?
• What is the outcome you want to achieve?

Show them examples of flipping feature requests into useful feedback

This is a top tip from our Head of Product here at ProdPad, Kirsty Kearney-Greig. She has done this with our Customer Teams to great effect. It involves picking out a real piece of feedback that they have submitted to the Product Team and flipping it from less useful feedback to some very valuable insight. 

Having the two interpretations side by side is extremely helpful when it comes to understanding the difference. 

Original piece of feedback:

“The customer wants access to the revenue fields via the API.”

Improved feedback after delving deeper and asking the right questions:

“The customer has a monthly report for the Board that requires them to add their revenue numbers per agent per week. Cutting and pasting them from the Rental Report in our product is taking about 2 hours of their time each month. This is time they don’t have to spare! They were wondering whether they could access the right revenue fields via the API and set up an integration that will automatically feed the data into the Board report. They need a solution that greatly reduces the time they have to spend on this task, if not remove it completely.”

How and when to deliver the training

You can’t just email this around and expect much to change. This is coaching that needs to be delivered face to face (well, face on a screen to face on a screen at least). You want to speak directly to your trainees and be able to see their reaction (so you can respond accordingly). 

Do it properly – use a slide deck

So I would urge you to deliver this training to them formally. By that I mean that you’re explicitly standing in front of them, with a slide deck, at a pre-planned time. Don’t worry, that’s as formal as it needs to get. I’m not suggesting everyone has to wear a suit and keep a straight face. The important thing is that this doesn’t come in the form of a passing comment or two. You need to get across the importance and therefore you should give this training the gravitas it deserves. It will help set the right tone and expectations with the team. 

If the thought of creating a slide deck for this fills you with dread, do not worry! We have you covered. We’ve knocking up a ready-made deck for you to download and use with your team. So all you need to do is book in the time with them.

Get a slot in their regular team meetings

In terms of when to deliver the training, there are a few pointers I can give here. If you can, try and deliver the training to multiple customer-facing colleagues at the same time. And try to ensure their managers and leaders are in the room. It’s a good idea to speak to the commercial leaders beforehand and stress the importance, asking for their support in encouraging their teams to work in this way. 

But, if your customer-facing teams are doing a good job, their calendars will be full with customer or prospect calls. So finding a time in the diaries can be extremely tricky. Therefore, it’s a good idea to get yourself a slot in their existing, regular team meetings – that way you know everyone will be there and you don’t have to struggle with finding a time. 

Or do a roadshow

If even that is proving hard, then you could consider taking your slide deck on the road. Yes this will take up more of your time, but I’m hoping you’re sold on the value this could bring! Slot yourself in with each team member for half an hour and run them through the training. 

Make it part of onboarding

Then, once you’ve gotten around everyone, you’ll need to think about new starters. Here I would suggest you speak to HR or the team leaders and ensure this training becomes a standard part of any new starter onboarding for any customer-facing role. 

Don’t let them forget! 

Once you’ve delivered the training to your customer-facing team mates, don’t dust your hands off and walk away. You need to keep reiterating this message if you stand any chance of it becoming a habit for your colleagues. 

This should be considered as ongoing coaching rather than just one-off training. So whenever you spot a piece of feedback coming from a team mate that falls into the ‘not as useful as it could be’ category, take it to them and give them that feedback in the moment. Work with them on how it could be delved into and the exploratory questions they could have asked. 

The post How to Train Customer Teams to Get Really Useful Feedback appeared first on ProdPad.

Why is it important to get internal stakeholders to share product feedback?

But first, why do you need to bother with this? You speak to your customers and users right? Isn’t that enough? Why do you need to struggle away trying to extract insight from other people in the organization?

Because, wonderful as you are, you can’t possibly gather ALL the feedback yourself. A big part of your role as a Product Manager is to speak directly with the users of your product, listen to their feedback and explore their problems. But you have customer-facing team members in the organization who are engaging with multiple individual users all day, every day. If you’re not tapping into that, you have a big hole. 

As Kirsty Kearney-Greig, our Head of Product here at ProdPad says…

For Kirsty here at ProdPad, it’s especially important that her and her team hear all the feedback coming in from customers, because, without it, there’s a risk that she could become blinded by her own experiences. 

I’ll let her explain…

Without a broad range of customer feedback, from as many different flavors of your user base as possible, you’ll fail to understand the whole gambit of experiences and needs and, as a result, fail to take them into account when you’re prioritizing your roadmap, assessing product ideas and deciding what you build and when.  

The challenges of getting stakeholders to share customer feedback 

Getting your hands on all that great insight your customers are sharing with other colleagues is easier said than done. And that is for a number of reasons. 

1. Everyone is busy

Tell me the last time you managed to get through every single thing on your to-do list, exactly in the order you initially planned it. It doesn’t happen right? And especially if you’re in a reactive, customer-facing role. Hopping from one customer or sales call to another all day long. It’s hard to fit in requests from other colleagues. They will certainly get pushed down the priority list as urgent issues come in from customers or revenue-generating activities need to happen.

You tend to get a lot of “oh, I’ll log that feedback later” – with people planning to come back to it at the end of the day and add all the feedback they’ve heard. That’s high-risk for you as a Product Manager. If ‘share feedback’ becomes an item on a to-do list instead of happening in the moment, then there’s a high chance it gets bumped down the list and might not even happen at all. 

2. It’s your job, not theirs

This sounds harsh, but it’s real life. When customer-facing teams are measured on call volume, response time, resolution time and revenue, they are always going to prioritize the tasks that most immediately impact those metrics. This is another reason that sharing feedback can, all too often, slide down the to-do list, in favor of those activities that relate directly to their own KPIs. 

Obviously, longer term, sharing customer feedback and having that impact the decision-making in Product will ensure the product develops in line with customer needs. That will lead to improved customer satisfaction, fewer sales objections and more revenue. But there’s a longer tail to realizing that benefit, and when you have immediate KPIs to hit, it’s not always front-of-mind. 

Even when you do manage to convince your colleagues to send through feedback to you in the Product team, there are challenges around how that is delivered to you and the format it arrives in. 

3. You’re getting feature requests and product ideas rather than feedback

Does this sound familiar to you? A colleague has spoken to a customer and sends you a message (in whatever format that comes) to tell you ‘the customer wants X feature’. End of message. 

How useful is that to you? Not very. Why do they think they need that feature? What do they think that feature will do for them? What is the problem they are trying to solve? THAT is what you need to know. Because maybe X feature isn’t the best way to solve that problem. Maybe you have a better way of solving the problem already on the roadmap. If not that, then you can at least take that problem and run it through discovery to explore a bunch of possible solutions to find the best and most efficient one. 

If you’re just taking feature requests and building to order, then you are falling into what our Co-Founder and CEO Janna Bastow calls ‘The Agency Trap’. 

If your Customer teams are taking feature requests and telling the customer that they will submit it to the Product team, they are setting the expectation that that exact feature will be considered. This can set everyone up for a fall. It’s much better to delve into the route of the problem, listen to the frustration or need the customer has, and have them feel heard and that a solution will be thought about. But we’ll come to how you help your customer teams flip feature requests into genuine feedback in a moment. 

First let’s talk about the challenge of format….

4. The format is all over the place

If you don’t have an organized and communicated way of submitting feedback to the Product team (and sometimes, even if you do), then you’re no doubt getting it in all sorts of shapes and sizes. 

Ultimately, we would always say that some form of feedback submission is better than none at all. So, at least you’re getting something here. But still, there’s room for improvement if feedback is flying in at you from all angles and in a variety of different states. 

One CSM tends to ping you a message on Slack, another fires off an email to you, a third person always forwards you entire recordings of hour-long customer calls, another mumbles a few sentences at you during a meeting. That creates a lot of work for you to collate it all, turn it into something useful and consistent, before you can even start to analyze what you have. Not ideal. 

5. They’re always asking for progress updates

It is absolutely reasonable that your stakeholders request updates on progress when they share feedback with the Product team. They need to keep their customers informed. But there are ways to make this less of a time drain for you as the Product Manager (and we’ll come to those ‘ways’ a little later on). 

Otherwise you will spend far too much of your time fielding questions and digging around for answers. If every time a CSM has a customer call, they come to you asking for updates on all the feedback that customer has given… and you have to do that for every CSM and every call they have… well, you won’t have a lot of time to do much else! 

Yes, those are the challenges, but how do I overcome them, I hear you shout. 

Fair enough. Let’s get to the solutions…

How to get your internal stakeholders to share feedback with the Product team 

1. Make it super easy to submit

Like we’ve said, everyone is busy, focused on their day job and their primary KPIs. They are all working in their own context and have their own work to do. So, if you want your colleagues from other teams to regularly and routinely share their customer feedback with you, you need to make it fast and convenient to do so. 

Let’s face facts, if you require them to log into a different tool which isn’t their own – not one of the tools they already use day-in, day-out – it ain’t gonna happen. Or at least not as often as you’d like. 

If your Customer teams have to leave their context to share feedback with you, then it’ll almost certainly end up as a to-do list item that they plan to come back to at the end of the day – log in once and get it all done in bulk. We’ve already talked about how infrequently those good intentions actually happen. You don’t want this. 

To get the most feedback from other people in your organization, you want them to quickly and easily fire it over to you in the moment (or, at least, immediately after the moment). If you stand any chance of making that happen, you need to give them fast ways to do so without leaving where they are. 

As Kirsty says,

Luckily we can help you with this. If you use ProdPad as your tool, as the central repository for all your feedback from multiple sources, then you can give your internal stakeholders a veritable plethora of fast and easy ways to share their Feedback with you. 

Those ways include:

• A browser extension
• An email drop box
• Through Slack or MS Teams
• Via an unlimited number of customizable Feedback Portals which can be embedded wherever you need 
• Directly from your CRM (like Salesforce)
• Straight from Support tools (like Intercom or Zendesk)

None of these routes require your stakeholders to log into ProdPad. They can simply send the Feedback in with a quick email or a click on the browser extension, or, with the CRM and Support tool integrations, they don’t need to do anything at all. They can just record the customer interaction as they usually would in their own tool and you can have that automatically route into ProdPad as Feedback. 

2. Let them see it makes a difference

It’s important to show your internal stakeholders that the Feedback they share with you actually contributes to the product planning. Otherwise you risk them thinking it’s a pointless exercise and ceasing to do it! I’ve heard Salespeople (in other companies – obviously not ProdPad!) saying “There’s no point telling Product. They just ignore it.” Don’t let that happen in your organization!

Being open and transparent about your product process. Giving everyone full visibility on your flow and prioritization is the best way to ensure you don’t fall foul of this with your Sales or Customer teams. 

If you currently have all your product planning hiding away in spreadsheets or slide decks you need to speak to us here at ProdPad! Having an easily accessible, always up-to-date home for all your product planning is the best way to ensure full transparency into the process. This will mean everyone in your organization understands how Product work and exactly how Feedback feeds into product ideas and prioritization decisions. 

You can also ensure that your internal stakeholders and Feedback submitters see the specific progress relating to particular pieces of Feedback when you use ProdPad. This is the powerful proof they might need to feel assured that their Feedback does impact the product strategy. 

For example, let’s say Customer Success Sally sent some Feedback in through Slack, advising that her customer was frustrated that she’s not spending as much time using the product as she’d like because she’s traveling a lot at the moment. As a Product Manager, analyzing your Feedback, you spot that ‘use when traveling’ is a theme across a number of customers (because ProdPad’s AI Signals tool has highlighted that for you ). So you create a Roadmap Initiative to address this problem – ‘How can we help our customers use our product on the move?’. You come up with a bunch of different Ideas in ProdPad and your AI Assistant automatically links all the related Feedback (including the piece sent in by Customer Success Sally) to the Ideas. 

Next time Sally has a call booked with that customer, she can hop into ProdPad and see a list of all the Feedback she’s submitted. She simply finds this piece and gets an instant update on the workflow stage of the related Idea. She knows, with one click, that you explored three different Ideas, validated a mobile app as the best solution and that mobile app is now in QA testing. What a wonderful update for Sally to deliver to her customer! 

I tell you what, Sally is convinced of the value of sharing Feedback with the Product team. You’ll be enjoying a steady flow of user insight from Sally forever more. 

You might not always be able to show that an individual piece of Feedback has resulted in a corresponding product Idea that hits the roadmap, but you can and should reassure your internal stakeholders that their Feedback contributes to a critical mass of Feedback which feeds the theme analysis. 

Kirsty, our Head of Product, has another top tip to help you convince your stakeholders that their Feedback submissions are important…

3. Make it easy for them to track progress 

We’ve talked about how time draining it can be for you to be constantly dishing out updates to all your customer-facing colleagues. So let’s explore how you can empower them to self-serve this information. 

Because, if they can quickly and easily check up on the Feedback they send through then they’ll be encouraged to keep sending it!

We’re not saying that there shouldn’t be an onus on you as PM to provide these updates, but the right tool can take the weight of this from your shoulders. You then just need to acknowledge receipt of the Feedback and give an indication of what you might do with it, and let the tool help you in terms of smaller incremental updates.

Take the earlier example of Customer Success Sally and the updates she was able to see about the mobile app in QA testing that was linked to her Feedback about using the product while traveling. Sally was able to go into ProdPad, look at her Feedback list and quickly see the workflow stage of the linked Ideas. It looks like this

With ProdPad, you can show all your customer-facing team mates how to set up their Feedback view, customize it to show the information they most care about, and let them hop in here whenever they need an update. You’ve just saved yourself a bunch of time. 

As Kirsty says,

4. Give them clear guidance on what to submit and how

Sometimes people don’t do things because they’re not quite sure how. That’s human nature. So remove all doubt from your colleague’s minds and be crystal clear about what and how to submit Feedback to you. 

We’ve already talked about the propensity to have product Ideas submitted when, in fact, they should have been framed as Feedback, having identified the problem to solve. So, step one here is to give everyone clear guidelines on what is an Idea and what is Feedback. 

Publish, share and socialize those clear guidelines and make sure it’s easily accessible for all your colleagues. Make sure you put it where your Customer teams spend time so they don’t have to hunt around for it.

Consider spreading the word in the following ways:

• Join a Sales meeting and present the guidelines to the team
• Do the same in other customer-facing team meetings
• Post the document on your intranet
• Pin it in relevant Slack or Teams channels (or whatever communication tool you use)
• Email it around
• Find out how to flag it in a prominent place in the CRM, Support tool or whatever tool your customer-facing colleagues use every day

Make sure they are always on hand, so your stakeholders don’t have to hunt around to find it. Because, let’s face it, they won’t. 

What should those guidelines look like? 

Well, we’ve gone ahead and created a template document with a ready-made distinction that you can download and distribute to your team. It’s based on the definitions we use here at ProdPad for our own customer Feedback and product Ideas. We hope you find it useful!

In essence, the distinction looks something like this:

Submit product Feedback if it is about:

1. Improvements on existing features
2. Bugs and issues
3. User experience (UX) enhancements
4. Performance
5. Aesthetics and design

Submit a new product Idea if it is about:

1. A new problem space
2. New markets or use cases
3. Innovative idea
4. Complementary products

Remember, any format is better than nothing at all. But if you can give them easy frameworks to submit their feedback it will reduce the time you spend, as the PM, interpreting what they’ve sent. 

You have to strike a balance between making it easy for them to submit feedback versus helping them to craft it into the most meaningful thing it could be. We think we’ve struck that balance here at ProdPad with our own Feedback processes, so download our template (as soon as it’s ready) and see how it works for you. 

5. Train the team

Our final piece of advice to maximize the amount and the quality of the Feedback you get from your internal customer-facing colleagues, is to spend some time coaching and training them. 

Be gentle obviously. You don’t want to bowl in and start telling them how to do their jobs. But you do need to give them some practical ways to extract the most valuable insights from their customers, in terms of product experience. 

Help them understand how to delve deeper into customer requests or comments, to get to the heart of the problem they need solving. You want this to become a habit for them, so every time a customer says “I need your product to have this feature”, they pause, reflect, then ask the right questions to flip the feature request into a problem to solve. 

Those questions could be:

• What do you think that feature would do for you?
• Why do you feel you need that particular functionality?
• What is the problem you believe that feature will solve?
• What are you trying to do?
• What is the outcome you want to achieve?

Another top tip from Kirsty:

For example, if a customer is asking about API capabilities, you don’t just want your Customer Support people to simply list off what capabilities are and are not available. You want them to delve deeper and ask the customer why they want to know about the API – what do they need to use the API for? What are they trying to do via the API? What is the outcome they want? What problem are they trying to solve

When that has been answered, bang, there’s your Feedback. 

Another of Kirsty’s top tips is to make an appearance at the customer team meetings and deliver this coaching en masse. Rock up to a Sales meeting with the examples on slides, join a CS meeting and take everyone through this training. Then make sure you’re consistently reinforcing this training. Give feedback on the Feedback – not only is this great for acknowledging receipt, but it will also help make this extra level of analysis a habit for your Customer teams. 

How are you going to manage all this Feedback??

If you implement all our suggestions here you’ll be enjoying a consistent flow of useful Feedback from all of your customer and prospect facing team members. So, you better make sure you’re using the right tools to help you manage all that insight. Come speak to one of our Product Management experts here at ProdPad and we can show you all the tools you’ll ever need to gather, analyze, prioritize and action all this customer feedback. 

The post 5 Ways to Get Customer Teams to Share User Feedback [with free template] appeared first on ProdPad.

What is a Customer Feedback Strategy?

A customer feedback strategy is the systematic approach to collecting, analyzing, and utilizing customer opinions, experiences, and feedback to drive product decisions and development. 

It’s about turning the voices of your users into actionable insights that can shape your product’s future. This process helps ensure that your product not only meets but exceeds market expectations, ultimately securing and maintaining product-market fit.

Think of it as being an explorer in a new land. You wouldn’t venture into unknown territory without a map, right? Your customer feedback strategy is that map, guiding you to understand your customers’ needs, pain points, and desires, ensuring you’re building a product that truly resonates with them.

Key Components of a Customer Feedback Strategy

1. Gathering Feedback

The first step is gathering feedback. This isn’t just about sending out the occasional survey. It’s about creating multiple touchpoints for feedback collection, such as:

• Surveys and interviews: These can be structured to gather specific insights.
• Feedback portals: A dedicated space where users can share their thoughts whenever they feel like it.
• Social media and support tools: Leveraging platforms where customers are already active can provide spontaneous and honest feedback.

The goal here is to capture a diverse range of opinions. Imagine you’re a detective piecing together clues from various sources to solve a mystery. Each piece of feedback is a clue that brings you closer to understanding the bigger picture.

I remember back in the early days of building ProdPad, we received feedback, requesting us to build a Google SSO login feature. Initially, we dismissed this as a viable idea because we only had a couple of requests for it, pretty spread out. But as we continued to gather feedback over several months, a trend emerged. More and more users from a specific high value segment were requesting this feature. It was like discovering multiple pieces of a puzzle that finally fit together. 

This feedback helped us understand not just the need for the feature but the specific use cases and user profiles that would benefit from it. Eventually, we built the feature, and it became a significant selling point for that user segment, and helped us step up our pace with growth.

2. Analyzing Feedback

Collecting feedback is only the beginning. The real magic happens when you start analyzing it. This involves both qualitative and quantitative methods:

• Qualitative analysis: Look at the themes and sentiments in open-ended responses. What are the common pain points? What do users love about your product?
• Quantitative analysis: Analyze numerical data from surveys to understand trends and patterns. Which features are most requested? What are the most frequent complaints?

This step is like sifting for gold. Amidst all the noise, you’ll find valuable nuggets of insight that can guide your product development. Tools like AI can help here, automating the process of identifying patterns and trends in vast amounts of feedback. In ProdPad, we have just such a feature. Our Signals tool will read all your feedback and surface the common themes. Better than spending hours, trawling through your entire feedback pile right?

I had this conversation with a customer just the other day: They were overwhelmed by the volume of feedback they’d received after a major product update. Manually sorting through hundreds of responses was daunting. So they decided to leverage our AI tools to help categorize and analyze the feedback. It was a game-changer. Not only did it save them countless hours, but it also highlighted patterns that they might have missed otherwise. 

For instance, they discovered that while users appreciated the new features, many found the updated interface confusing. This insight led them to tweak the navigation UI, resulting in a more intuitive user experience and a subsequent increase in positive feedback.

3. Using Insights to Drive Action

Insights are only valuable if they lead to action. This is where you take the findings from your analysis and use them to inform your product strategy:

• Prioritize feedback: Not all feedback is created equal. Prioritize based on factors like the number of requests for a feature and its alignment with business objectives.
• Develop new features: Use feedback to identify and develop new features that address customer needs. For example, if numerous users request a Google SSO login, and it fits your target market, prioritize its development.

Think of this as turning raw materials into a finished product. The feedback is your raw material, and your product development process is the factory where it’s refined and shaped into something valuable.

Another example from our journey was when users repeatedly requested a more robust tagging system. Initially, we thought our existing system was sufficient, but the volume and specificity of the feedback told a different story. We analyzed the feedback and realized that users needed more granular control over tags to manage their workflows effectively. 

Acting on this, we revamped the tagging system, adding more ways to wrangle tags in bulk and in line with your work. The result? Our users were thrilled, and we saw a notable uptick in that feature adoption and in wider product satisfaction.

4. Responding to Customer Feedback

Once you’ve gathered and analyzed feedback, it’s crucial to respond to it. This doesn’t mean promising every feature request will be built, but rather, showing customers that their feedback is heard and valued:

• Transparency: Explain how feedback is processed and what changes are planned.
• Communication: Regularly update customers on the status of their feedback and the overall product roadmap.

This step is about closing the feedback loop. It’s like being a good friend who listens and then acts on what you’ve heard, strengthening the relationship.

Super early on in ProdPad’s history, I remember a particular instance when we received a complaint about a bug that caused significant frustration with one of our early users. We prioritized fixing the bug and then went a step further. We reached out to the user who reported it, explained what went wrong, how we fixed it, and thanked her for bringing it to our attention. We gave her space to talk us through any other niggly frustrations she might have had with the product—in fairness, there were quite a few as we were so fresh to market back then! She was not only surprised but also impressed by our proactive approach, and she became one of our most loyal advocates over the years. As a result, we built this approach into our customer feedback strategy ever since—turning every reported bug into an opportunity to win the respect and trust of our customers.  

5. Closing the Loop

Finally, after you’ve acted on the feedback, close the loop by informing customers about the changes made:

• Follow-up: Once a feature is developed based on feedback, reach out to the users who requested it. This not only shows that you value their input but also encourages further engagement.

Think of this as the final flourish in a well-executed plan. It’s the moment where you show your users that their voices truly matter and make a difference.

Why Do You Need a Customer Feedback Strategy?

Whether or not you think you have one or not, you’ve already got a customer feedback strategy. It’s just that if you haven’t intentionally crafted it, it’s probably not fit for purpose or doing you any favors. You might just be skating by by doing the minimum amount of listening and responding in a pretty haphazard manner.

Having a solid customer feedback strategy isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a crucial part of product development. Here’s why:

1. Builds what customers want: Directly addressing customer needs and preferences ensures your product remains relevant.
2. Early problem detection: Regular feedback helps identify potential issues early, allowing for prompt resolution.
3. Mitigates churn risks: Engaged customers who feel heard are less likely to churn.
4. Measures success: Positive feedback indicates successful features, while a lack of negative feedback can signal the resolution of previous issues.

Imagine trying to cook a meal without tasting it along the way. You might end up with something that looks good but tastes terrible. Customer feedback is like tasting your dish as you go, ensuring the final product is something your users will love.

Advantages of Having a Customer Feedback Strategy

1. Enhanced product-market fit: Continuous feedback helps refine the product to better meet market needs.
2. Improved customer satisfaction: Addressing customer concerns and preferences boosts satisfaction and loyalty.
3. Informed decision-making: Data-driven insights lead to better product development decisions.
4. Increased competitive edge: Understanding and responding to customer needs faster than competitors can provide a significant market advantage.

Who is Responsible for a Customer Feedback Strategy?

While the Product Manager (PM) is typically responsible for the customer feedback strategy as part of the broader product strategy, it requires cross-functional collaboration:

• Customer Success Team: Often takes ownership of gathering and triaging feedback.
• Support Team: Acts as the frontline, handling initial feedback and escalating issues as needed.
• Product Team: Analyzes feedback and integrates insights into product development.

How to Overcoming Challenges in Implementing a Feedback Strategy

Implementing a feedback strategy can be challenging. Here are some common obstacles and how to overcome them:

• Lack of Ownership: Ensure clear responsibility by assigning roles to specific teams, such as customer success or product teams.
• Resource Constraints: Use tools like ProdPad to automate and streamline the feedback process, reducing the manual workload.
• Bias in Feedback Interpretation: Use objective methods and diverse feedback sources to minimize bias.

I recall a time when we struggled with resource constraints. We were getting more feedback than we could handle, and it was starting to affect our ability to act on it. We decided to invest in AI tools that could help manage and prioritize the feedback. This decision transformed our process, allowing us to focus on the most critical issues and opportunities, leading to more effective product improvements.

What’s the Future of Customer Feedback Strategies?

As technology evolves, customer feedback strategies will become more sophisticated:

• Leveraging AI: AI can streamline the feedback process, making it easier to gather, analyze, and act on customer insights.
• Closer Customer Relationships: Understanding customer needs will become a key differentiator, with companies needing to be more customer-informed to stay ahead.

Imagine a future where AI not only helps analyze feedback but also predicts customer needs before they even arise. Companies that can harness this power will be able to create truly innovative products that delight users and stay ahead of the competition.

Common Misconceptions About Customer Feedback Strategies

Many companies do not actively think about having a structured feedback strategy, assuming that ad-hoc feedback handling is sufficient. However, without a structured approach, valuable insights can be missed, and feedback may not be effectively integrated into product planning.

I’ve seen companies fall into the trap of treating feedback as an afterthought, only to realize too late that they’ve missed critical signals from their users. A well-structured feedback strategy prevents this, ensuring that every piece of feedback is considered and acted upon where appropriate.

Your cue to take action

To learn more about building a robust customer feedback strategy, check out our detailed guides on gathering feedback, closing the feedback loop and analyzing what you have. Start a trial with ProdPad today and see how we can help you turn customer insights into actionable improvements for your product. Book a demo now!

By implementing a comprehensive customer feedback strategy, you can ensure that your product continues to evolve in line with customer needs, maintaining a strong product-market fit and fostering long-term customer loyalty.

Conclusion

In the end, a customer feedback strategy isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a vital component of successful Product Management. It’s about being an explorer, a detective, and a friend all rolled into one. 

By gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback, you ensure that your product not only meets but exceeds customer expectations. So, start mapping out your feedback strategy today and watch your product soar to new heights!

The post Customer Feedback Strategy: How to Gather, Analyze, and Use Feedback to Make Your Product Better appeared first on ProdPad.

There’s often more than one way to solve a problem. To avoid wasting resources, you need an effective way to assess feedback and understand customer problems. Here are my top tips for creating a framework to make managing feedback manageable.

1 – Separate user feedback from ideas

Feedback is a piece of evidence to understand the root problem. It doesn’t have to represent something you are going to work on immediately. So, you shouldn’t treat feedback in the same way as you would an idea in your product backlog. 

How are feedback and ideas different?

Ideas:

• Normally at the Epic level
• Represent opportunities/solutions/experiments
• As product teams, you only want one version of an idea in your backlog

Feedback:

• Summarises problems and pain points
• Naturally some will be requests, like a specific integration for example
• As product teams, you want lots of feedback of the same thing as it shows evidence of need

You should also think about the language when asking for feedback. Terms like ‘feature requests’ are misleading. Customers start thinking about solutions not problems, because it implies they can request an actual feature.

Below are some real-life examples of negative nicknames for an organization’s product backlog. This negativity arises from lumping feedback and ideas together, which leads to frustration from colleagues who work closely with customer feedback as they can’t understand why their feedback seemingly isn’t being listened to. This can be rectified by creating separate processes for managing feedback and ideas. 

A transparent product workflow will alleviate this frustration, showing the customer-facing parts of the business what stage ideas have reached and how decisions are made around prioritisation. They can also see all the other great things going through discovery and being built to meet customers’ needs. Below is an example workflow, including discovery, development and released processes, to help with this.

Idea discovery workflow

• New idea 
• In Review – Indicates you are reviewing/validating the idea.
• Needs More Info – Indicates the idea requires more information/is being spec’d out.
• Approved for Development – Indicates the idea has been approved for development.
• Queued for Dev – The idea has been sent to the dev team and is being prepared for a sprint.
• In Development/In Progress – The idea is with the dev team and is being worked on.
• QA – The idea is being QA’d.
• Released – The idea has been released.
• Not Doing – The idea won’t be done.
• Duplicate – There is a duplicate in the system.
• Failed Experiment – The experiment failed.

At the bottom of this post, you can find a framework for creating your own workflow for managing feedback. By creating two separate, but connected processes, this will create more understanding and harmony in your organization.

2 – Understanding customers’ problems

User feedback comes into the business from many different places, and it can be difficult to know where to start. If you’ve already separated feedback from a new idea, then you’ve taken that first step to making it easier. But it’s important not to take the feedback at face value, and instead to understand the real problems. If you don’t, you could end up making expensive mistakes.

Often user feedback can be very specific and requires research to fully understand the problem at its root. It can be difficult to do this, especially for colleagues outside Product when this type of feedback comes from a conversation focused elsewhere, such as a sales or success call.

The key thing is to remember that you’re trying to understand the problem at the root of the feedback. You should focus on understanding the WHY, rather than HOW they would like something e.g. the solution they have decided they would like. 

Here are some tips for understanding these customer problems better. 

• The five whys – keep asking why to dig into the deeper problem
• Understand their current frustrations
• Ask them to show you how they currently do this
• Get more specifics on what they are trying to achieve

If it’s not appropriate to follow up with these questions during a call that is focused on achieving a different outcome, get used to going back to customers to dig in further.

3 – Collect varied user feedback

There’s plenty of direct and indirect ways that feedback can come into the business, so you need to make sure you have an effective way to gather them. 

What do you currently treat as feedback?

Feedback, whether quantitative or qualitative, comes into your business from a wide range of sources:

• Support desk
• Sales calls
• Internal stakeholders
• Customer Success
• User research 
• Data insights

You need to make sure that all feedback is collected and made accessible to help with conducting different areas of the business.

Qualitative feedback can come from:

• Support tickets
• Feedback portal
• Sales calls
• Customer Success calls
• Face to face meetings
• User research

Qualitative is one part of the story, but you also need to try and understand how your product is actually being used, which is where Quantitative data comes in. There are lots of tools that can help you understand usage, such as Sherlock, Amplitude, or Mixpanel. Think about what data you want to see, which may include:

• Product usage
• What would you expect? Importance of the features/functionality?
• No. of logins
• Frequency

Identify what you want to understand:

• What does good look like?
• What do you expect from an activated account?
• Drill down into that data
• How can you try and tweak that metric?

How easily can customers share feedback with you?

Consider how to make it easy to gather feedback from these areas and centralise it for the Product team. We collect feedback in our Sales and Success tools and integrate them in ProdPad to collate it in one place. 

Think also about whether you’re making it as easy as possible to hear from your customers. I always use in-app chat as the first point of call for help and so I hate it if I’m asked to join a forum when I’ve just shared my feedback with someone in the company. The business should be joined up enough to tell the product team, otherwise they miss out on my feedback. Your customers’ time is valuable, don’t put blockers in the way of gathering useful feedback!

With all this feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, you’re building evidence of need for the potential ideas and opportunities that Product are exploring.

4 – Assign someone to be responsible for feedback

It’s great to have a single space to consolidate feedback, but the only real way to get it to work for you is by developing a proper process around it. You should make someone responsible for keeping on top of it so it doesn’t become unmanageable. 

Companies approach this differently. In some, Customer Success owns the feedback process while others keep it in Product, with internal stakeholders feeding into it, as they know the ideas backlog best. I don’t think it matters which approach you take as long as you consider the following: 

• Where will responsibility sit?
• Which team?
• Who has capacity?
• Those interested

And consider the following when you set up your feedback process:

• How much time you should set aside?
• When/how often feedback should be reviewed alongside ideas?
• How you map out the process?
• Will there be a place to collect feedback?
• Is there a feedback review process?
• Will the feedback sit with a sit or existing idea?

5 – Communicate

To help manage expectations it is essential to communicate your process around feedback both internally to sales, customer success, marketing, support teams, etc, as well as to external clients, customers, end users. By sharing and opening up processes, everyone can see how they feed into it, and feel heard. Therefore, they will appreciate how Product is making decisions on what to build next, with customer problems and business objectives front and centre.

Product teams can do this by sharing their roadmap so they can understand the focus for Now, Next & Later, and how this relates to customer problems. As a Customer Success Manager, for example, having access to this means I can understand the direction of the product and what ideas are being reviewed to resolve those problems, so I can discuss with customers.

How easy is it for colleagues outside Product to discuss the direction of the product?

Involving people outside Product in the feedback process can help to reduce the number of questions the product team is asked. If the roadmap and ideation workflow are open, people can easily access information for themselves. For example, I can easily see our roadmap, understand the direction of the product and what the status are of those ideas being reviewed to resolve those problems, for example if they are in discovery, development or released.

How to build your framework to manage user feedback

1. Show benefits internally of having this process
2. Understand the problems internally 
3. Identify where to get feedback/data from
4. Consolidate in a centralised location
5. Ideally connect it with your product discovery backlog
6. Allocate responsibilities to regularly review & manage feedback
7. Plan how to communicate & close feedback loop

This blogpost comes from a talk given at the Product-Led Growth conference. For more information on the topics covered around customer feedback, please get in touch. I would be very happy to chat more about this.

Below you can find the slides from my presentation.

The post Tapping Into Your Market: Making Sense of User Feedback appeared first on ProdPad.

Creating Product Roadmaps – Top Down and Bottom Up

You are doing your discovery, you’ve updated your product vision, revamped your strategy. You’ve come up with your product objectives and know you can’t manage on objectives alone. What next? How do you combine the top down (product vision -> product strategy -> product objectives) with the bottom up of customer problems and feedback?

To bring these all together you need to revamp your roadmap to focus on initiatives that both solve customer problems and achieve your product objectives. We’ve covered the structure of these roadmaps in detail here, you might know them as thematic roadmaps, lean roadmaps or objective roadmaps.

Your objectives are the outcomes that show you’re delivering your product strategy. In order to achieve an objective, you need to make changes to your product – these are your initiatives. While you could try to manage without a roadmap and solely with objectives, in general this is not advisable.

Let’s consider an example to clarify the difference between objectives and initiatives: Your vision is to force the enemy to surrender, your strategy is to deny the enemy freedom to operate in the area of operations you’ve been assigned. Your objectives are to deny enemy access to the area of operations, dominate the area of operations, and establish defensive positions as needed.

Let’s consider the objective “deny enemy access to the area of operations”. An initiative that achieves this objective would be “establish control of road C”. Within that initiative are various steps you need to take to complete the initiative – such as plan the initiative, conduct a fighting patrol to hill B, route the enemy from hill B and establish a defensive perimeter on hill B to provide overwatch and fire lanes on the road.

The initiatives should be described as a problem or set of problems that, when solved, will help to achieve the objective. They should be able to affect the KPIs or Key Results, which are the measures to show you achieving or making progress towards the objective.

A key point to remember here is the assumption that executing this initiative will help to achieve the objective. You don’t know if it will, which is why it’s better to frame the initiative as a set of problems or problem statements. The steps you plan to take as part of the initiative then become experiments. These experiments will test your hypotheses, that certain changes to your product will solve customer problems and move the needle on the KPIs/Key Results. This indicates progress towards your objective.

Going back to our example, you might find that once you get to hill B it is impossible to seize. So that initiative won’t work. But you find that you can seize hill A on the opposite side of the road, which still allows you to achieve your objective. You can discard one initiative for another that achieves the same objective.

As you run the experiments you gather feedback and see the impact on the metrics. This in turn allows you to adjust your roadmap to best achieve your objectives and also to continually test whether the objectives are reasonable, if your strategy is working and if your vision is achievable.

This is why a roadmap is the prototype for your strategy. It’s not set in stone, and should be adapted as you learn.

Right Sizing

It’s important to start solving problems as soon as possible, and ensure you don’t waste time building things that aren’t useful, by using smaller initiatives that are part of a bigger problem set. That way, you can test whether you’re on the right track and that the problems are worth pursuing. Iteration and measurement of outcome is the way to confirm that you’re doing the right thing.

While you confirm that the initiatives are working, your team can move on to other initiatives that address problem sets and, ultimately, objectives. The aim is not to focus exclusively on one objective and then move on to the next. Instead the aim is to move forward on all fronts, to avoid falling down a rabbit hole and neglecting the overall product strategy and vision. Delivering a product strategy is never about achieving a single objective but instead delivering multiple objectives together that combine to deliver the product strategy, and therefore the product vision.

It is the interplay of objectives that delivers the product strategy and product vision.

Your roadmap then becomes a mixture of smaller initiatives, some related, some not, targeting various product objectives.

Should you break down all the initiatives right away? No, this is where time horizons are so powerful.

Initiatives that are slated for “later” are broad and large, too big to be deliverable without further analysis. As the initiatives move from right to left, they become more granular and deliverable. Some initiatives will never progress and will be removed from the roadmap. Other times only parts of the original initiative will progress.

Assigning Objectives

Initiatives aren’t limited to one objective. Many initiatives will have more than one objective, sometimes because the objectives are very similar, other times because the initiative tackles multiple objectives at a fundamental level.

You need to be careful that an initiative doesn’t collect objectives – only add the objective if its associated metrics are expected to change. The initiative has to have some reasonable explanation (hypothesis) for why it can help to achieve the objective.

The requirement for a reasonable, causal link between an initiative and an objective is a strong barrier to featuritis. If a good idea can’t be tied back to the product strategy via the objectives then, while it is a good idea, it isn’t for your product right now. This is particularly helpful when managing expectations of other stakeholders.

When your initiative is slated for “later”, limit the assigned objectives to the strategic objectives. These are the broad-based objectives that directly spell out your strategy. As they move left into the next and now columns the initiatives will gain more tactical objectives and relevant company objectives.

Prioritization

With so many choices of initiative – some dependent on others on the roadmap, others potentially dependent on initiatives in other roadmaps, or even on initiatives undertaken elsewhere in the company – how do you choose what to do? How do you prioritize?

Prioritization often depends on your knowledge of the customer, the product, the technology, and then the business. But there are some rules of thumb you can use.

Generally, you should focus on initiatives that have a high impact and low effort. But your product doesn’t live in isolation to the wider organisation and you can’t consider initiatives in isolation from each other, so that’s probably not enough. This is where the rules of thumb come in.

Rule 1: The more disparate objectives the better

If an initiative or series of related initiatives helps to achieve a disparate set of product objectives then these initiatives should be prioritized before all the others. In this case it is important that the objectives being achieved are not related. The more related the objectives are, the less important this signal is when prioritizing the initiatives.

If you’re trying to prioritize between two initiatives that both have multiple objectives, the disparity between the objectives is an important consideration. For example, if you have an initiative with objectives of “increase users” and “reduce churn”, it could be low priority than one which has objectives like “Enter the US market” and “Increase user satisfaction”. The latter example hits two very different (and much more specific) objectives, so the return on investment is likely to be higher.

Rule 2: Alignment with company objectives

If your company or organization is using objectives, alignment of the initiatives with the company objectives is another important signal. The more the initiatives support the company or organizational objectives, then the higher the priority. However, you should remember that you need to start with the product objectives before prioritizing via the company objectives. Otherwise you end up prioritizing for the company strategy and not the product strategy. You want to achieve alignment between the delivery of the product strategy and the current company objectives.

Rule 3: Look to your dependencies

Many initiatives will be dependent on initiatives in other products in the organization or initiatives in other teams in the organisation (such as sales, marketing, customer support, security and finance). At the same time your initiatives may be a dependency for those of other products or teams. You may need to bring forward work that is needed to support others and you may need to push back your plans if the other teams haven’t finalized the initiatives you’re dependent on.

The priorities of the initiatives are indicated by the relative position in the roadmap columns. Initiatives in the “now” column are highest priority, followed by the “next”, and then “later” columns. Within the columns, the higher-priority initiatives are nearer to the top. So an initiative at the bottom of the “now” column has a higher priority than one at the top of the “next” column. However, priorities are fluid and changing company objectives, product objectives and dependencies can all mean initiatives move back and forth between and within the columns. You can’t lock your priorities and not be responsive to changing fortunes.

Summing it Up

Having started with product vision which led to the product strategy and then onto the product objectives, a roadmap of initiatives driven by the problems of customers tied to the product objectives now exists.

The initiatives that get onto your roadmap should be tied to the problems you’ve identified through continuous product discovery and tied into your product objectives. As those initiatives move from right to left they should become more defined and granular, collecting more tactical objectives and company objectives as they move left. The priority of the initiatives is indicated by the column they sit in and position within the column.

You now have a roadmap that aligns your customer-focused initiatives with both the product objectives and company objectives, showcases your priorities and helps you to communicate progress to stakeholders. As you learn more about customer problems and the effectiveness of your product vision, you will need to adapt your product strategy, keeping in mind the constant change in company objectives. The only constant in life is change – and that’s why your roadmap should not be static.

The post Putting it all Together – Creating a Lean Objective-Based Product Roadmap appeared first on ProdPad.

For this tutorial, all you’ll need is…

1. Your widget embed code
2. Access to your codebase
3. A text editor (I use Sublime Text)
4. A basic understanding of CSS
5. A good cup of coffee!

Install your widget

If you haven’t already installed your widget, you’ll need to do that first, don’t worry all you have to do is find and add your widget embed code. Having trouble? Follow this guide.

The default widget should look like this on your site with no customization:

Don’t worry If you’re not an admin in ProdPad, simply ask your admin to give you the code!

Basic UI customization of your widget (in ProdPad)

If you’re an admin and just want to make some quick changes, you can customize basic text and colors of your widget (plus other options) via the widget styling tab in ProdPad.

The CFP Widget customization view in ProdPad

Advanced customization of your widget (with CSS wizardry)

So assuming you have installed your widget and set some basic UI customization options from ProdPad we can look at customizing the button a little further…

Inspect the button element (right click on the widget button and select inspect) this is the HTML we see:

<button id="pp-cfpiaw-trigger" class="pp-cfpiaw-trigger--icon pp-cfpiaw-trigger--rounded pp-cfpiaw-trigger--right" role="button">Got feedback?</span></button>

Let’s break this down:

1. The widget button has an id ofc#pp-cfpiaw-trigger we’ll be using this later.
2. The classes .pp-cfpiaw-trigger--rounded and .pp-cfpiaw-trigger--right are styling modifier classes that set the shape and position of the button retrospectively. (You can also configure these options in ProdPad if you want a different shape or position). We don’t need to do anything with these.
3. The .pp-cfpiaw-trigger__icon is our icon class. We use an SVG as our default icon. Because an SVG is actually just code, it’s accessible via CSS, the pros to using an SVG are 1. it looks much better on high-res screens because its scalable (compared to lower res images) and 2. It has a small file size! We’ll come back to this class later.
4. The .pp-cfpiaw-trigger__text is the “Got Feedback” text. This shows in the HTML but is visually hidden by the ProdPad configurations we set earlier.

With this knowledge comes power, you can now do any of the following:

1. Add a background gradient

If you want more than just a solid background color (which you can change in ProdPad), you could do something in CSS like add a gradient! I find this generator super helpful when creating gradients as it provides browser fallbacks, prefixes and SASS versions 

Open up that text editor! For all CSS changes, we want to prefix your rules with the #pp-cfpiaw-trigger ID selector to make sure your CSS takes precedence over ours and avoid specificity wars.

You can add a custom gradient as follows:

#pp-cfpiaw-trigger {
    background: rgb(240,80,92); /* Old browsers */
    background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(240,80,92,1) 0%, rgba(240,148,78,1) 25%, rgba(240,228,78,1) 50%, rgba(35,195,179,1) 75%, rgba(37,167,217,1) 100%); /* FF3.6-15 */
    background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(240,80,92,1) 0%,rgba(240,148,78,1) 25%,rgba(240,228,78,1) 50%,rgba(35,195,179,1) 75%,rgba(37,167,217,1) 100%); /* Chrome10-25,Safari5.1-6 */
    background: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(240,80,92,1) 0%,rgba(240,148,78,1) 25%,rgba(240,228,78,1) 50%,rgba(35,195,179,1) 75%,rgba(37,167,217,1) 100%); /* W3C, IE10+, FF16+, Chrome26+, Opera12+, Safari7+ */
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#f0505c', endColorstr='#25a7d9',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */
}

This amazing rainbow gradient would give us something like:

2. Change the button hover style

By default when you hover over the widget button, the background subtly fades to a darker tint of your chosen primary color. This has been achieved with CSS transitions and a box-shadow on the hover pseudo class.

Now, you might want a specific background color rather than a tint, so we can change it by setting a color and removing the box-shadow like so:

#pp-cfpiaw-trigger:hover {
    box-shadow: none;
    background-color:#E95EAC; /* ProdPad Pink */
}

This would give us the following:

You can also experiment with the transform property on the widget to do things like making your widget grow on hover, for example:

#pp-cfpiaw-trigger {
    transition: color .15s linear,box-shadow .15s ease-in-out, background-color .15s ease-in-out, transform .15s ease-in-out!important; /* Change the existing transition property to include the transform value */
}
#pp-cfpiaw-trigger:hover {
    box-shadow: none; /*Remove the existing shadow*/
    background-color: #E95EAC; /*ProdPad Pink*/
    -webkit-transform: scale(1.1); /* Ch <36, Saf 5.1+, iOS < 9.2, An =<4.4.4 */
    -ms-transform: scale(1.1); /* IE 9 */
    transform: scale(1.1); /* This will scale our button up so it looks like it’s growing! */
}

This would give us the following:

Add a custom icon image

If you want to use your own icon instead of ours first of all we need to hide that SVG we talked about earlier.

Hide the existing SVG with the following code:

#pp-cfpiaw-trigger .pp-cfpiaw-trigger__icon {
    display:none;
}

As the HTML is generated by our script, we’ll need a different way to add a new icon.
We can use the ::after pseudo selector which allows you to add new content (e.g. our icon) on a page without needing to edit the HTML

#pp-cfpiaw-trigger {
   &nbsppadding:4px!important; /*Reset padding to what you want*/
}
#pp-cfpiaw-trigger::after {
    content:"";
    display:block;
    background:url(question.svg) no-repeat center; /*Path to your custom image*/
    height:40px;
    width:40px;
}

This should now look like what we have in ProdPad:

Note: I’ve used an SVG which you can download here but you can use a transparent PNG or GIF to achieve the same result. Older versions of IE don’t support SVG so check your browser support first!

If you have a completely custom button image you want to use instead, you don’t need to use the ::after selector you can just replace the background property on the button like this:

#pp-cfpiaw-trigger {
    background:transparent url(../img/icons/question.svg) no-repeat center!important;
    border-radius:0!important;
    padding:0!important;
    width: 70px; /*width of your background image */
}
#pp-cfpiaw-trigger:hover {
    box-shadow:none!important; /*Remove the hover shadow*/
}

And last but not least:

Note: If you’re finding that your colour is being overwritten by the default settings, make sure your CSS is being loaded after our widget CSS. When multiple declarations have equal specificity, the last declaration found in the CSS is applied to the element. You might have to use the !important class.

There you have it, if you have any questions drop us an email, or tweet! My next blog will talk you through adding a pop up menu like we have in ProdPad

The post Custom styling for your CFP Widget </br> (Blog 1 of 2) appeared first on ProdPad.

This little time-saving detail makes your customer experience shine. Fewer form fields reduces friction for your customers, which usually results in an increase in form submissions. It’s a nice little touch that also helps you get more customer feedback.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how to set up pre-filled form fields for customers who visit your Customer Feedback Portal or use your Customer Feedback In-App Widget.

Here is a short example of implementation to help get you started.

First we will look at targeting the element to dispatch to and listen for events. Then we will set up the events used to pass the ‘name’ and ’email’ values to the widget. Lastly, we will listen for when the widget is initialised so that we know that we can successfully pass the values in.

Step 1: Target Your Widget

Both of the tools that come with your Customer Feedback Portal emit and receive their own specific events to allow for programmatic interaction.

Initially we need to obtain a reference to your widget, so that we can listen for the these events:

var widget = document.querySelector('[data-pp-cfiw-widget]');

To target the portal widget, use the data attribute 'data-pp-cfpw-widget'

To target the in-app widget, use the data attribute 'data-pp-cfiw-widget'

Note: We are assuming here that there is only one instance of each widget on the page. However, if there are more then simply target each additional widget further by adding into the query the widget’s UUID (this is the widget’s generated data attribute string) as the attribute’s value.

Step 2: Set Up Events

Next we need to set up a CustomEvent that will be dispatched to the widget to set the value of the ‘name’ input in it’s form:

var setNameEvent = new CustomEvent('setNameValue', {
   'detail': 'Will'
});

This creates the event object, though doesn’t send the actual event yet, we will do this in the next step.

The ‘detail’ property should output the name value that will be displayed in the form for your ‘name’ input value. We are just using a static string here to keep it simple.

We can also create an event for setting the email value, but you could just set the one event if you preferred:

var setEmailEvent = new CustomEvent('setEmailValue', {
   'detail': 'will@email.com'
});

Step 3: Listen for Widget Initialisation

Next, we can create an event listener to listen for the widget’s ‘initialised’ event. Once the widget is ready, it will emit this event which indicates that it is ready to receive our custom events.

So let’s set it up to dispatch our events on hearing the ‘initialised’ event:

widget.addEventListener('initialised', function(e) {
   // The widget is now ready to receive events
});

Note the English spelling of this event, I apologise, I’m British and the ‘z’ just didn’t look right.

Step 4: Dispatching Events

Finally, we can dispatch the events to set the input values at any point after the widget has been initialised. So, for example, if the user logs in after the widget has already initialised on your website, then you can set their name and email in the widget form after this has happened or if they update their name or email for some reason.

widget.dispatchEvent(setNameEvent);
widget.dispatchEvent(setEmailEvent);

Note: These events can be passed in at any time after the widget has initialised.

Putting all the code together…

You should now have something that looks like this:

var widget = document.querySelector('[data-pp-cfiw-widget]');

var setNameEvent = new CustomEvent('setNameValue', {
   'detail': 'Will'
});

var setEmailEvent = new CustomEvent('setEmailValue', {
   'detail': 'will@email.com'
});

widget.addEventListener('initialised', function(e) {
   widget.dispatchEvent(setNameEvent);
   widget.dispatchEvent(setEmailEvent);
});

Extra detail on the events involved…

Emitted Events

'initialised' – This event will be emitted from the widget/portal’s base element when it has fully initialised. It will pass down the widget’s configuration as an object in the ‘detail’ property of the emitted event.

Received Events

Once the widget/portal has initialised it will listen for these events…

'setNameValue' – This event expects the ‘detail’ property to be a string that it will apply as the value of the ‘name’ input in the widget/portal’s form.

'setEmailValue' –  This event expects the ‘detail’ property to be a string that it will apply as the value of the ‘email’ input in the widget/portal’s form.

So what’s next?

Why stop here? There are tons of ways to customize your Customer Feedback Portal – plus a free API to help you roll out an even better experience for your customers.

The post How To Auto-Populate Fields On Customer Feedback Forms appeared first on ProdPad.

But Daniel had a different point to make: What about the color-blind users?

You see, when someone adds their vote and a comment to an idea, 92% of our audience sees this:

The remaining 8% who are color-blind see something different.

Now, there are a bunch of different types of color-blindness. I ran an example of our current design through a color-blindness simulator.

Here’s what the same positive vote looks like if you’ve got a deuteranomaly form of color-blindness, the most common type that involves a red-green color deficit.

Not so clear it’s a positive vote anymore!

It’s funny that Daniel pointed this out and that we hadn’t thought of it when first designing this voting system. When running demos of ProdPad, I always use color-blindness as an example of a problem to solve!

But here we were, dropping the ball. So we looked at ways to improve the experience, even though we knew we didn’t have a lot of time to put towards it.

I worked with our UX Designer, Kav, and we went through a few potentially quick solutions.

How do we fix this without a lot of time?

Potential Fix #1: What if we added a hover state with context?

This one put too much onus on the user. We didn’t think people would think to hover over a user’s avatar in a discussion thread to see what a color means. Solution thrown out.

Potential Fix #2: What if we changed the luminosity to have a contrast ratio of 4.5:1? 

This one would drastically change our colour palette, and there was no easy way to detect and dynamically adjust luminosity on the fly. It certainly wasn’t the simplest way to solve the problem, and Danielle, our UX Developer, had experience in trying this before that was helpful in steering us away from this time sink. Solution thrown out.

Potential Fix #3: What if we added some context inline, next to the user’s name?

It would provide quick visibility and understanding of the action the user just took, and was simple to execute. Solution accepted!

We created a new idea in ProdPad, wrote up our notes and included some mockups. On our Priority Chart, it fell squarely in our Quick Wins category.

I pushed it along to Trello to be picked up by our development team.

And there we have it, from feedback to quick win solution in a matter of hours. Thanks, Daniel! You just helped make ProdPad that much more awesome.

The post Now You See Me! Feedback to Quick Win in Less Than a Day appeared first on ProdPad.