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.

People want to talk about that roadmap

You may know that at ProdPad, we communicate our plans on a theme-based roadmap. You won’t find any features or deadlines on our roadmap, because themes give us way more flexibility to change our plans and priorities. (You can create one too using our product roadmap tool.) 

We stay relatively vague, to give ourselves the freedom to shape and pivot until we move forward on a solution. Yet this has never been a deal breaker for our customers. 

Quite the opposite, actually.

Our roadmap has kicked off conversations that have gone on to directly influence our product decisions. It’s an opportunity for our customers to tell us what they’d like to see. More importantly, it’s an opportunity for them to see what we’re up to without getting caught by surprise.

For example, when we first put SSO on the roadmap (based on initial feedback from customers), we didn’t know what we were going to build. But we had a public roadmap and asked customers what they thought of the idea. 

We learned from them that the Google Apps SSO integration would have a much bigger immediate impact than some of the trickier solutions we were considering.  Eventually, we moved forward with what our customers suggested and saved ourselves the pain of building an overly sophisticated feature our customers wouldn’t value as much.

Or take this for example: In the Future column, we have a Mobile/iPad theme.

We know won’t get to building an app for awhile, but just having it sitting there on our roadmap led to a feature that our users themselves brought to our attention.

When we started asking what was important to include in a mobile version, we learned that our users wanted to be able to organize their ideas and feedback ProdPad while they were commuting or on a flight.

That led to the launch of our offline mode, giving them basic access to a small number of tasks while they’re on-the-go. We don’t have a mobile app (yet!), but that conversation helped us respond by building the functionality that really mattered to them.

Customers love the transparency

We’ve found that as long as we’re open and honest about our priorities, customers are actually very forgiving. We hold onto the feedback we get and reach back into it to guide the way we approach their problems – and our customers know that.

These conversations have helped us understand what resonates with people, and that helps us position our launches down the line. 

We don’t bow to the pressure to make false promises. We don’t have a problem telling customers that something they’ve requested isn’t going to get built. We stick to our priorities (although we do shuffle them around as needed).

Since we’re all looking at the same roadmap, we’re all on the same page.

Have you thought about going public with yours?

Update: We’ve developed an e-course to help you set up and introduce a theme-based roadmap at your organization. Sign up here.

The post Radical Transparency: Our Product Roadmap Is Public And People Love It appeared first on ProdPad.

Don’t go overboard on your interview squad

Whenever you’re going into a customer interview, you need to be sure you’re well equipped to make the most of it. But you don’t want to intimidate your customers. Two of you is plenty: one to talk, one to take notes. And for one-on-one interviews, consider recording it instead (if you ask nicely, of course).When you’ve worked so hard on a prototype of a new product idea it’s very exciting. And so it’s very tempting to show it off straight away to your customers in interview. Iif you want to get to the heart of their real problems, attitudes and opinions, save it for the end. Start instead with an open conversation.

Be careful with prompts

It can be difficult to get some people to open up, so try asking simple yes/no questions if open-ended questions don’t get you much of a response. Then follow up by asking “Why?” Prompts such as “tell me about” might also help you to trigger something.

Embrace silence

Perhaps an interviewer’s biggest fear is complete silence. It’s an even higher risk the more customers you have in the room at once. But as long as you’re not the one phased by silence, all will be fine. It might not sound friendly, but let your customers feel the pain of silence until they crack. In fact you can wait an entire minute before you follow up with another prompt

Don’t make customer interviews personal

Your products are your babies, but you want to avoid conveying this to your customers. If they feel like your pride is at stake based on their feedback, they likely won’t be honest. Caveat your hypotheses with the opinions of ‘others’, “people have suggested to me that…. Do you agree.” And be very careful to be light and breezy when asking for feedback. Remember that criticism is your best opportunity to learn, and you want to hear it.

For even more tips on what to do – and what not to do – during a customer interview, watch this great video from the LIFFFT Inc guys.

ProdPad can help you to tag, organize and link your customer feedback to your product roadmap. Sign up for a free trial here

The post How Not To Screw Up Customer Interviews appeared first on ProdPad.

Surface the timeliest feedback

Your customer support team are the first port of call for your users’ frustrations and challenges. Customer feedback of course might come from many different sources, but here your customers’ most pressing pain points (those they are pushed to reach out to you about) can highlight some of the changes you absolutely must make if you are to keep their business. When customer representatives make use of user feedback capture tools in ProdPad, you can be sure that each of these instances are recorded and that no threatening issue is overlooked.

Delight customers

As well as fixing their pain, good customer service is also about delighting users. When customer service teams and product management teams work together effectively, they can identify new opportunities to delight users with quick product wins. At ProdPad, we ourselves use tags such as ‘fun’ on ideas dedicated purely to making customers happy.

Making use of ProdPad’s features and integrations, it’s easy to communicate those changes back to relevant customers too. A complete feedback loop is made simpler by either recording customer contact details directly against feedback and ideas, or by integrating tools such as UserVoice to automate updates to customers when their suggestions have been taken on board.

Build a workable case

When customer service data is shared with product management, problems can be better solved and value more easily created. But how does this work? If you are to avoid the frustration of customer reps who feel their feedback is going ignored, or the stress of product managers who are bombarded by the same enquiries day in and day out, good process is key.

In ProdPad, user feedback is logged separately from fully formed product ideas. This way customer service teams aren’t limited in the number of times they log a piece of feedback, in fact comprehensive coverage of this important information should be encouraged. Yet in linking feedback to a single product idea each time the issue is surfaced, product managers can avoid repetition and keep track on the traction of an idea in a measured way.  Service teams can help to build a workable case for a new idea and champion their customers’ needs, keeping everyone happy.

[Tweet “Any good product manager should put customer needs at the heart of their daily decisions.”]

If you’d like to find out more about how ProdPad can facilitate collaboration between product management and customer support teams, get in touch for a chat or sign up for a free trial

The post How Product Managers Can Work With Customer Support appeared first on ProdPad.

Direct customer involvement

Customer conversations

Whenever they get the opportunity, product managers should be having real conversations with real users. Depending on your business model this might mean picking up the phone or organising to meet with small groups in person. Whether to discuss a particular piece of feedback, an idea on the roadmap or just a check in with core users, it’s important to start talking. These conversations can not only surface fresh product insight, but help us to internalise our customers’ needs, problems and attitudes.

MVP and user testing

An important element of the MVP philosophy is to get products out to customers at the earliest possible stage. You should make only the necessary assumptions about your users’ needs to build minimum viable products that can be taken to customers for feedback. Use wireframes to walk your customers through new products and changes, and share prototypes with customers at different stages of product development to make sure you’re on the right track.

Open roadmap

Sharing your roadmap with customers both keeps them informed and gives you perspective on how effectively you’re moving towards your product vision. However, that doesn’t mean you have to share your entire inner workings with customers. If you have particular projects or developments you aren’t ready to make public, create a customer-friendly version of your roadmap that you’re happy to discuss in full detail.

Indirect customer involvement

Customer feedback

Although customer feedback comes from customers initially, it is a data source that should be analysed alongside other factors rather than taken at face value. Product Managers should base decisions heavily on customer feedback, but individual suggestions shouldn’t guide product evolution or development time. Listening to feedback is about trying to piece together the big picture of customer needs.  Look for trends in customer feedback, and weight ideas differently depending on who they come from – feedback from your target market is the most important of all.

User personas

User personas are virtual representatives of your customers. They have a name, a face and personal details, but they aren’t real people. They are fictional representations, based on the real conversations that helped you to understand your customers inside-out. Building user personas allows you to do product management grounded in user needs, without getting bogged down in the detail of specific customers and all their anomalies. Before you take your new product ideas out to real customers, test your inkling, staff suggestion or piece of feedback against your personas.

[bctt tweet= “What’s the Role of your Customer in Product Management? “]

If you’d like to find out more about how ProdPad helps you to work effectively with customers, get in touch with us here. 

And if you’re new to ProdPad, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial here.

The post What’s the Role Of Your Customer In Product Management? appeared first on ProdPad.

Share customer insight

Your marketing team holds important customer insight that can be invaluable in understanding both particular product needs and the big picture of your target users.  Alongside the specific prospect feedback you collect from your sales team, your marketers – specifically any colleagues focused on customer or product marketing – have additional information to share from competitive research to customer interviews.

There are a number of ways in which ProdPad allows them to do so easily – from adding customer feedback and new ideas, to commenting on existing suggestions and even directly on user persona pages. Product Managers can call in marketing opinion at any time using @mentions, and marketers can follow ideas of interest to stay involved in their development.

Support the business case 

Once you’ve found a promising idea, there’s still more work to do before you can start to prioritize. Every idea canvas should have a validated business case to help you evaluate whether the new product or change will merit the resources required.  For certain product developments, marketing will be able to help form commercial objectives, such as awareness or new registration numbers. Accessible collaboration tools are key at this stage where defining – and ultimately delivering on – success criteria is dependent on the involvement of team members company-wide. 

Plan coordinated product launches

Although we don’t believe in fixing specific dates to your roadmap, communication is still key to coordinating product and commercial strategies. As your new products move closer and closer to implementation, the marketing team will have plenty of work to do from press to sales materials. When roadmapping you may wish to attach broad timeframes to ‘current’ and ‘near-term’ products and features so that your marketing team can start to plan out launches for these new releases. As ideas make their way into development, make sure that your marketing team is following their progress. With the help of systems integrations and email notifications, there are no unexpected surprises.

Bring consistency to product messaging

Finally, new and updated products can be supported with marketing-approved resources, all centralized in a single location – your ProdPad product pages. Materials can be uploaded so they can be accessed by your entire team, helping product managers to keep product management in one place, and marketing teams to rest assured only on-message content is being shared externally.

If you’d like to find out more about how marketers and product managers can work together using ProdPad, get in touch with us here

Catch up on how to involve your executive team in product management decisions here, and stay tuned next week for how ProdPad can help you to keep compliance and legal happy. 

The post Product Planning with Product Marketing Teams appeared first on ProdPad.

Source valuable feedback from the field

Your sales or business development people are your commercial ears on the ground – they have daily conversations with prospects about what would encourage them to buy. Ideas and suggestions often come thick and fast from sales teams, so it’s important to be able to validate the ones of real value. ProdPad distinguishes user feedback from the ideas list so that every valuable piece of information can be captured while reserving the product backlog for specific suggestions and ideas. Sales teams can use tools that fit into their own daily jobs to share those suggestions, from email to Google Chrome.

Get commercial input to decisions

Collaboration doesn’t stop as soon as an idea is marked out as having potential. Defining user requirements and a business case for development can often rely heavily on the input of your commercial team. ProdPad’s in-tool communication allows your sales team to share comments on any idea canvas, and product managers can reach out for specific information directly through @mentions. A simple voting mechanism for idea canvases means that opinions for and against different features can be measured and business development teams can be assured their input is heard.

Help keep prospects and customers in the loop

Your sales team is not only a mouthpiece for customer opinion, but can be an important link back to users and prospects to keep them informed about upcoming product changes. ProdPad roadmaps focus on current, near-team and future developments, allowing you and your sales team to give safe projections for what’s in the pipeline. Cards can be made public or private to prepare your sales team with a roadmap that’s appropriate to share externally via PNG or PDF exports or even a live site embed.

Individual salespeople can follow ideas to remain updated on feature progress all the way through to implementation. And when ProdPad is integrated with project management tools, these updates are completely automated, meaning your sales team need to do nothing more than await the latest email notifications.

Catch up on how to involve executives in product management decisions here, and stay tuned for the next instalment where we take you through how to involve marketing in product planning.

If you’d like to see how ProdPad can help you to open up product management to Sales, you can sign up for a free 14 day trial here. 

The post How to Open Product Management to Your Sales Team appeared first on ProdPad.

Peace of mind

From now on, you can type away happily, knowing your every last word is being caught and saved, whether you’re updating a new feature request, fleshing out your product strategy, or adding some flair to your product roadmap.

Simply put, you won’t lose your work again.

Quicker to edit

An extra bonus for you is that this also makes it faster and easier for you to work. You no longer need to click to get into ‘edit mode’ and the click to save your work. It’s all done in one smooth movement. Click what you want to edit, type away, and as you go, we’ll save every last bit. We’ll even helpfully tell you when everything’s being saved, so you’re never left unsure.

Full coverage

This is more than just one little autosave box we’re talking about. We’ve rolled out these helpful changes through our app, whether you’re triaging new ideas, updating your product canvas, adding user feedback, user personas, or your roadmap.

Check it out in the following pages:

• Ideas Management: Idea title, description, business case, user stories and user acceptance test criteria, functional specs and any additional notes
• Product Canvas: Product name, description, key KPIs, and product vision
• User Personas: Persona name, description, behaviors, goals, and frustrations/limitations
• User Feedback: Any feedback snippet from users
• Product Roadmap: Roadmap card titles and descriptions

If you’re not already on ProdPad, you can start your free trial today!

It’s the little things that make a product delightful to use, and this one is our latest to help you work smoothly and delightfully. We hope it helps! If you have other suggestions on how we can make ProdPad even better to use, get in touch any time at feedback@prodpad.com.

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