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.

What is a user persona?

User personas are a fictional representation of your users that help your teams understand who they’re building for.

A good user persona is realistic, easy to visualize, and tied into your day-to-day decisions and processes.

Each one is like a composite sketch of what you know about many individual customers, what jobs they want to get done and what problems they’re having along the way.

How to create a user persona

There are a ton of great resources online on building user personas. It’s up to you to decide how you want to approach it, depending on the time, data and resources you have on hand.

As you can see here, you can pull in a lot of different sources of input to help you define each persona. You don’t have to stick to any single “methodology” (there isn’t one).

Lean Personas (UXPin)
Not every company needs to build complex personas, says Jerry Cao of UXPin. This guide to lean personas from UXPin is super handy if you need to validate quickly to get your product out the door.

Data-Driven Personas (ConversionXL)
Want to put user persona development through a more rigorous process? This guide from ConversionXL shows you how to segment users based on data, survey results and includes both data analysis examples and advice from experienced marketers.

Marketing Personas (Buffer)
Buffer’s advice for developing marketing personas includes studying online traffic, including social media data, Google analytics and qualitative surveys.

Buyer Personas (Hubspot)
This guide from Hubspot includes a handful of ways to customize buyer personas for sales and marketing teams. It also includes the concept of a “negative persona” – a representation of who you don’t want as a customer.

Bonus: For a handy list of questions to ask during interviews, head to Usability.gov, which designs for not a couple thousand, or a couple million, but the entire population of the United Kingdom. They know a thing or two

User personas help you be user-centric

I’ve seen many teams bring in pricey consultants to help develop user personas and then leave it in some obscure folder in Google Drive. Don’t let this happen to you! User personas help you be user-centric, if you put them to work.

Build a business case for product ideas

User personas can help you nail the business case for a product idea. Bringing in user personas allows you to ground those ideas within the bigger context of your business. What kind of users is this idea meant to help and how valuable does that make it?

A user persona gives you a centerpiece around which to focus your discussions. For example, you can see that the following idea is specifically meant to benefit “Larry Landlord.” Not just anyone.

That’s useful context as you validate the idea further and decide whether to move it forward in the workflow.

Understand what user personas need

There’s a really cool feature in ProdPad that you can use to pull up a list of customer feedback by user persona. This gives you an aggregate view of what your customers want from you, where they’re struggling, what kind of functionality they’d like, and so on.

This is monumentally important for product managers. Why? Because sorting through individual feedback gives you a limited perspective on what you think is important to customers. A handful of standout comments can pretty effectively cloud your judgment.

In contrast, reviewing a list of feedback by persona helps you make decisions that benefit an entire segment of users.

To learn more about how to do this, read about our Contact Profiles feature.

Communicate personas to your teams

User personas aren’t just for you and your product team to hang onto. They have really valuable context that everyone else working with you could use too!

If you’re throwing specs over to your development team, user personas give them the context they need to make judgment calls during build. Personas also help marketing teams understand their audience better so they can set up more effective messaging and targeting.

The key thing to remember is that the user personas you develop become the basic set of assumptions used across your business. Everyone else depends on you, the product manager, to keep their assumptions in check. If your persona evolves, you owe it to your business to update the persona so they can update their assumptions too.

So what’s next?

User personas should be relatable enough that they can be brought up all the time in daily conversations. But to help make them feel really real, you should bring them into product planning as soon as you can.

In ProdPad, you can develop product ideas with user personas, user stories and all the context you want.

The post How To Work With User Personas When You’re A Product Manager 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.

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.

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.