Tapping into your market: How to develop a framework to make sense of user feedback

Customer Success ManagerEmma Hill (& Meg)

● Previously Product Manager at

LearnTech co. implemented ProdPad

● Co-Organizer & Founder ProductTank

Oxford, Customer Success Cafe

Oxford

● Recovering Project Manager Higher

Education - Global Education Projects

From Product to Customer Success

The key to working together successfully?

Understanding target* customer problems to build appropriate solutions.

*note you need to define your target customers to help listen to the right feedback!

Who is speaking with customers?

Harness feedback by connecting with Product discovery.

We know feedback is important BUT

● Will it open up the floodgates?

● Our Execs aren’t keen & feel they know

better

● We don’t want noisy customers to derail us

Feedback is powerful evidence

● Listen to your customers, they need a constructive way of

giving feedback

● Focus on pain points and problems

● Not just who shouts the loudest

● Reduce assumptions

I don’t understand how our organization decides what to build next?

THE PROBLEM.

My top 5 tips on developing your own framework

1) Separate feedback from ideas

Don’t treat feedback the same as ideas

Ideas vs Feedback

Ideas

● Epic level

● Opportunities/solutions/

experiments

● As a product team, tend to only

want one of them

Feedback

● Problems & pain points

● Requests

● Want multiples to evidence the

need for certain ideas to solve

their common problems

Warning!Stay away from “feature requests”

Consider the implication.

“Graveyard of dreams” “where ideas go to die”

“Nice-try dump”

“Feedback Purgatory”

“Never Never Land”

“Idea limbo”

“The black hole”

“I’ll put it in the backlog is Product Manager for F**k you”

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.

Feedback can be added at any stage in the process.

Build up evidence of need.

Help with prioritisation.

2) Understanding customers’ problems

“I do a lot of reporting, so it'd be useful to have some element of customization on our reports.”

“I want an integration with Salesforce.”

“I would like to be able to search for new contacts.”

“I do a lot of reporting, so it'd be useful to have some element of customization on our reports.”

● 5 Whys

● Understand current frustrations

● Ask them to show you how they currently do this

● More specifics on what they are trying to achieve

3) Collect varied feedback

What do you currently treat as “feedback”?

Where does feedback come from?

● Support desk

● Sales calls

● Internal stakeholders

● Customer Success

● User research

● Data insights

Quantitative vs Qualitativefeedback

Qualitative

● Support tickets

● Feedback portal

● Sales calls

● Customer Success calls

● Face to face meetings

● User research

How easy is it for your customers to share their feedback with you?

Quantitative

● Product usage

○ What would you expect? Importance of the

features/functionality?

● No. of logins

● What’s being used/frequency

● What’s not being used

Getting useful data insights

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?

● Run like experiment, always have

retrospectives and track what has been learnt

Feedback builds evidence of need

4) Assign someone to be responsible for feedback

But who?

● Customer Success vs Product team

● Where will responsibility sit?

○ Which team?

○ Who has capacity?

○ Who is interested?

And how?

● Set aside time

○ When will feedback be reviewed alongside ideas?

● Map out the process

○ Identify where to get from

○ When to review/how regularly

○ How it will be mapped to a new or existing idea in

product backlog

(Note this is not the same as

development backlog)

How Artificial Intelligence can help

● Product may be nervous about other teams getting

involved with generating ideas and managing feedback

● AI and tech can help with this, with all feedback and

ideas in one place, can help you to identify where items

are similar

5) Communicate

Share your processes

● Internal - Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, Support etc

○ Transparent, easily accessible, up to date information

● External - Customers, Clients, End users

○ Virtuous cycle - acknowledge feedback & update

Public roadmap

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

direction of the product?

ProdPad’s

“controversial”rule:

No dates.

Bringing it together in your roadmap

● Understand how feedback

affects your backlog

● Building up evidence

● Help with prioritization

● Better informed decisions

● Transparency over direction

Closing the feedback loop

● Look good by following up - 2 weeks or 2 years later!

● Gives you the opportunity to re-engage an old customer

● You will look like a superhero

How we manage feedback at ProdPad

1) Easy to share feedback with Product teama) Zendesk & Slack integrationb) Immediate response to all new pieces of feedback

2) Feedback is reviewed daily by Product team & processeda) Add relevant attributes (makes it easy to find later)b) Attach to existing ideac) Create new idead) Archive if not doing

3) Customer facing teams have access so we can track the feedback & idea through discovery/development

4) Close feedback loop once released

How to build your framework

1) Show benefits internally of having this process2) Understand the problems internally 3) Identify where to get feedback/data from4) Consolidate in a centralised location5) Ideally connect it with your product discovery backlog6) Allocate responsibilities to regularly review & manage

feedback7) Plan how to communicate & close feedback loop

Thanks for listening!

@emma_sephtonemma@prodpad.com