Introduction

Building a great product is always a challenge. You can’t do it alone! You need help, and the best help you can get is from your users. After all, they know best what they want and need, so you only need to listen. Or do you? Won’t that kill innovation, like in this fake saying about “people wanting faster horses (rather than cars)”?

In today’s article, we’re exploring how to set up your update process to collect and utilize user feedback in your product development process in the best way. We’ll show how to build what users ask for while finding the right balance between that and your innovation direction. Without further ado, let’s start immediately with:

How to get feedback?

Let’s open with one clarification: with feedback, you want to learn both the good and the bad. It’s not only about pursuing negative opinions and trying to address them. Feedback also means the areas of your product that impress the most and give uncanny levels of value. With this information, you can better decide on your next product releases and craft the right marketing messages and value proposition. With that out of the way, how do I get your feedback? You can look at the feedback-gathering process as two slightly different stages: Pre-release and Post-release. Let's discuss both of them in detail.

Pre-release: How to build the best thing possible

Getting feedback on that stage is one of a few balancing games you need to play when incorporating user voice into your development process. If neglected, you may discover that you are not building the right product very late (which usually means too late). If overused, you’ll take forever to add meaning to your product, potentially missing the value it would have brought if released sooner.

How to get early feedback from users:

• Polls in different shapes and… well… forms: This is the easiest and classic method, but also one that can get a limited number of replies from not statistically enough diverse users. Still, as it’s pretty cheap to run a poll, it’s worth a shot! Remember, it doesn’t have to be an email. It can be a form embedded directly in the Product itself, preferably asking very contextual questions.
• User interviews: With this method, you invite a number of your users to consult on your ideas, prototypes, and maybe early versions of the planned product or update. As long as you ask open-ended questions, you should get tons of qualified feedback. Don’t stress about doing this too formally. In small to medium B2B businesses, you can simply ask to be included in a few sales check-in calls and also to ask your interview questions!
• Internal review meetings: In the Agile Scrum framework utilized by most IT developers nowadays, there is always an opportunity to review the work completed at the end of a short development cycle called “sprint”. Here, you can also invite your clients and other major stakeholders to give feedback as the development continues.
• Fake door tests: This approach creates an illusion that something was added to the product but doesn’t yet work at a given moment. Of course, it doesn’t work, and it’s not meant to. It’s only the clicks on the fake proposal that counts to understand the potential appetite. This fake door can be easily coupled with a poll.
• Other no-code, low-code MVP (Minimum Viable Product) solutions: Other than the fake door, you can take a few different approaches that will probably require a little more time and effort, like a landing page development to gather emails of the interested users. However, this does muffle the border between pre and post-release, so let’s look at the final way to get feedback
• Social media and online forums: Why not talk directly to your followers and ask their opinion? Yes, this could be considered a type of poll, but unlike those, social media can get passive feedback that you didn’t prompt. Maybe your product subreddit has a few great ideas. How will the subreddit reader react to a little upcoming feature “leak”?

Granted, most of those methods directly or in a changed way can be also used in:

Post-release: Learn what works and what doesn’t

So, on top of the above-listed methods, here are also a few ways of getting feedback that is only available once the product/update is live:

• A/B testing: If you have more than one concept of a solution and you are not sure which approach will be better, why not let users speak in one of the most unbiased ways to test possible? Just release all your solution variations to different groups and then monitor the performance. Data from different groups will unravel the truth! However, an A/B test might not always be necessary. Sometimes all it takes is simple:
• Data Analysis: Of course, the data will show whether the newly released feature/product performs as expected. Thus it can show if the funnels work as intended and highlight the areas of interest that will require additional investigation towards understanding and potential follow-up updates.
• External feedback sources: While you can have a feedback section in your product and utilize all the methods already listed, it can also come from many different sources, which include the sales department, customer support, mobile app store ratings, and more. Make sure to keep on top of those and have the users’ voices heard, regardless of the direction.

As you, dear founder, can agree, there are more than plenty of ways of getting user feedback! However, those methods will be merely encyclopedic entries if not utilized regularly and enthusiastically in your product and organization, Thus, your goal is:

Creating a Feedback-Friendly Culture

In every development team, there is more to do than can be done. Thus, if getting feedback isn’t an organic and appreciated part of the culture of your product/company, it will be difficult to collect, let alone react to. Here are a few actions a founder can take to make sure his/her teams hear, appreciate, and include user feedback in their work:

Put a metic on it

As a data-driven leader, you need to put a number on user feedback. Whether it's user rating, NPS, or proportion of good positive to negative comments. Whatever your product and team(s) need! However, don’t overcomplicate it. The simpler the metric, the easier to follow and be able to brainstorm improvement solutions.

Have it in one place

As mentioned, there are various places where feedback can come from and without effort, some of that feedback might not be monitored. Make sure all it eventually lands in a  single system where it can be reviewed. You can also delegate it to someone else and have this person consolidate the feedback into a single report, refreshed periodically. With that:

Review the feedback with the team and plan next actions

You heard users’ voices! Now, be their advocate! Use the sprint and roadmap reviews (perhaps a dedicated, separate meeting?)  to highlight the core user feedback and learnings.  Work with the team to agree on which pieces of feedback require further actions and which, unfortunately, have to be ignored. Come prepared for such feedback review and show an orderly, filtered, and clean list. Reviewing a data dump or a CSV file together with engineers isn’t the most productive way to spend time. It’s another reason to keep it all in one place!

Encourage, and even promote internal and external feedback

Make sure to be proactive in collecting feedback from your users and do it smartly. The feedback request has to appear when a user is not interrupted in any product funnel and is likely to share her/his honest opinion. You can even consider prizes and/or additional product perks for people who decide to leave ratings and/or feedback. That is on the user side of the picture. When collecting internal feedback from within your team, clients, and/or senior staff, everyone needs to feel secure to speak freely and be heard without any mockery or later, negative consequences. You need the people around you to feel empowered to speak their minds.

Act on the feedback

If there is one point you are to remember from this list, this is the one to tattoo on your arm. All the effort described in the previous points of this article will go to waste if you relegate the feedback you receive to “user trivia”. Unfortunately, very often companies encourage people in positions of power to collect feedback, while at the same requiring deliverables that leave little to on the development allocation to act on. That can be very discouraging for the team when the product becomes corporate and not user feedback-driven. Thus, always book some capacity to react to feedback so that in the near future you can highlight:

Highlight user success stories

If you listen to your users and help them achieve something huge, brag about it! To your stakeholders, clients, family, and everyone! Let them know you did well for your users and you can do it again! This will keep morale high, show the point of feedback collection, and highlight the actual user importance when deciding what to build.

That being said, don’t take an extreme path here. To keep the product healthy and innovative, you also need to test things users didn’t ask for or might not even like. Whether it’s to test some new bold direction or keep the business flowing, you will have to make a unique decision. Thus, you have to actively work on:

Balancing feedback with innovation

A fake quote from Henry Ford states: "If I did what users asked, I'd breed faster horses". Therefore, if you only stick to addressing user feedback and abandon any brave, risky updates that could shake up the product and market, you risk eventually becoming obsolete (Like horses mostly are ;) ). Just as I suggested booking some space for user feedback in your sprints, do the same for innovative items! This can be a part of the development cycle, or whole sprints dedicated to feedback, innovation, or new feature development. As long as you mix things up, you should be go.

However, this “development cocktail” has to have some fine ingredients in order to be tasty. Thus, not every innovation idea and not every piece of feedback should always reach your backlog. You can filter both and establish the impact hypothesis, value, and cost/risk before deciding to bring an item into development. Even with that, you might still go back to users for the next round of feedback. If you invest time in Product Discovery, you can learn user sentiments before you invest in any development! Also, if you perform post-release discovery, you have more chances of understanding what went well and learning from the happy clients.

Arguably, it’s a lot of work. However, it’s even more, potentially unsustainable work if you don’t prioritize and dissect each potential backlog item in extreme detail. Doing the opposite might also transform your team into a feature factory, creating new things that will cost a lot and won’t bring a lot of value to the users.

In other words, when deciding what pieces of feedback and innovative ideas to follow, have a “quality over quantity” mindset and pursue only those items that make the most sense when processes throughout a detailed prioritization process. With that, let’s go to:

Closing words

When it comes to creating great Products, you can’t do it alone. You need a talented team, dedicated contractors, and most of all, loyal and engaged users. Funny enough, the key to the success of this relationship is the same as for any successful partnership: You can listen! But only that, you have to hear and act on what comes your way. This is the only real way to become really user-centric and create products that users need, love, and will stick to for years to come. Remember, feedback is gathered to learn as much as possible about the problem (not the solution) and provide that context to the your development team so that they can develop a solution to the problem.

Gathering feedback is an ongoing process and we here, at Appunite, understand that. Contact us, so we can help you create those great products by listening to you and helping you listen to your users. This is the only way success can be achieved!