Product Management: How to Get Product Feedback You Can Use

Feedback is invaluable when it comes to upgrading or launching a new product. No matter the industry or the type of product, the only way to know if customers will pay for it is to ensure it is providing the service your customers expect. Gathering valuable feedback and validating it can help ensure your next product version succeeds.

Bettering Your Product Means Gathering All Feedback

It is the job of the product manager to gather feedback, as well as to validate it. Yet, your customer isn’t the only source of feedback you need to gather. Let’s take a look at where you can gather feedback and why its valuable.

Your Customer Feedback

This is the goldmine of information you need. Your customers will always provide you with the most valuable insight. Keep in mind — your customer is the person who pays for your product and then uses it. Value their time. Never overwhelm your customer. It distorts their image of you and the service you provide.

To get valid, impactful feedback, always talk to the right person. Focus on who your target persona is. This helps you gain insight from the people you are designing a product for specifically. Create questions about how they use the product, their struggles, and what they want from their product that they are not getting.

Your Sales Team

Your sales team not only has the working knowledge of your product, but they also hear the objections your would-be customers provide to them before they walk away. They can tell you what customers are looking for when they arrive at your product. They also can tell you what makes it hard for them to sell to that customer (price, lack of a specific feature, or perhaps even usability). And, they can help you to learn what will help sell more of the product faster.

View your sales team as professionals who are your partners. They need to understand the product to sell it, but they are also a valuable resource for the design and development team. Provide an easy way for your sales team to communicate this feedback. Sales meetings should include the product manager, for example, to gain insight.

Your Development Team

How can your team of engineers offer input to you? They can because they can communicate what they couldn’t do to get your product out. Often called tech debt, this is the type of feature they didn’t add but could have. Sometimes, you may view this as a feature you didn’t need. Yet, if your development team thought it was a valuable resource, find out why.

Keep in mind that your development team only sees one side of the process. They cannot give you a large view of what your customers are going to want or need. However, they can give you insight into what else can be done to improve, better, or streamline your product. Keeping this team in the loop is a must.

Your Support Team

Perhaps some of the most frustrated of all people working on your product, your support team is also a rich resource when it comes to customer feedback. After all, they deal one-on-one with your customers all day long. They know what the most common complaints and difficulties are. They also know what makes customer experiences more difficult. They can provide you with information about all aspects of customer experience.

It’s important to ensure you gain valuable date from your support team. They tend to be able to focus on areas such as product functionality, usability, and performance. This is where you want to get information from about how to improve.

Now What — Validating and Using Feedback

With all of these ideas and feedback points-of-data, the next step is to validate the feedback. Dig deeper into the requests and feedback given to you. Why are they requesting this information? What functionality or benefit will this offer to your whole customer base? Validation is the process of taking the data and insights given to you and then determining what the next step is. In some cases, you need to gather more insight here, such as surveying a specific idea. You may need to, as the product manager, work to devise a solution complaint and then test it out on a group of users.

Now that you have this feedback in hand, what do you do with it? It’s important to validate that feedback based on what is most pressing and valuable to most people. You also have to be realistic — there are going to be some things you just cannot do or do right now. That’s okay. Yet, with this comprehensive feedback, you can determine what tasks should be your priority so you can move your product ahead to the next level and the next generation.

Gather feedback as if it is the most valuable resource in your product development process. Learn from it. Then, decide what to do with it based on where you want to see the product grow and change.