An efficient and easy product feedback loop is an essential component of every successful product. Your target audience should know how to reach out to you.
Setting up an effective customer feedback loop is one of the primary responsibilities of the product team.
Of all the product management skills, this is one of the most important ones.
Are you looking to break into product management? Then these strategies are a must know for every product professional.
Product Feedback Loop – Strategies
There are many strategies that a product team can use to get real and useful feedback on their products.
The following strategies are all equally important.
Ideally, each strategy should be used, depending on which stage the product is in the product life cycle.
Let us take a closer look at these feedback strategies.
There may be resistance from different teams regarding some strategies.
But, effective leadership skills need to be used to overcome and manage such resistance.
Dogfooding
Dogfooding is generally the first step in every product feedback process.
This refers to the practice of the creators or the builders of the product themselves using it as if they were actual users.
This method provides valuable insights because nobody knows the product better than the developers.
This can be combined with other useful frameworks, such as Google’s OKR Framework.
Let us say the entire team, including sales and marketing, are given a task to go from point A to point B.
Let us say there are 5 ways to accomplish this task but only one way is efficient.
The product team wants the majority of these in house testers to automatically choose the most efficient path.
However, not all people know the most efficient path, especially the sales and marketing teams.
This little experiment would let the product team know if their hypothesis of product usability is correct or not. Were most people able to intuitively locate the most effective path to go from point A to point B? This dogfooding experiment will give a clear picture.
If the dogfooding experiment is not successful, it is time to go back to the drawing board.
Field Visits
Too many people make the mistake of not leaving their computers.
A lot of things are assumed and implemented without a proper field visit.
There is nothing more enlightening for a Product Manager than a trip out of the office.
Too many products fail because they are not grounded in reality.
Let us say a company is building a food delivery app.
There are two broad target audiences here. One app would be aimed at people ordering the food and the other app would be aimed at people delivering the food.
In all probability, the development team and product team would already be familiar with ordering food over an app.
But how many of these people would be familiar delivering food through an app? Not very many.
Can the delivery app be used effectively while riding a bicycle in heavy traffic? What if it’s raining heavily? The best way to answer these questions is to actually pick up a bicycle and use the delivery app in real time.
The wealth of experience gained would be unbeatable.
Community Surveys
This is generally a very easy thing to do.
And yet, people simply ignore this important aspect of the product feedback loop.
Everyone in the product team can simply share a simple survey on their social media pages and ask for feedback.
While engaging in community surveys, the product team can also get on video calls to explain the purpose of the survey and get real time feedback on the product.
Learn how to communicate like a Product Manager.
People are more than happy to give out opinions!
If there is a beta version of a product that is available, then it should definitely be sent out as part of the survey.
If the product is only in the initial stages, just send out a simple survey asking people if they would use your product.
It would be great way to validate your product hypothesis.
This is also a good way to find the elusive product market fit.
Market Research
Many product teams just do the market research at the initial stages of product development.
Once the software development life cycle takes over, many product teams do not focus on continuous market research.
In reality, market research is ongoing process.
It can never stop.
The market dynamics can change overnight.
The current pandemic situation is a classic example of things changing overnight.
Learn how to effectively manage a product during the current times.
Many ride hailing companies like Uber suffered overnight drop in numbers after the lockdown was put in place.
While at the same time, many online education and online healthcare startups gained overnight fame and prominence.
With more and more people avoiding hospitals and educational institutions, the online sector in these industries has seen a boom.
Both these situations demand that the product team keep a continuous watch on the market.
Many ride hailing companies introduced safety protocols to give confidence to the consumer.
Many online education companies launched freemium versions to attract new users.
These little pivots are very important to respond and adapt to every little change in the market dynamics.
Competition Analysis
Like market research, competitor analysis should be an ongoing exercise.
The competition never sleeps!
On the contrary, the competition is always trying to step up their game.
And that is a good thing.
An effective competitor not only expands the market size but also pushes us to put our best foot forward.
It is very important to log in to the competition’s app or website and see what features they are using.
There are many websites available that can give you the traffic details of any and every website.
Use these tools!
There is no such thing as ‘too much research’.
Any research is good research.
Product Feedback Loop – Tools
There are a wide variety of tools that are available to gather customer feedback and set up excellent product feedback loops.
Some of these tools are very common, like Survey Monkey.
Check out the full list of all product management tools.
Though nothing beats face to face meetings, here is a list of tools that can be used.
- TypeForm
- Survey Monkey
- Canny
- productboard
- Intercom
Conclusion
So now that we have covered all the best strategies and top tools for continuous customer feedback, it may be a good idea to put these learnings into practice.
Many of these strategies also require people to learn to influence without authority.
There are many articles available online that talk about the feedback loop and the various techniques.
The important thing is to actually starting putting these strategies into practice.
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