What are the best ways to use feedback loops for product vision?

Feedback loops are crucial for refining and evolving product vision. They provide valuable insights from users, stakeholders, and the market, enabling Product Managers to make informed decisions and improvements. Implementing continuous user feedback mechanisms,establishing Customer Advisory Boards, conducting competitor analyses, promoting cross-functional collaboration, and leveraging analytics tools, are some of recommended strategies that collectively empower Product Managers to make informed decisions, drive continuous improvements, and ultimately deliver products that resonate with their target audience.

In marketing, a feedback loop is often crucial when running digital ad campaigns. Marketers regularly monitor campaign performance metrics like click-through rates and conversions. By analyzing these real-time data points, they can quickly adjust ad content, targeting, or budget allocation to optimize campaign effectiveness. This iterative process ensures continuous improvement and maximizes return on investment (ROI)

Actively engage with customers through user testing, surveys, and social media monitoring. Utilize data analytics to track user behavior and identify areas for improvement. Continuously refine the product based on feedback to ensure it meets customer needs. Additionally, establish a culture of open communication with the development team to ensure feedback is incorporated into the product roadmap. Ultimately to sum up, the key to using feedback loops effectively is to prioritize customer satisfaction and create a product that truly meets their needs.

Creating EFFECTIVE feedback loops involves two things. Good planning and good communication. Here are the steps for establishing and maintaining feedback loops. - Clearly articulate goals and objectives - Identify key stakeholders and create communications channels and cadences - Make it really easy to give and receive feedback. Use collaboration tools - Foster a culture of open communication to enable people to be comfortable when they want to tell you something is not working. Allow people to submit feedback anonymously if necessary - implement KPIs to measure the effectiveness - continuously improve the process.

As a Product Marketing Manager, I believe integrating feedback into the product roadmap is pivotal for shaping the vision. It's not just about collecting insights; it's about me actively demonstrating to stakeholders how every piece of input steers the product's course. Ensure that feedback isn't just a collection of insights but a force influencing decisions and priorities. Communicate this, showing how specific feedback from users actively shapes the product's future. This approach validates customer input, encouraging collaboration and shared ownership. It's a personalised, hands-on way of ensuring that users' voices and the impact they have on the product vision are not just heard

Want to build products that your customers will love? Then, listen up, because I'm about to reveal the secret ingredient: Great products are built with strong feedback loops No matter if you are building AI SaaS tool or eco-fashion line, without a robust feedback loop in place, your product is like a ship sailing in the dark without a compass. But with a well-designed feedback loop, you'll be able to steer your roadmap in the right direction, make data-driven decisions, and create a user experience that truly delights

Feedback loops bring in continuous insights from stakeholders, users, and the market that drive alignment with the with their evolving needs and maximise probability for its long-term success, ensuring the product vision remains relevant.

Cada vez que promociono un producto, tengo una vision?en mente. Por ejemplo, todas las decisiones de marketing del producto de Ace (Detergente) se basaban en la visión de producto??de "estar en el punto del sucio". Hacían Focus Groups para obtener opiniones sobre los nuevos aromas y el nuevo empaque, y esto era esencial para tomar decisiones y decidir si continuar con el producto o volver an ejecutarlo?lo que significa estar "al punto del sucio". Es una experimentacion constante.

Feedback is integral to shaping and sustaining a robust product vision. A product vision serves as a guiding beacon, articulating the purpose and significance of your product to the target audience and business. Feedback becomes pivotal in validating this vision with the market, and gaining insights into customer needs, pain points, and expectations. It ensures alignment with internal teams and stakeholders while facilitating continuous improvement through user input. By incorporating feedback, a product vision remains adaptable to evolving market dynamics, customer preferences, and competitive landscapes, thereby enhancing its relevance, resonance, and long-term success.

Lost at sea without a compass? That's a product vision without feedback. Users, with their whispers of pain points and bursts of inspiration, become your guiding light. Feedback unveils hidden needs, ignites innovation, and builds trust – a loyal crew for your vision's voyage. It's a constant pulse on the ever-shifting market, helping you adapt and avoid crashing into irrelevance. Embrace the conversation, weave its threads into your vision, and watch your product become the star that lights the way. After all, a brilliant product is a journey, not a destination, and feedback is your chart to navigate the seas of success.

If you are using a revenue intelligence software like Gong, you can set up trackers, according to your company’s business priorities, and what you want to capture insights or feedback around. This can give you both qualitative and quantitative feedback depending on what tracker you create. For example if you are thinking of building a feature to address a certain pain-point, the tracker can tell you how often or how many customers have articulated the pain point in their conversations and also give you more color on their needs.

Giving your customers a voice to help you build your product starts with listening to their feedback on how they are already engaging with your product AND service teams. HOWEVER you don't have to go the traditional "survey" route to garner that feedback. You can engage in the communities where they learn or ask for help naturally to get honest/raw information. Create ways they can give live feedback in-store with a demo or during a user group for SaaS. Use that information to inform your product development process to solve for the customer. And then, the MOST important part, communicate that back to those same users that were interested in the first place. They will be your early adopters and help you grow.

- Minimising friction for your stakeholders - when submitting feedback it should be done as efficiently as possible, every extra step in the process creates barriers for your feedback to be shared (eg important for sales to submit feedback from salesforce with 1 click) - Close follow ups & change management - especially in the beginning of feedback loop set up, overcommunicating is crucial (aknowledging that feedback is read & processed, praising key contributors, sharing how this feedback helped in product decisions or vision iterations) - Setting up processes to make this feedback actionable from the beginning - when / how product / business teams receive this communication & what is expected from them to ACT on it

Here's an example from the health & medical field: To create a Patient Advocate, provide a feedback loop to allow the patient to either amplify their positive feelings about the relationship or give input for corrective action if something was amiss. Offer comprehensive follow-up to ensure patient satisfaction with their experience, and to promote improved treatment and health care. This is relevant to different patients. One who has a social orientation is engaged at a very high level, and likes the feedback loop of friends and family in their decision-making process. On the other hand, one who is results-oriented seeks less feedback.

Establishing a robust feedback loop for product vision involves a four-step process: Define Feedback Goals & Metrics: Clearly outline what you aim to learn from feedback, specifying measurable goals and metrics. Determine how you'll assess the quality and impact of feedback. Choose Feedback Sources: Identify who will provide feedback, select appropriate channels for engagement, and decide on tools and techniques for data collection and analysis. Implement: Develop a detailed plan for executing the feedback loop. Address how data will be collected, stored, analyzed, and results interpreted. Act: Communicate findings and recommendations clearly to your team and stakeholders. Integrate feedback into your product vision and roadmap.

Make sure your feedback is tagged and categorized by customer segment. Feedback is useless if you can't determine whether it's even coming from a customer segment that you are prioritizing. This helps you identify how pervasive a piece of feedback is, and if it's a segment worth solving for.

When feedback is collected in qualitative interviews it is important to ask open-ended rather than closed-ended questions to gain new perspectives and generate ideas that might have previously not considered.

The feedback loops are great ways to help you measure product improvements, GTM success, etc. Before you start, 1. Define clear metrics to help you determine success. It provides a quantifiable way to track the impact. Some standard metrics are NPS, usage rate, churn rate, etc. 2. Identifying the right channels for your audience is highly critical. It can include in-product feedback, surveys, interviews, community, support tickets, etc. 3. Identifying common themes and issues must be analyzed and implemented across the targeted product or campaign. 4. Feedback loop is an ongoing process that helps you stay updated with customers' needs and requirements. It is essential to reiterate the process at regular intervals to be updated.

Thinking in a scalable manner from the beginning - Leverage specific tools to help you with processing & identify trends, eg we use one tool to aggregate, analyse & prioritise feedback coming from different sources (sales, account managers, care tickets, social media..) - Think of the ways how you can leverage AI to capture & analyse existing intelligence at scale, eg we leverage GPT to analyse sales meeting recaps & meeting transcripts to capture product & narrative feedback

Create a feedback-friendly atmosphere where customers feel heard and valued; make them feel like co-authors in the product story by sharing consistent updates with how their feedback is impacting the roadmap. Regularly conduct surveys, but keep them engaging – less like a questionnaire, more like a captivating conversation. Figure out not just what they want, but the “why.” Sometimes, customers don’t spell out solutions; they drop hints. Set up Gong filters for the words “feedback” or “roadmap” to help here. Have a budget for CAB, surveys, and incentives. Finally, organize by segment & vertical to better understand revenue impact. For example, if retail mid-market has highest close rate with a shorter sales cycle, prioritize!

If you want to build a sustainable product feedback loop process in B2B/2C environment , you need to close the loop BACK making sure your contributors (eg sales / care / account managers) know 1) that their feedback is not going to the black box 2) that their feedback is communicated & leveraged during product planning 3) what is coming next in product roadmap & how their feedback shaped it This requires close follow up with stakeholders 121 , tracking & communicating on adoption of feedback loop ( praising key contributors, making it a performance level for contributors), communicating on roadmap, including success stories of your feedback loop process & rationale on pioritisation decisions

Feedback loops, crucial for product marketing, face challenges like asking the wrong questions or the wrong people, collecting excessive or insufficient feedback, cherry-picking or ignoring insights, delays or avoidance, and potential misinterpretation or misuse. Adhering to best practices, like clear vision, diverse feedback sources, and a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, mitigates these pitfalls. By navigating these challenges, feedback loops become a powerful tool, guiding the creation and refinement of a product that delivers significant value to both customers and the business.

One of the pitfalls I've seen most often is poor team construction. If you have even one member who misunderstands the core objective, approaches the project with a negative attitude, or is unable to contribute at the level or speed required - the product can easily fall off it's path.

Not communicating what is done with that information. This impacts sellers, CS, and customers alike. To help with this, I do a monthly roadmap update that I share with the teams with an explanation of what was changed (prioritized/deprioritized) and why. BE SPECIFIC, and try to explain the impact if possible. What customers are impacted, what is the upsell potential, etc. For messaging feedback, be open to refinement. Allow yourself to be flexible but intentional. What are you testing and why? What needs to happen once the feedback indicates a clear path forward. Again, share the WHY behind changes you make!

Feedback is critical but cohort where feedback is taken is even more critical. Closed and controlled environment is paramount

Co-creation with customers! You can unearth unseen patterns that exist outside of internal teams by engaging customers in the co-creation of your product vision. By involving them in the ideation and refinement process, you not only gain valuable insights but also foster a sense of ownership and loyalty. And, make sure to establish a culture where all team members, regardless of their role, feel empowered to share their perspectives. This can lead to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of how the product vision is perceived and can be improved.

We implemented a new positioning, and thanks to the scalable feedback loop process (structured approach by our sales & account managers to meeting notes & analysing it at scale), we were able to closely track new positioning fit & perception, iterate when needed & quantify its impact on acquisition & retention

The best feedback loops for product vision? Customers, Customers, Customers Any day of the week It's about their pains. It's about their daily frustrations It's about the change they will undergo If they don't give you the instant: "Where have you been? When can I get this?" type of feedback - start over again. The best product visions are about a change you want to be part of, no matter if you're creating it or not. It's meaningful It's triggering an emotion It's something you want to pay a premium for to have. The only people that can give you an honest answer: Customers

Use customers AND partners! For customers, if you are developing a new feature based on a key use case that a customer brought forward, celebrate them! A quick video and/or quote will do. We are social by nature, and often like to be recognized when we make an impact! Partners can be a “secret weapon” here. Ask them to share things like “did you know Company A is working on Feature B because of this critical market trend?” This will exponentially broaden your reach (without having to pay for ads or track down a customer). If you have an online community, create a specific section for Product Recommendations that allows people to upvote what they care about. And of course, always communicate the WHY to external & internal stakeholders.