What do you do if stakeholders and customers are unhappy with your product?

Prioritize listening to the loudest and most critical voices among your stakeholders and customers. While it might seem counterintuitive, these individuals often highlight pressing issues that quieter voices might overlook or feel too hesitant to mention. This approach can provide invaluable insights into urgent areas for improvement, driving more impactful and targeted changes to your product. Remember, in a chorus of feedback, sometimes the sharpest notes guide you to harmony.

Active listening is one of your strength points as a PM. You need to understand the root cause of this. Gathering the feedback and looking from their perspective can open your eyes to a whole new horizon. Always go with the "What" and "How" questions and try to avoid the "Why." Instead of "Why don't you like the product" go with "What can we do better" "How can we improve the product" It is preferable to have a face-2-face conversation where you will feel the engagement and the energy of the people around you. If this is not applicable, then gathering data and opinions through surveys and online communication channels can also do the work.

When stakeholders and customers express dissatisfaction with your product, the first step is to listen carefully. Implement the Active Listening technique, focusing on understanding their concerns without immediately jumping to defense or solutions. This approach helps in identifying the specific aspects of your product that are not meeting expectations. By validating their feelings and showing that you genuinely care about their experience, you build trust. Use this feedback as a valuable input for improving your product, ensuring that future developments are closely aligned with user needs and expectations.

I'll rather go with a very systematic Approach of Systems Thinking. There are boundaries, internal feedback loops, and adaptations wherein the system corrects itself and moves toward a stable state. Most significantly, systems behave in characteristically nonlinear ways, meaning they don’t usually operate within traditional cause-and-effect dynamics. In other words, the relationship between input and output in a given system is not always proportional and any single action can have a sweeping impact on the entire system—think of something like the butterfly effect in which relatively small causes can have unpredictable, outsized effects. Try to analyse the events through the lens of system thinking.

It's crucial to create an environment where everyone feels safe and encouraged to share their views and concerns about the product, ensuring their perspectives are taken seriously. To make this listening more effective, it's important not only to welcome feedback freely but also to steer attention towards specific issues, identifying the main pains of users and what they hope to gain from the product. Often, pointed criticisms of specific features may be symptoms of broader issues, such as the product's inability to meet a real user need. Therefore, an approach to listening that is both open and focused is critical to truly understanding customer needs and improving the product in a meaningful way.

What! Your stakeholders are not happy with your product? Isn't it a shame? NO, IT'S NOT. I would rather say that you have failed fast enough to complete the feedback loop. Listening to a detractor can give you a lot of insight from user perspective which you will struggle to find otherwise. A good way to start would be empathy mapping to understand the pain points with specific instances in user journey. Spend enough time analyzing what you see than envisioning what it should be. The idea is to not looking for an answer instantly but focussing on real problems causing persistent pain to the customer. Always remember user might not tell you the problem but user behaviour will.

When facing dissatisfaction from stakeholders and customers, methodically assess the feedback received. Utilize the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to categorize feedback and understand its implications for your product. This structured approach helps pinpoint areas for improvement and capitalize on strengths, addressing concerns directly. It enables you to strategically respond to feedback, turning challenges into opportunities for product enhancement and better alignment with market needs. This proactive response demonstrates your commitment to continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.

Gather the necessary feedback and start focusing on the purpose of the requirement. Mistakes happen, it's more important to focus on what can be done next. Analyse all the feedback and make a set of actionable items. Review with the management and put yourself to work.

It's crucial to sift through it with a discerning eye. Figure out if the comments are isolated gripes or signs of bigger problems. This sorting session guides you on what needs fixing first. Keep in mind, not every bit of feedback is gold—some might not even make sense! But don't brush any aside; spot trends to steer your next moves wisely.

When you have a lot of feedback to validate it does make sense to categorise it in a way you can prioritise it. If you want to find out how you can have the biggest impact on users, I would recommend create a customer journey mapping with all the issues you found. With this it will be easy to find out which step in your journey has the biggest problem. Also having the journey in front of you, you can check which steps are crucial for users to experience value? These steps might be worth fixing first.

Keep users at the centre. Focus on their needs and prioritize UX. Maintain open communication throughout. Focusing on user needs, prioritising UX, and maintaining open communication it would be easier to turn dissatisfaction into opportunity! 1. Gather feedback from all channels. 2. Prioritize issues based on impact. 3. Action Plan Development: - Fix critical issues first. - Brainstorm solutions for deeper problems (consider A/B testing). - Allocate resources effectively.

When creating a plan for new releases or reworks it is important to set success metrics for the release upfront and measure them upfront so you can measure the impact of your adjustments later. Also it helps focussing on what you truly want to achieve.

Once you listen and asses the feedback, you should develop a plan. These plans will be used to mitigate all the issues your customers have encountered and will lead to a better customer experience. My plans are not just based on RICE framework, but they take into consideration what is the best experience and how do I remove customer pain points.

The thin line between product managers and good product managers is a bias towards execution. Once the expectations of the customers and stakeholders has been understood and the team has reached on a consensus for the changes, the changes need to be prioritized and then implemented. Stakeholders need to be part of the entire process to understand whether the deliverable is meeting the expectations or not.

Implementing the change smoothly is essential to rebuilding trust with both customers and stakeholders. By prioritizing critical issues and implementing well-planned solutions, you demonstrate a commitment to user and stakeholder satisfaction. Phased Implementation: Roll out solutions in stages, starting with critical areas to address immediate concerns. Resource Allocation: Allocate resources efficiently to support the implementation process. Constant Communication: Maintain open lines of communication with stakeholders and customers, keeping them informed about progress and changes.

Don't let good intentions backfire! Catch Unforeseen Issues: Even well-planned changes can backfire. Monitoring helps identify these early on. A new design might streamline one task but hide other features. By tracking user behaviour, you can catch these issues before they snowball. Continuous Improvement: Product development is a learning process. Monitoring the impact of changes provides valuable data. You can see what worked, and what didn't, and use this knowledge to constantly refine your product and user experience. Build Stakeholder Trust: Actively monitoring impact shows stakeholders you're not just making changes for change's sake. They see your focus on achieving positive outcomes for the product and users.

Getting feedback once you have a new feature is the at the heart of product management. I always work with the PMs in my organizations to ensure they listen, plan, implement, and then get the feedback. Feedback is not jsut seeing the data in google analytics or mixpanel, it is talking to actual clients and customers and seeing how the new feature has improved their work or daily lives.

Once you've rolled out changes, keep a close eye on how they're shaking things up. Check metrics and gather feedback to see if the tweaks are hitting the mark. This ongoing watch is key to steering your product toward success and fixing any hiccups pronto.

Showing your customers and the stakeholders the actions you took from the feedback they gave will imbibe trust and make the relationship stronger. It will always keep the communication/feedback channel open as they know that they are heard and their issues are taken seriously. It will help with user retention and usability on the product as well. And soon you will be speaking your customer language which will make it easier to understand and build what they expect.

To earn the trust of stakeholders and customers through communication prioritize transparency, ensuring openness about both positive and negative outcomes. I present findings clearly, avoiding technical jargon, and emphasize relevance by highlighting how results impact them directly. Providing context around the results helps stakeholders understand their significance within the broader strategy. Additionally, offering actionable insights fosters engagement and demonstrates a commitment to improvement. Consistent communication maintains transparency over time, reinforcing trust and credibility.

Realize testes com os seus usuários para entender suas dores e depois para validar a possível solu??o. Testar com o usuários irá esclarecer os pontos de aten??o que você deve priorizar no seu produto e as oportunidades que você tem para trabalhar.

Ugh, that's a double whammy! So, the folks who give us money (stockholders) and the people who actually buy our stuff (customers) are both grumpy? Not good. Here's the real talk: gotta fix the product, gotta fix it fast. Listen to what the customers are saying, what are they hating on? Talk it out with the engineers, is it a tweak or a total overhaul? Appease the stockholders by showing a plan, be it improvements or damage control. Bottom line is, gotta make both sides happy or this thing could take a nosedive.

My approach to handling unhappy stakeholders and customers regarding product is to actively listen, empathize, and collaborate. For example - Let's say customers are unhappy with a new feature in your security product that's causing performance issues. listen to their concerns and empathize with their frustration. After understanding, collaborate with your team and the customers to develop a plan. Together, identify the root cause of the issues and propose solutions that maintain security while improving performance. Communicate the plan to the customers, keep them updated , and invite their feedback. By listening, empathizing, and collaborating, you demonstrate that you value customer input and are committed to addressing their needs.

You may want to consider preventative measures throughout product development cycle by offering beta testing to customers or by engaging internal stakeholders in interactive workshops for some product features. This will give you an opportunity to adjust and pivot before the big launch, plus allow your stakeholders and customers feel more involved.