Gathering customer insights, part five: measuring feedback

Measuring customer feedback

Welcome to another installment of this series of articles about gathering feedback and hearing the voices of your customers.

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Part one explores the pitfalls of talking AT your customers. You visit customers, talk at them incessantly, never pause to listen, rarely ask questions, fear their feedback, and are blindsided when you get it.

Part two delves into the hubris of expertise and why we sometimes listen to and then choose to ignore our customers.

Part three introduces a product manager who falls victim to learning from customers but does not validate the market applicability of their requirements.

Part four explores what happens when you fall prey to negativity bias and outlines tactics to recognize when you are improving your product versus resolving complaints.

This article is about combining the right data and insights from customer feedback to help you answer your most important product questions.

Ask yourself:?

• How effective am I at gathering feedback?
• Are the insights and data I am collecting resulting in action and outcomes?

The mechanics of gathering feedback

Gathering customer feedback should be a deliberate, structured activity designed ahead of time with specific outcomes in mind. Customer feedback is crucial data for understanding the health of your product and the effectiveness of your product organization.

It is essential to gather feedback through a variety of channels.?

Product analytics

Product analytics tools are widely available, easy to implement, and provide excellent quantitative data about adoption and utilization. Given the simplicity of automating collecting usage data, in-product analytics is a surprisingly underutilized tool. If you have this in your ‘we’ll get to this when we have a chance’ bucket, put this at the top of your priority list.

These analytics help you figure out where to make improvements in your product. The less obvious outcome is arming you with the confidence to do less and remove a lightly used feature. It is easy and tempting to pack a product with features, but that leads to really complex software that is harder to use and even harder to maintain.

Begin each strategic planning cycle by asking, “How can we do less?” Use product analytics to prove less is possible.

User interviews and design research

You’ll need the usage data to correlate to your customer interview feedback. To achieve maximum effectiveness, design interviews with increasingly specific questions. “What are your current priorities?” “What are you most worried about?” “How do you accomplish this part of your job?” “What is blocking you?” “Here’s a feature we are thinking about implementing. Would this help?”?

These example questions are designed for requirements validation and market applicability research. Include user design research–what’s the best way to implement a feature that will drive adoption and utilization? Does the feature need just an API or an API and UI?

Speculative experimentation

Speculative experimentation helps validate higher-level hypotheses or longer-term product strategy. What if we take our product in a new direction or add an adjacent feature set? What if we break the product apart, repackage, and refine the target personas for our ideal customer profile? What if we went after an entirely new market or a different ideal customer profile?

Designing conversations for customer feedback

Take an inventory of your last five customer meetings. What was the agenda for each? Were you there to inform or learn? Did you design the conversation in advance with an experiment in mind? How structured and consistent are the questions you asked of each?

Here are some guidelines I’ve used to gather feedback effectively...

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