How to use surveys to get feedback
Kent J. McDonald
Product Management Writer | Advisor | I help organizations build the right software | Specialize in IT, B2B product management, agile software development
A couple of weeks ago, I explored how user interviews can help with your discovery efforts. One of the key messages was the questions you ask will go a long way to determining how effective your user interviews are.
You need to know what you’re trying to find out, and you need to ask people questions about what they actually do, not what they think they might do.
You want stories, not predictions.
And you may have read that newsletter and said “sounds like a great idea. An example would be handy right about now.”
Ok. Here you go.
Product Management Newsletter Survey
I’m curious what newsletters you read for product management knowledge, and why you read them. Please fill out this survey and let me know.
It’s only six questions, and your input will help me immensely.
Good interview questions work in surveys
Did you take the survey yet?
No? I’ll wait.
Ok. What did you notice about the questions?
I tried to word them to get you to answer what you do (So you pay to subscribe to any of these newsletters?) rather than predict what you would do (Would you pay to subscribe to a newsletter?).
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I also asked a question to find out why, but again why you took a particular action, not why you think you would or would not do something.
We’ll see what results I get, but I suspect asking the questions this way will provide more meaningful results. It’ll also reduce the chances that people will lie to me.
I didn’t mean you, of course.
Surveys work well alongside user interviews.
User interviews can be time consuming, so you’re only going to talk to a few people. It makes sense to supplement those user interviews with a survey to get feedback from more people.
You may want to do the survey first to get a broad picture about what folks are doing, then use the user interviews to dig more into why.
Of course, to make sure people respond to your survey, you’ll want to keep it short so you’ll need to be real clear on what you want to find out, so your research question is important as well.
I’m going that route with this survey by opening the option for people to let me know if they’d like to discuss further, but not requiring that.
If you’ve got feedback from surveys and interviews, I’d love to hear about your experience.
And if you haven’t taken the survey yet, now’s a great time to take it now.
Thanks for reading
Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.
If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, let me know.
Talk to you next time,
Kent J. McDonald
Founder | KBP.Media
Global Head of Product| Gen AI Thought Leader
10 个月Great insights as always! I've personally found surveys to be a valuable follow-up to user interviews in B2B products. Surveys often encounter low engagement and open rates, sometimes as low as 5-10%. In contrast, user interviews typically yield higher response rates and conversions due to their personalized nature, allowing customers to provide feedback with a personal touch. In my approach to B2B feedback, I prioritize user interviews as the initial step. If I identify consistent patterns, I then leverage surveys to gather additional supporting information and validate or invalidate those trends. Regarding B2C, surveys tend to excel due to the higher volume of feedback, which outweighs any limitations in conversion rates. Additionally, conducting user interviews with a large customer base can be challenging and time-consuming.