The Power of Product Feedback: Why it Matters to Everyone

“Focus on how the end-user customers perceive the impact of your innovation – rather than on how you, the innovators, perceive it.” - Thomas Edison.

Product Feedback is a topic that has resurfaced many times throughout my career in software and is an area I'm incredibly passionate about. I've worked on several initiatives to advocate for customer feedback across customer engineering, customer success and developer relations organisations, contributing to several significant feature prioritisation bumps and growing and coaching teams on their product impact through feedback. The commonality across these scenarios has been showcasing why it is essential to the business and engineering teams, how to gather feedback (there are probably more options than you think), what strong feedback looks like and how to make the best use of it.

In the spirit of collaborating and sharing openly, I'm writing this series to outline my observations and how you can make use of these in your teams and organisations. This blog series comprises three separate posts:

1. The Power of Product Feedback: Why it Matters to Everyone
2. Mastering the Art of Product Feedback: From Identification to Action
3. Mastering the Art of Writing Effective Product Feedback: A Guide

This first lays the groundwork and establishes some context on why feedback matters. This is one of the most important steps, as communicating the 'why' is vital in driving business impact and fostering a strong feedback culture.

Why Product Feedback Matters

The technology industry has undergone significant changes over recent years, particularly with the advancement of cloud computing. These changes have caused a shift in the way that software engineering teams design, develop and ship software to end users. I discuss this extensively in my recent post, "Moving from a product to a service mindset" , on the GitHub Blog. One of the key points I make is that the way we ship software is changing to a service-driven model, typically paid for on a subscription basis.

The shift from a subscription model has a subtle but powerful impact on the importance of customer feedback. Building what you think the customer wants can no longer be the status quo. Instead, it must be what you know the customer needs.

Some will argue that product feedback has always been important. But, the fact that the typical technology business model has shifted from upfront payment (irrelevant of whether you used the licenses or products) to a regularly billed service has significant consequences. As an organisation, you must ship a service your end customers are willing to pay for regularly (monthly or annually). Unhappy customers will likely cancel their subscriptions and move to a competitor. So, while product feedback has always been an essential cornerstone in software engineering, it has never been more critical as the core business model revolves around consistently delivering customers' desired service.

Feedback comes in many guises:

• Results from customer satisfaction surveys (NPS/NSAT Results)
• Comments and posts analysed based on social media engagement
• 'White glove' programs from your most significant customers (such as executive engagement, roundtables and similar)
• 'Day-to-day' calls, with pre-sales, customer success, technical enablement, and more
• Not just what people directly say but how they interact with your service

You likely see where I’m going with this. Product feedback isn’t the responsibility of the few, but is everyone’s responsibility. It isn’t limited to product teams directly. It is a harmonious relationship between anyone working with a customer, the product teams, and the company’s leadership team. Only by working together collectively can we fully utilise feedback in a way that is impactful to improving the product and therefore bringing positive impact to the business. By telling a story through our feedback, we can capture the why, how and what of our customers’ challenges, enabling our product teams to build an experience that delivers high customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive business results.

The Impact on Business Success

As I have mentioned, a laser focus on customer feedback can positively impact business results. In fact, in 2022, McKinsey shared :

Many organizations fail to see how improving the customer experience can create value. And despite their efforts, many struggle to understand what really drives the customer experience. McKinsey research reveals that improving the customer experience has increased sales revenues by 2 to 7 percent and profitability by 1 to 2 percent. In addition to this, the overall shareholder return has increased by 7 to 10 percent.

You have likely already heard the well-known phrase that it costs more to attract a new customer than to attract a new one . But as the Forbes article shows, pushy sales tactics and providing customers with incentives to stay are not the point. The point is to continuously deliver value to your customers so they remain loyal and willing to continue as valued users of your platform.

Consider this scenario. You're a gamer looking forward to playing your favourite video game. You notice that there is an update that you must apply before you can begin playing. Once you install the update, you encounter several minor but annoying bugs. You're a big fan of the game, so you overlook those. However, most importantly, you discover that the game mode you most enjoyed has now been removed from the game. It's unlikely that you would be alone in that scenario, and likely a disappointing moment for the community. The community would presumably lose trust in the game studio, which would take time to rebuild and may have some business impact. Therefore, it's important to have a deep understanding of the expectations and requirements of your customer community. Such changes will inevitably happen, so transparent and open communications are vital.

One of the lines in the agile manifesto summarises it nicely:

Customer collaboration?over contract negotiation

How can you collaborate with a customer if you don't fully understand their requirements? This goes beyond understanding the customer's direct request, e.g. "We require this data to be exportable into CSV format", but understanding the context and story behind the request. Only then can product teams triage the request, appropriately prioritise it and put an action plan in place for resolution. A product team's time is finite, so the way in which we document and capture feedback is crucial, so they can fully understand its importance in relation to existing commitments and backlog. But more on that in a follow-up post.

And, of course, understanding and translating customer requirements articulately before the customer moves to a competitor directly benefits the business. The customer will continue to pay their subscription, reaping business benefits. And after all, it's likely that acting on their feedback will strengthen the position of your service against competitors and potentially even attract new customers.

Fostering a Culture of Feedback

So, we understand there's a link between delivering customer value (based on improvements through feedback), customer loyalty and delivering business value. But to achieve those goals, we must build a community within our organisation. Community building can be hard and ultimately depends on a shared understanding.

• Feedback is everyone's priority. It's not the responsibility of a specific team. Customer obsession is vital; everyone from developer relations to the product team, sales, company leadership and beyond should tune their radar to help improve the product. Even in an educational workshop, seek to understand the questions you're receiving. Could the root of those questions be undiscoverable or unwritten documentation? Is the product unintuitive? Or just doesn't meet customer expectations?
• Tell a story. In my third post, we'll talk more about this, but here's a teaser. Storytelling is crucial to getting your feedback prioritised. Help the product teams understand the customer's challenges and why this is more important than other items on their backlog.
• Set expectations. Sadly, engineering teams have backlogs longer than capacity allows and must prioritise the most critical items. Seeing unattended and unresolved feedback can be disheartening. But, the more you can tell a story and showcase the impact of the potential work (and get others to +1 the feedback), the priority of those requests likely increases.
• Better than the sum of our parts. Working together, we'll likely gain more valuable insights across the organisation than working in pockets or silos. While one-off messages to the product team may work individually, the product team are likely receiving tens or hundreds of similar requests. These one-off requests get lost and may not add to the prioritisation. We'll talk more about this in my second post.

This begins our feedback journey as we establish the 'why' behind feedback and the importance of building a culture around it.

Stay tuned for my next post (link to follow), where I'll discuss how you can master the art of customer feedback by identifying an opportunity and the potential tools to get to the root of the problem.