Markets move fast, leaving little room for delay; a trend which has left many product managers and marketers with a great deal of pressure to perform and achieve product excellence. For these teams, it’s all about getting the right products to market faster with the guidance of user insights, a clear product strategy, and a data-driven product roadmap. User insights, in particular, have gained a lot of ground in the product management world recently. Previously many product teams would release a product or feature based on their own assumptions, whereas now all decisions are data-driven – thanks to product feedback.
What is product feedback?
Product feedback is feedback shared by your users about their experience and satisfaction with your product. This type of feedback is gathered in various ways including digital feedback surveys, user interviews, customer support tickets, reviews ratings, social media, etc. Though for the sake of this article, we will focus on the first method: digital feedback surveys.
This particular type of feedback is collected in various ways and oftentimes it is centered around a certain product goal such as a product launch, the product development pipeline, user onboarding, or even user testing (i.e. the introduction of new services, features and upgrades).
Why is product feedback important?
Product feedback helps bring focus and alignment to your product strategy.
In other words, gathering this feedback ensures that organisations don’t build or improve upon products without knowing the impact it will have on those using the product. Instead, they can put this data to use and more effectively prioritise their features and product launches.
Customer feedback is essential for our company, not only to ensure successful results for our clients, but also to have real-time data on product feature adoption and trends to ensure products remain user-friendly while staying at the peak of digital innovation within our industry. Nothing can replace capturing feedback from a user actively engaged with your product.
Angie Truby, Consumer Insights Manager at NCSA
Don’t believe us? Let’s take a look at a number of benefits product feedback serves up for product teams.
Benefits of Product Feedback
+ Product feedback aids in prioritising the product roadmap
From setting up a strategy and feature definition to marketing forecasting, product teams have a lot on their plates in terms of the product roadmap. After all, your goal is to create a product that not only solves real customer problems, but also exceeds expectations. This means you need a foolproof product roadmap that is backed by informed product decisions.
And product feedback supplies just that, giving you insights into your product performance and where you should prioritise.
For example, there are many organisations that work on a continuous deployment model, in which case prioritising new features and releases is of utmost importance as these features go out quickly. There is no time to be wasted.
You must have a strong identity for your product. You need to know what it’s meant for and what it solves. Your customers might stray and find other ways to use your product but don’t let that take you off course from your original intended use.
Chris Chumley, COO at Campus Logic
And keep in mind that it’s not the volume of feedback you implement that matters, it’s what eventually ends up in the product that moves it forward.
Want to learn more about how you can align your products with your vision using product feedback? Be sure to check out this post: How to Balance Product Vision with User Feedback.
+ Product feedback helps build a product that is successful
If we look at which products are most successful out there, it’s usually the ones that are continuously being monitored for performance.
Imagine launching a new digital tool and making no new enhancements for a year. Odds are your tool will become obsolete, as your competitors have probably made tweaks and UX improvements to their tools in order to meet the needs of users. With product feedback, however, you can keep a close eye on developments and changes in user habits and expectations.
Take the organisation MeisterTask, for example. MeisterTask is an intuitive (and rather new) task management tool on the market that helps teams stay aligned with one another.
In a recent interview with MeisterTask, it came to light that the team was leveraging product feedback to understand what their users like and don’t like about the tool (in-app), and then use that feedback to make improvements to a feature or the product as a whole.
