Do you listen to User Feedback?

Yes of course you need to listen to user feedback - the user should always be the center of your product. If you're not offering something the user wants, then they simply won't use it.

That being said , you should only listen to user feedback that is actually useful to you. Not in the sense that this is the only thing that I want to hear, but that the feedback is coming from your product's persona. If the feedback isn't coming from your persona, it could just be a lot of useless noise that your target audience actually doesn't care about.

One of my favorite articles that talks about this is Superhuman's Product-Market-Fit article: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/

IME, there are multiple kinds of feedback, and multiple ways to use feedback effectively.

My general rule of thumb is that you should always be listening and observing to what your customers say, but never let your customers tell you what to do.

It's also very helpful to know whose feedback to qualify. 99.9% of feedback from someone who isn't paying you isn't useful. They can talk all day long about what they WOULD do if they were a paying customer, but what people do and what they say are rarely the same.

Soliciting feedback is also a bit of an artform - it requires asking the right question, and the right time, and a keen eye for noticing patterns. I wrote a detailed example of how we solicit useful feedback automatically from the people who buy our digital products. It includes the exact emails, the way I decided the timing and some examples of how I extracted useful patterns from the feedback.

Lastly, from this post by Amy Hoy is worth always having in the back of your head:

Most people give shit feedback. That’s just a fact of life: most people give shitty feedback, period. Some people — but not many — give decent feedback.

But everybody who gives feedback — including almost but not every person who runs their own business — gives the wrong kind of feedback.

Even the best feedback-givers will often say things like:

“It should x, and it should x in this way.”

This isn’t useful to you as it stands. You have to filter it through the lens of all their biases and blind spots, imagination and lack thereof. And of course the filter of, “What’s best for everyone?”

Great feedback is rarer than unicorns Ideal feedback comes from the wisest and most self-aware customers:

“My goal is to achieve z. I would like to maybe achieve this by y mechanism. But maybe you have a better way. Or maybe it doesn’t fit with your app. Or maybe z is actually not a good goal at all.”

Nope (sarcasm).