How do you deal with feedback?
Hi guys! I was wondering how you deal with customer feedback.
How do you manage feedback and feature requests? Is there a tool you are currently using? What framework/system do you use for prioritisation? What user data do you think is the most important when analyzing feedback? Are there any pain points in your process?
I would really appreciate your answers.
Thanks!
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There's a temptation to be really diligent about tracking feedback, feature requests, etc., but I think that's mostly not a good idea. Every business has more work than they can ever possibly finish, and the reality is that before you get through your backlog of feedback/ideas, you'll have new stuff come up that's more important than the old stuff you already de-prioritized. So your list gets longer and longer and ends up becoming a distraction.
Instead, I prefer the approach of prioritizing things as they come in, and only adding something to the list if it seems like you might work on it relatively soon. Otherwise, either you'll keep hearing about it from customers so it won't matter that you didn't write it down the first time, or you won't in which case it probably isn't worth doing anyway.
As for the specifics of what we do: we use Trello. There's a board with columns for what people are currently working on (something sort of like jogs in Agile, but our own twist on it) and then a handful of columns for future stuff (things like "good intern projects" or "work on this once technology X is ported to technology Y"). It's very informal. I just run through the list every once in a while and reprioritize things. Most things on the list just get archived because, as mentioned above, new things have come in that seem more important.
I wouldn't say we have any pain points aside from the fact that every time a new hire joins the company, they're uncomfortable with the fact that not everything gets documented and so we have to have the conversation all over again about whether or not we should institute a real system.
Thanks a lot for your thorough answer.
I think this works well when you have a mature product, know your customers really well, and you have a clear vision for your product.
What would you recommend to maybe new, smaller companies that need to grow fast and don't really know what's a priority vs what is a "nice to have". Or how do you choose your high-value low-effort features first? Also, isn't it relevant what feature requests come from old/new users or small/big customers?
Let me give you my context. I had a wave of new customers for my product that I noticed started churning out and they were all new users. I personally emailed them and it turned out most of them were missing a specific feature: "the product is great but I couldn't do X and that was important to me". I was just wondering if there was a better way of figuring that out before they had churned and entice them to actually communicate. Or maybe this is just part of growing and learning?
Gotcha. Yeah, I think it's definitely valuable to solicit feedback from people before they churn. But if you are in fact small, I'd question whether your sample size is big enough to do the type of analysis you're talking about (old vs. new, small vs. big, etc.) in a mathematically rigorous way. Additionally, one trap you can fall into is that a lot of people will list objections ("you don't have feature X") and once you address that objection, you'll find there are 10 other things on their list that keep them from going with you. It's very hard to uncover that just by collecting feedback.
Instead, I think that it's best to trust your intuition. Collecting feedback is great, but it's still up to you to have a vision for what your product should be, and what type of customer you want to serve. Talking to customers helps you tremendously, but I think some people try to absolve themselves of making the final decision by having some system that makes it for them (e.g. "my spreadsheet says that this feature is what we should build next").
Having said that, here's what we do to try to get feedback from customers:
That last one is key for us. We don't have a robust system for tracking all of the suggestions, but we do listen to each one, and pretty quickly trends emerge. Our last major project was re-doing the calendar because it was clear that was the main problem people had with our product. Now we're working on mobile, custom fields, and Outlook sync. Next up will be tasks. These projects are all slam dunks and we know that without needing to be particularly data driven.
Hey!
Well I've accidentally launched my nottr app (story here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-have-you-been-doing-this-week-to-grow-your-product-64cc241cc4?commentId=-LsvcjA9ZHtqXiUwdv4D) and I got some really good feedback.
I decided to track feature requests on my landing page so I can show my appreciation for feedback. You can check it out here: http://nottr.colac.xyz/#features
In terms of tools I suggest something as simple as Trello. It's quite powerful if you use it right. At my job we used it for a team of 8 before we moved to jira.
Cheers and good luck!
Usually I use Trello for this kinda things
I've implemented requests and feature voting on my site. Users earn points that can be used to request and vote on features they want. Paying members earn points faster. I've tried to balance the total voting power of free users and members.
When a user requests a new feature or new content, i.e., a new tutorial, I estimate its difficulty. Then I rank the upcoming work based on votes/difficulty. It's been a fantastic decisionflaking shortcut!
More details in this thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/AlchemistCamp/status/1130884408762724353
Hello Alexandra! Maurizio here, you maybe want to take a look at https://producthero.app (made by me ;-). It allows you to:
Let me know whenever you need any help to set it up!
I came across a tool from fellow indie hackers, that might be what you are looking for.
https://canny.io/
I haven't used it yet, but I will give it a try when the time comes
To be honest, I think the tool(s) used to track the feedback is less important than the type of information you're tracking and why.
Knowing things like customer segment requesting, impact (that is, will this feature help only the person who requested it, or ALL of my users), and any other info required to scope the development of the request will be the most beneficial.
Thanks for answering. This is exactly what I was wondering.
What data do you think is most important when scoping the feature request? I was thinking that average feedback MRR (to know if this something relevant to small/big customers), sign up date (so you know if it's old users vs prospects), and maybe churn (to see if this is something users churn over).
If I had to give a quick recommendation I would say go watch Michael Seibel's video about "building product" on Youtube. The folks over at YC have a lot of good, relevant material that is distilled down into 45-60 minute vids
How about Jira. Renting a sass service of Jira would less than 30$ per month.