Loads of poorly structured feedback. What do you do with? Or is it a common problem at all?
There are app store reviews. And facebook groups. And twitter mentions. And customer support chats. Do you have a (hopefully automated or semi-automated) way to process these and dig useful stuff from it? Which one?
I used to be a product manager at a large corporation with a popular app (millions of MAU a month) and to my shame the only time I really went through app store comments trying to figure what the users praise/complain about and generalizing topics only once. As for support chats I was mostly relying on the support department summaries.
In smallish scale startups I've been to feedback is usually either taken literally ("these two people complained, it must be a real problem, let's go improve!") or mostly ignored AKA summarized informally.
Indiehacker angle
My indiehacker career is at semi-hobbie stage by now, so I am curious what are the usual practices of handling the poorly structured feedback when you are just 1-2 people company and probably operate in a relatively small niche,
What do you folks do with reviews, comments, support chat discussions?
- Nothing, but it's okay as you just know things by heart as you were a part of most of this discussions?
- Somehow process regularly (by going through the lists manually and figuring out the topics)?
- Nothing, because you don't have time, but it would be good if you had?
- Something completely different?
I haven’t had experience with this specifically, but have had some experience in capturing and synthesising feedback from customer testing.
To start with you could do something relatively informal, such as logging verbatim feedback from various channels in a Miro board or Excel. From here, you could organise the feedback into groups based on categories (e.g. “feature request”, “bugs” etc) to determine conclusions based on similar pieces of feedback, then prioritise these conclusions to determine which one should be actioned and how urgent they are
Ultimately the goal is to gather feedback over time, and each individual piece of feedback should collectively contribute to and drive towards an action of some sort, assuming you deem it valuable and it plays into your strategy. You could set aside regular times to do this synthesis, say fortnightly or monthly, and then introducenthem during roadmap planning or backlog reviews.
This may not be scalable as you grow, but should be enough to get the ball rolling.
I write short summaries of every comment / piece of feedback I receive and drop them into a Notion doc as bullet points.
Advantages:
Drawbacks: