The artificial battle between product vision and customer feedback
For PMs, designers or engineers, receiving customer feedback can elicit a range of emotions ranging from “Great! Let’s add it like all the other suggestions and we can prioritize later” to “Ignore it! The customer doesn’t know what they’re talking about anyway. That feature makes no sense.”
The product culture at a company has a strong influence on which end of this spectrum you might more frequently fall on, but at its core, this tension is natural. How do you strike the appropriate balance between staying true to an independent product vision and being receptive to customer asks?
Ignoring feedback isn’t an option
To start, a product team has to have a clear and ongoing sense of evolving customer needs. It’s similar to the way people say effective leaders must always “walk the factory floor”. Only by getting a first-hand sense of a customer’s context, motivations and satisfactions/complaints can you get an unbiased and objective perspective that isn’t second-hand delivered from another team which is managing for their own goals and objectives.
Product teams in B2B companies in particular have to stay close to the customer. First, it’s pretty unlikely that the product managers at a company are exactly like their users. Second, work tools tend to be necessities, in contrast to consumer-apps which might be for entertainment. Therefore, it’s particularly critical that PMs aren’t imaging their users’s needs and context and building something not useful, or worse, gets in the way.
Put feedback in context
Feedback, however, is a tricky partner. Because customers are (generally) not product experts, they’re more likely to describe a solution they want in the form of words they’ve heard before. They can’t describe what they’ve never seen. That’s why you might see feedback from coworkers like: “so and so wants an API” or “so and so wants a kanban board.”
It’s really not clear that this is what the customer wants, but they’ve probably seen a competitor offer this feature and it was maybe an okay solution, so they’ll ask for it. This is where again, it’s the product team’s responsibility to dive in to get to the heart of the issue or motivation.
It is the job of the product team not only to be responsive to customers, but to guide and inform how customers think about the possible solutions to their problems
Proactively guide feedback with your vision
There’s another way feedback can lead teams astray. Listen too much to it, and you can end up with a Frankenstein product that’s merely the sum of crowd-sourced parts. Ultimately, it is the job of the product team not only to be responsive to customers, but to guide and inform how customers think about the possible solutions to their problems, both in the short term and long term.
One way to do this is by spending time with key customers, sharing this vision. Another is to evangelize this vision repeatedly to cross-functional teams — especially the ones who spend a lot of time in front of customers. Finally, it’s worth internally examining customers requests by asking: if we build this, how will that change how the customer describes what our product is to a new coworker? Not how will the customer use it, but how will they describe it? And is that description in line with how you want them to describe you?
At Spoke, the team often revisits the question of whether the company should go deeper into being a knowledge base or company wiki. But the current strategy is to be the favorite internal request management system for operating teams like IT and HR, so we are cautious about putting knowledge too front-and-center. Too often, I find that teams skip over this question and focus almost exclusively on a cost-benefit analysis that doesn’t consider impact on impressions, how the sales team describes the product, and users’ mental models.
Involve the broader company in research
For a long time, I tried to ask the Customer Success and Sales teams to do a bit more digging in their calls and ask questions that would reveal why a customer asked for this and what their goals / challenges were. What I learned is that Sales is trying to move deals forward and rarely has the time to launch into user research. CS can be a bit easier of a partner because the customer relationship is more established and there’s more existing context into the customer to be able to “pull on the thread.”
One of the most effective things I have done at Spoke was to teach our CS team on how to do great user research (methodologies, good questions to ask, and then modeling it for them by joining tons and tons of customer meetings). A motivated and inquisitive CS team can help a small product team scale in unbelievable ways simply by being many more eyes and ears on the ground.
7 ways to start integrating vision and feedback:
Here are a few tactics that I’ve seen or tried out at various startups. I’ve also included some thoughts on the size/stage of company where this might be more appropriate, where “Small” might be mostly R&D/product folks, and “Medium” is starting to build out the rest of the functions to support product onboarding and sales, while “Large” would have full fledged functions and functional processes.
Calibrate internally
- (Small — Medium) Meet with customer success or support. Ask them to describe the product vision in their own words and pick out customers who are excited by this vision vs. ones who don’t get it. Where are the gaps and why?
- (All) Filter your list of feature requests by customers who are vision aligned and those who aren’t. Spoke uses Product Board to capture these asks. What are the biggest differences in what they ask for? What would happen to the product if you built the features asked by customers who aren’t vision aligned?
Build empathy and first hand context
- (All) Encourage all PMs to spend time taking customer support tickets. At Intercom, everyone did this 1 day per quarter, and companies like Zapier tout the benefits to “All Hands Support.”
- (All) If you don’t already, create a set of “research topics” and partner with CS to recruit customers. My personal goal has been to spend 3+ hours a week on customer calls.
- (Medium — Large) Join QBRs (quarterly business reviews) and ask if you can talk through the upcoming product roadmap. Share the vision firsthand, see what resonates and what is confusing.
Translate from vision to roadmap
- (All) If your team doesn’t have a set of guiding principles, this can be a good time to define them. For example, a core principle at Spoke is to build for workflows and features that are common across teams, so the product doesn’t become siloed to one function like IT or HR. Having this principle helped us align our company around deprioritizing requests that were too domain-specific. Instead, we try to solve them via integrations.
- (Small — Medium) Demonstrate responsiveness to customers. When there are asks that are vision aligned, reacting to them quickly can build a lot of good will and set a positive tone for what you want more engagement around. We’ll try to grab one or two of these each quarter and turn them around within the week.
The “appropriate” balance between vision and customer-asks is likely ever-evolving. By engaging in active and ongoing discussion about this tension, product teams can play a much more proactive role in shaping the culture and attitude within a company towards feedback.
