Product Management Webinar: Gathering Feedback

Maneesha Silva: [00:00:00] So hello everyone. Welcome to this fantastic webinar on how to gather and maintain a consistent flow of useful feedback.

So this webinar is going to help you understand all the possible feedback channels available in order for you to make sure that you have a consistent keyword there, consistent customer feedback. Flow coming in at all times. Basically, you have a constant refreshed idea of how your customers feel about your product.

So you can keep a finger on that pulse so you’re understanding this, the sentiment, the problems, the priorities of your customers at any one time. And that’s, so you’re basically just up to date with their needs. So some of these feedback channels we will talk about today you may already have in place, but we will be giving you tips on how to maximize them.

And some you may not have really thought about in which case they’ll be useful additions to your feedback strategy. On to the next slide. Just before we get stuck in I’m just going to do a bit of housekeeping. So you will see, and you probably already used, there’s a little chat box at the bottom and also a little Q and a box.

We will make sure to leave some time at the end for any [00:01:00] questions. So if you do have any, pop them down there and we’ll get to them at the end. But before we jump in, Janna did already introduce me, but I am the marketing manager here at Broadpad. And for those of you that are new to us.

Prodpad is an all in one product management tool that Janna and her co founder Simon created back when they were product managers themselves. They built Prodpad because they were looking for a place to organize their ideas, experiments, their product strategy, and of course, their customer feedback.

So podpad is an all in one platform that allows you to gather feedback, analyze it to fill your product strategy, capture ideas, product ideas, manage your backlog, prioritize what you’re working on and so forth. But if you want to check it out yourselves, we do actually have a sandbox environment available.

We’ll also be linking to this in the post webinar comms. You can have a look for that there. But also if you just have any questions or want to have a chat, we do have you can. Contact us or book a demo with us and we’ll be happy to talk you through the tool. So with that, let me hand you over to Janna.

[00:02:00] Janna is our CEO and co founder. But she’s also the co founder of Mind the Product. And also the inventor of the Now-Next-Later roadmap. And she knows her way around the product world and has trained many teams on their customer feedback strategy. So Janna, over to you. 

Janna Bastow: Awesome. Thank you so much for the warm welcome and good to see everybody here.

So today, what we’re going to be covering, we’re going to touch briefly on why collecting customer feedback is so important. Then we’re going to get into the good stuff, starting with how to collect feedback within your own product. And then we’re going to look at how to proactively reach out for feedback and how to mine external channels for that feedback, and then we’re going to talk about how to use analytics data as a feedback source, and then we’re also going to look at how to.

So this is a great way to use and maximize your customer facing teams as a feedback channel. And then lastly the second part of the webinar as you may or may not know, it’s a two part series. So in part two, we’re going to be looking at once you’ve got all this feedback, how do you analyze it and how do you make sense of it [00:03:00] and how do you use it to inform your product strategy?

So let’s dive in. So talking about strategy you’re. Overall customer feedback strategy should look something like this. You should have effective, consistent, always on channels through which you can reach your customers and get direct feedback from, understand what they think of the product, what their problems are, what they need help with.

Then you need to take that feedback and analyze it, look for themes and trends. And then once you understand it, you need to look at how it influences your customer your product strategy. How do you take that insight and use it to help validate your product ideas? How do you use it to help prioritize what you’re working on?

And lastly, how do you make sure that. Part of your customer feedback strategy is responding to that feedback, updating customers and closing that loop which is where you’re actioning on that feedback and communicating that back to your customers. So I did mention this is a two [00:04:00] part webinar series.

So we’re going to be covering gathering feedback today. So make sure that you register for part two of the webinar series, where we’re looking at how to analyze feedback and how to use that to inform your product decisions. We’ll let you know where you can register later in this webinar, but for now back to the business at hand, I want to explore how you can have that really healthy flow of feedback into your product team.

So why that’s so important. I want to keep this short and sweet. Living in a bubble won’t help your product grow and evolve and not listening to your customers is a surefire way to frustrate them. At the end of the day, collecting and analyzing customer feedback will help you improve your product reduce churn through better customer relationships and help you achieve product market fit.

And it’ll drive. Your product decisions and development for the better, but the important takeaway here is making sure that you have consistency and always on channels. Otherwise the burden is always going to be on [00:05:00] you to actively go out and gather this feedback ad hoc and your product people, your busy people.

So what we want to do instead is figure out ways to almost set and forget some feedback channels and have that feedback constantly flowing into you. So let’s look at the different ways grouping methods you can use to collect feedback. And remember, it’s not about picking one or two. You need to ensure that you’re creating multiple touch points for feedback collection, like a mix and match for it.

So we’re going to look at how you can gather feedback from within your app, all the different techniques that there are for doing that and ways to approach that, in app feedback portals, live chat, and then we’ll talk a bit about how you can use and understand your usage data. And what that can tell you in terms of feedback, and we’ll also look at external channels, like review sites and social media and how they can be a valuable source of feedback.

So what your customers are saying and sharing about your product elsewhere, and then we’ll look at. Reaching out [00:06:00] proactively, you as a product person, as the product manager the different ways that you can proactively reach out to customers to get their feedback. And then finally, we will look at your customer facing teams as a feedback channel support, sales, customer success, and how you can maximize and train them to share what they’re hearing from your customers.

So let’s dive in. So let’s start with. in app in product feedback collection first, right? One thing to remember is that with this method you’re getting in the moment on the spot feedback from your users. You aren’t asking them to remember an event from the past and give you their thoughts and feelings.

You’re asking them After the fact to tell them to tell you how they found something. Sorry, you’re not asking them to tell you after the fact you’re capturing them in the moment when they’re in your product and using it. So you can get that extremely valuable feedback. A great way of doing this is [00:07:00] using a pop up or a widget, the small windows that, that prod your user for feedback at a certain point.

But even though they’re highly effective, they can also be, as we know, intrusive and they might negatively impact the user experience if they’re not implemented carefully. So some common mistakes to avoid, you want to avoid overwhelming people with too many questions.

You’re catching them in the app or the product. You don’t want them to be distracted for too long. You want to avoid using irrelevant contact. content, really think about the questions that you want to ask. Is it necessary to ask them at that particular point? Does what you’re asking them make sense?

Think about whether you’re displaying them at the right time. You don’t want to be displaying them too early or too late. Timing really matters here. So say you’ve released a new feature and you want to set up a pop up or widget to gather some feedback. If you get them, if you use them too soon, People may not have had enough user experience with it to give any [00:08:00] feedback.

They’re still looking at it. On the other hand, too long or too late, and it may not be relevant anymore. They’ve moved on. So choose your timing carefully and appropriately. And this may seem like an obvious choice, but it’s important. Always offer the user a chance to opt out of the widget or pop up that’s displaying for them.

Make the user experience easy, not frustrating. So here’s some things that you should be doing, display them in high traffic areas. We want them to be seen and triggered easily so that you can get more feedback and review them. Content can get old and people can get asked too many times.

There might be a case of content blindness. So take the time to review any active widgets or pop ups you have in circulation and check if they’re working. They’re even relevant anymore. Change the wording change up the colors, try a different structure to the question. Don’t let them stagnate and become something that the user [00:09:00] learns to ignore.

Set up a regular cadence to check for any bugs or broken links. It happens. So just make sure that they’re still working. And don’t forget about following up on responses. If a user submitted, let’s say a two out of 10 for their experience, like a bad experience, get your customer success person to drop them a message, figure out what’s going on.

It’s valuable feedback. Is something broken? Is something not clear? Is something annoying or frustrating them? This stuff matters. So take the time to look for it. And another tip here, which I’m going to be going into more later is directing people to your review sites to give them the opportunity to give more in depth feedback, segment them to, those users who gave you seven or eight or higher or whatever, you can arrange pop ups to direct them to give the, to give, leave you a review and anybody lower, give them the opportunity to tell you more.

Maybe not on a review site, but in a one to one chat, [00:10:00] remember more feedback means more insights for you and your product team. So there’s a lot of tools out there that can help you with all of this. With ProdPad, for example, we use a tool called user flow for in app products.

pop ups and widgets. But there’s other ones out there. Hotjar, UserVoice, Pendo, UserPilot. We’ve looked at a bunch of them. There’s a ton of them out there as well. If anybody else has suggestions of what they’re using, pop them in the chat. We’d always love to hear your suggestions and always good to see product people sharing tips on what tools they’re using.

Next, we can look at customer feedback portals. And here’s one here’s what our own ProdPad one looks like. So you can use our QR code. Here, if you want to have a closer look yourself but featuring a branded customer feedback portal on your website allows customers to request or talk about desired features and share their thoughts on existing ones.

It provides your product team with valuable insights into user preferences and needs and helps identify areas that might need improvement. So if you haven’t set one up [00:11:00] already, do it. A good tip is to. Is that your customer feedback portal doesn’t have to just sit on your site, waiting for people to stumble across it, share it you can embed it in your product.

You can have a dedicated Slack group for your customers. So share it in there. If you’re having one to one conversations with your customers you can send it to them afterwards. You can embed it as part of your trial. Flow conversations your onboarding messages. Now I’ve touched on why they’re great, but a common pitfall that a lot of product managers often fall into is when your customer feedback profile becomes a a bit of a feedback form.

And this is not what you want. Your customer feedback profile should be a place for your customers to drop your feedback. Feedback, share thoughts and become a place where they can share thoughts and see what features or updates that you’re considering. Don’t use a a forum where customers have a [00:12:00] place to air their thoughts on.

What you should or shouldn’t be doing and start conversations with each other where you become the community manager, having to justify why certain things are or not on your road map or are or not in your. Backlog, it shouldn’t be a public place where you, as the product manager, have to explain features that you are considering or not considering.

It shouldn’t be a place where you air all of your potential features and put them up in front of everybody. So remember that you see a fee is a place where people can input feedback. You can selectively put ideas out to get feedback on to get suggestions around. But it isn’t a place where their feedback is exposed to other customers and you get, one customer discussing with another customer, and it turns into a discussion about why your product is, or isn’t solving their needs.

Keep that in mind when you are picking your [00:13:00] customer feedback tool the ProdPad customer feedback. tool has been specifically built to keep you away from those particular traps. Happy to talk more about that if anybody wants to take a closer look at that. But I also want to take a look at live chat as an option as well.

So I love live chat because it’s accessible, it’s easy to use, and, it’s a really easy to use tool. Good way to provide real time quick support. But also, for us, it’s a great tool for feedback. We use a a live chat feature here, if you’ve ever jumped into BroadPad and uh, it’s not, I’m not just talking about the.

How the customer support query went or rate the experience. There’s so much more insight and opportunity available with your live chats and transcripts. Every conversation is a source of valuable data. So you don’t want to miss out. So starting with the obvious, as I mentioned earlier customer satisfaction scores, you could ask how useful the product is at the end of the chat whether they recommend it or look at net promoter [00:14:00] scores.

It. It is all good feedback that you can analyze later on, but there’s more than that as well. During live chats, you can also recommend other resources or blogs or webinars, or even help pages. And you might think what does this have to do with collecting feedback? But here’s the thing.

If lots of you users are clicking through on that other resource, it validates the need for that resource. If it’s a blog, you’ve got a topic there that you can build in, build on, if it’s a help page, maybe there’s some things that you’re, in your product that just isn’t as straightforward and needs reassessing at the product level rather than, fixing it with links in to help centers.

And of course, next is the opportunity to upsell if lots of users are hitting the chats and asking about a certain feature, maybe you can prompt a response that, if they upgrade, they get that feature available to their entire team, or maybe that feature works even better alongside another feature, you can gather all that data and use it as [00:15:00] insight at the renewal stage.

But one thing I will point out as well is brand voice. I know sometimes we rely on AI when it comes to live chats, but when a user approaches the live chat, whether it’s a person or the AI bot, they expect to be chatting to something that is in line with your brand voice. So keep up with the consistency.

And lastly, we have post chat surveys. I’m going to be going into surveys properly later, but ending a live chat with the survey is a great opportunity to get a little bit more in depth feedback. And don’t get me wrong, not everyone’s going to participate, but some will, enough will, to get you some feedback here.

And so when it comes to some great live chat, Tools the screenshot that you’re seeing here at ProdPad, we use HelpScout but some other tools might include things like Zendesk or Intercom Hiver but there’s a ton of others out there that you might want to choose from. So again, share your suggestions.

We’d love to hear what’s working for everybody out there. [00:16:00] 

Maneesha Silva: Really quickly, Janna, we just had one question there about live chats from Jonathan, do you tend to use these more as high level health signals as opposed to targets? 

Janna Bastow: Ah, good question. I think so Jonathan’s a question. He’s saying interested to hear your experience on which feedback types and mechanisms are suitable for what I think, honestly it wouldn’t be a product management talk if I didn’t have an, it depends in here.

Depends on where your customers are talking to you already. I always start to say to people, think about where your customers are right now. Likely reason why we started on in app is like likely they’re in your product, so talk to them there. There’s going to be other ways that we can talk to them as well.

You can pull that out of them, but ultimately you want to be Making it as easy as possible for them to get that feedback to you. Whether that’s through emails that they like to communicate, or whether they’re more of the handholding type, and you need to have somebody and I want to 1 sit down conversation with them.

But I think it’s more about making it easier for [00:17:00] them to get the feedback to you. But also back to the point I made earlier about segmenting. So if you get the sense that this is a customer who is in a good place versus in a not so good place, different customers are going to need different levels of follow up and based on their different, health signals that they’re giving you a customer who’s not engaging with you at all and isn’t using the product, you’re not going to be able to reach them through in app.

Ways. So you’re going to have to email them. You’re going to have to call them if you want to get their feedback. So it just depends on the context of who that customer is and what you’re trying to suss out from them.

Cool. Let’s take a look at external channels to mine for feedback. So remember your customers could be talking about your product elsewhere, and you’ll always get people who are reluctant to tell you to your face. When they’ve had a negative experience with your product or when they think things could be a bit better, therefore, making sure that you have an ear to these sorts of external channels is [00:18:00] really important because you might pick up insights and feedback on your product that you wouldn’t necessarily get directly from your customers themselves.

And this is where review sites are really important channel and one that product teams often neglect to look at or simply forget whatever industry or sector you’re in. There’ll be a review site to match, and in our world, this is the likes of a trust pilot or G2 or Capterra or Gartner all depending on what sort of industry you’re in.

If you’re in the travel business, it’s a trip advisor. I’m sure other people are in other spaces here and have other review areas, sites that they need to consider. Whatever it is, you need to keep a regular eye on that. Read what it is that people are posting in terms of reviews about your product.

This is really crucial feedback. Sometimes you can find this stuff by Googling for it. Have you ever Googled for your product and looked up reviews? A really great tip is when it comes to the review sites is that you do have a, usually have a degree of control over what your product profile.

Is on these sites, so go [00:19:00] and find out who in your organization owns that side of things. It’s often your product marketing folks get the login have a look at the backend ask them to get them set, get you set up or get you in there. So that you can get a notification whenever a new review is posted.

And, this is this is the sort of thing that takes the sort of grunt work of you having to regularly go in and have a look. Instead of doing that, you can get a, an alert, right? Change it up so that you can email maybe you can set up something that, that pings your Slack whenever you get a new review.

You just want to make sure that you’re on top of this stuff and you’re hearing it. Another great tip. Is that it also suggests you look at the reviews that are being posted on your competitor sites not only to keep up with your competitor knowledge, but feedback on a competitor product can also be really useful for you.

If people are keen on a particular piece of functionality, maybe that’s an opportunity for you. If people are lacking something that your competitor has again. [00:20:00] That can be a an opportunity for you. Remember I was talking about those feedback forums where customers talking about and talking about what they’re lacking from.

Your particular product look for your competitors versions of that and see what they’re missing. Cause they’ll often talk quite vocally about those and on public sites. And again, why you probably don’t want to have one where customers do that for you. So you can mine places like this for feedback.

But also. On these review sites that you’ve been building up your profile on, you can direct people there, I’ve talked about live chats and follow ups, but remember you can direct people who are showing appreciation for your product to these popular review sites to give your feed, give their feedback after good interactions with you so that your profile looks better and better on these review sites.

You don’t have to wait until they. Proactively go themselves. You can get people to to go in there for you[00:21:00] 

now, as well as posting formal reviews on review sites, people could also be talking about your product on social. So you want to be good at social listening and there’s various tools out there that you can use. So sprout social brand watch, but sumo are some great examples. But you also want to be proactive and take things into your own hand, consider your brand name and keep an eye out for whenever you’re mentioned But also consider the industry you’re in and your user demographics and the, focus on the platforms that they’re likely to be using.

Listen to, up to be, to, to what’s being said there. What are the the main pain points that keep coming up? For example, here at ProdPad, our tool is a product management tool, but we don’t just listen for tool chat. We try to listen, understand just general product manager questions.

When it comes to feedback via social, you’re not just looking for where your brand is being mentioned. You look for feedback from the types of users that you want to target. [00:22:00] Again, this may take a little help from your marketing team. Ask them for access to those profiles or establish a way to get regular updates.

You can even set up integrations with your CRM. For example, here at ProdPad, we’ve made it really easy for people to add feedback using our Chrome extension. You can just open it up whenever you’re browsing or on a social platform. Or, ask your social media marketing person to add feedback whenever they happen to spot something and they’re on the go.

Or again, there’s social listening tools out there that you can use. You can also be really direct and run a poll and ask open ended questions and approach your audience where they are. You might be surprised at what kind of great responses and honesty you might get. Ask people on social questions like, What would you like to see in future updates?

Or what would you make? What would make your, what would make our product or service better? Or, what sort of problems or challenges are you having? Get out there and test some content ideas. The world’s your oyster. Another top [00:23:00] tip that most people overlook is to set up a Google alert on your brand or other keywords around it.

They may not give you specific mentions on social, but it will alert you whenever your brand is being mentioned online. So you can get in there and see what’s being said and interact with it, catch any feedback and act on it. For example, if someone’s written a blog about a comparison between your product and a competitor product, a Google alert is going to pick that up for you.

And you want to be there and react to it.

So onto usage data, you can get a lot of insight, not just from what your customers say and what they tell you, but also how they behave. So don’t forget that your analytical data can also be a significant channel for feedback. You can also look at usage patterns that will tell you a lot about your product.

Heat maps are a great example of this. You can get a lot of feedback from looking at heat maps. Anybody here use heat maps? I saw somebody earlier mentioned that they were using amplitude. There’s probably other tools out there that do similar things to [00:24:00] this. But basically, you can see where people are spending their time in your product and, basically you can learn a surprising amount.

You can see. If there’s an area that people are blind to that people aren’t clicking or using, or if people are clicking a lot maybe there’s, you’ve got a specific part of a feature or something on the page that you think is of high value, but in fact, is just sitting in a dead zone. Pete maps are going to help you uncover that.

You then be able to make some changes to bring that high value feature elsewhere, or, change the copy to point at it or make it more obvious that it’s a button, whatever it is that needs to happen, but you can see what people are doing or not doing and adjust it. Another great thing you can do with your with existing product analytics for feedback, cause you can get heaps of feedback without actually bothering the user.

You don’t have to ask them anything. You can just look at what they’re doing. Which, when it comes to feedback that’s one of the hardest things is getting people to actually give their feedback. Another thing with that, your usage data is great for when you want to [00:25:00] proactively reach out to your users to get feedback on something.

And you want to ensure that you’ve got representation of your whole user base. You can use your product analytics data to identify those users that are highly active in your product and those that are low usage and those that are in the middle And then you can use that insight to create samples from each group and reach out depending on the feedback that you’d like to create that you’d like to collect.

So that leads us really nicely into reaching out as a feedback channel.

So a lot of what we talked about so far is people posting their feedback when they’ve been prompted to do in pop ups or widgets or external review sites or conversations on social. But what about when you as a product manager need. And wants detailed feedback on something that’s when you need to.

Get out there and reach out. So I touched on this briefly before, but you have to also remember that people who often submit feedback are [00:26:00] either in love with something or hate it and are having a problem with something. It’s hard to get feedback from those people in between, average Joe, somebody who’s Apathetic.

They’re fine. It’s something you have to consider when collecting feedback because the different types of feedback that you’re getting feedback, you get different types of feedback from from different types of people. If you only get feedback from the people who really love it and, have taken the time to reach out or the people who hate it and, just have to, get out and tell you, you’re only seeing part of the picture.

So one of the best ways to reach out is with customer surveys. So I’m not talking about These short, sweet surveys in app that we talked about. I’m talking about proper longer surveys that require a little bit more input from your users, but you end up with more in depth insights and feedback.

So I’m not going to dwell on the different survey types. Tools out there. But there’s, there’s tons of them out there. You might be using survey [00:27:00] monkey or just simply Google forms or type form. Choose your poison. It’s whatever your team’s already using or whatever you prefer. If anybody has a preferred one, that’s a cool these days, let us know.

But what you do need to spend time on is thinking about when to use them. Some thoughts on that. So number one post purchase or at a specific like event in your conversion funnel, after a user has actually purchased your product and service, it’s a great time to collect feedback and analyze.

The why so that you can use those answers to evaluate their conversion process. You can also send out a survey post trial to see how your users are getting on and why they didn’t convert. So you really want to gather that information at that point. It’s a really key point. You also want to consider this right after any new feature releases or major updates.

For example, if you’ve just released a new [00:28:00] feature, you want to get feedback on it. How are you users getting on with it? You’ve got really good evaluation and user feedback experience there to mine. And then maybe you’ve got something that you want to test out, you want to see if it’ll land, maybe a new pricing model, maybe a new feature, maybe a new direction.

So send out a survey and gather some info beforehand to scope out whether your idea is actually worth building on. And then I’ve spoken about this prior, but perhaps you’ve got a one to one conversation with a customer or they’ve used your live chat or filled out an in app pop up. So follow up with a survey.

This is where you can. Gather more information from somebody that you’ve already had a conversation with, but you want to dive that little bit deeper with. And we already talked about having a a survey for folks who are didn’t convert, but you can also have an exit intent survey. So it’s not the nicest of survey opportunities out there, but it’s also really important.

Usually one that you might develop [00:29:00] in a conjunction with your customer success person. But it’s a really good time to gather feedback from anybody who is churning or no longer using your product. You really want to gather feedback on what you could have done, what needs improving.

Really key time to be gathering this. Those are some key points. Sometimes that you might want to launch this type of feedback survey. Let’s quickly look at the what. I don’t want to go through these too in depth, but cause this. A myriad of things that you can ask in a survey multiple choice, open ended questions for more in depth answers scale questions to gauge thoughts and sentiments mixture of easy yes and no, or close ended questions for those direct answers too.

They’re all valid just depending on the right mix and what it is you’re trying to get out of there. But lastly, onto the who, you should target the right people with your surveys, should you send them to everybody? Obviously not. You want to make sure you send them to the right people so that you don’t end up getting feedback from the wrong people.

And of [00:30:00] course, you don’t end up fatiguing people by asking everyone for feedback all the time. So you need to target users depending on the feedback that you want to receive. And segment the, those users. It helps to have usage data as we’re talking about. And that could be used to segment your users down, but it also ties into when to target users with the survey.

Some examples you might have you are more experienced users, the ones who’ve been with you for a longer time, or have used it to a particular depth of usage, if you want to ask more in depth. Conversate questions. You might also want to segment users based on their demographics. Another group of users are those that are at specific stages of the funnel.

Or you might have a specific set of users who have gone to an event. Perhaps we send out a survey to everybody here today because you’ve gone to a webinar. And finally have you could send it to all your users. This is when you have something really big either on the horizon or out there already, and you want to know what your users as a whole think.

That’s [00:31:00] customer surveys for you. So next on the reach out bandwagon we have interviews or focus groups, and they’re a fab opportunity to get deep and personal insights on your customer’s thoughts and feelings about your product before you run one carefully selected diverse group of users to ensure that you get a range of perspectives and feedbacks.

Remember, it’s crucial to be flexible with scheduling and to create a comfortable environment and to encourage engagement and don’t underestimate the importance of having a really skilled interviewer or moderator there. Really good top tip after each session, remember to follow up.

If you need deeper insight or just getting in contact to say, thank you, this sort of gesture goes beyond good manners. It shows appreciation for their time and input and it strengthens that personal connection between you and your customer between them and your product as well. Of course.

Whatever you go for. Make [00:32:00] sure that you’re going in prepared. You need to go in knowing what it is that you need to focus on and have a clear plan on how you want the session to go. And something that can be overlooked is that PMs often think that they need to create something polished and then set up a session or interview or focus group and I to get feedback and that it can involve a lot of planning time but you can also get rapid feedback with a lot less effort when you’re proactive about this.

Really great example of this is setting up regular sessions whether it’s weekly or monthly. Monthly, what you can do is set up an ongoing group of different users in either online or via zoom. And just make sure that the, this group is set up on a regular cadence.

That, every Wednesday you have a user testing session. Every Thursday morning, you have people coming into your office to have coffee and talk about product stuff. The key thing is that you are setting these things up ahead of time, not because you’ve got [00:33:00] something to show them in particular but because, you always will have something to show them because you’ve made it a regular thing, it forces you to show them what you have at that time, a lot of people stop and hold off on holding.

Feedback sessions with users because they say, Oh I’m going to finish this piece of work and then I’ll plan the feedback session and then they get the feedback session planned, but it takes a week to do so this is latency. If instead you always have a feedback session planned because it’s every Wednesday, then you just show them what it is that you have.

Maybe that week you show them the feature that you launched the day before. And then the next week, you don’t have a feature because you launched it last week, but you show them the sketches of what you and the designer were working on that morning. And the following week, you talk them through some copy changes or some pricing changes you’re thinking of.

And you just take advantage of the fact that you always have users in, as opposed to Planning your focus groups around the fact that you [00:34:00] finished a piece of work and now you need feedback. Just always assume you will always want to get feedback.

So next up we have user testing sessions. So you can think of a user testing session as a reality check. All you have to do is collect a group of people to represent your users. And this could be a mix of users. And ultimately the goal here is to you see the, your product through their eyes, fresh eyes.

It’s really helpful. What we want to figure out here is how your product fits into users daily lives by creating realistic scenarios for them to navigate. This approach reveals how intuitive and user friendly your product is from a fresh perspective. I want you to really analyze everything they do, observe where they struggle and pause and experience wow moments.

Encourage them to think out loud, to gain insights into the thought processes, providing raw feedback that highlights issues that you might miss. Now, if I wanted to do each of these in depth, we’d be here all day, but [00:35:00] something that but if it’s something you’d find interesting, pop in the comments and maybe we’ll do a webinar on this.

Itself but when it comes to strong user testing sessions, we recommend you could do user interviews, field studies, diary studies surveys, which we’ve touched on card sorting, usability testing beta testing. Anybody use these sorts of things already? Anybody have thoughts on these?

This is something that we go into deeper perhaps on another day, but remember always keep your participants. In the loop. This isn’t just about identifying flaws. It’s about continuously evolving to make the product the best it can be for your users. So a hidden gem when it comes to reaching out are customer advisory boards or CABs.

For those of you who don’t know what these are, they’re a group of customers you regularly bring together to discuss your product. A customer listening tool, if you will, you invite them in, you set up meetings and agendas, and you collect the feedback. Job done. [00:36:00] Honestly, cabs are slept on. And I think because people just assume that they’re too much work to manage, but they’re overlooking the amount of truly useful feedback that they can provide.

Once recruited, you’ve got a reliable group of customers on standby who can give you clear understanding of your product’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s a direct channel that you can leverage throughout the year to get insights that you can action. Once you’ve built up those relationships, you can engage them with surveys or fire them a quick email or get them involved in a group Slack group sort of thing channel.

But overall they’re really worth investing in. You can build loyalty, which can be rewarded with, word of mouth, recommendations, referrals that sort of thing. And it’s also a perfect opportunity to validate new ideas that you’ve got floating around. So instead of throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks, you can turn to your customer advisory board.

Use them as a sounding board. They’re also really good to help you build trust. practice your sales pitch work on iterating on your [00:37:00] positioning. This isn’t to be confused with trying to sell new features to your customers or encouraging them to to upgrade. What you’re doing is you are asking them about your value messaging and your positioning which propositions.

best resonate with their pain points and challenges. So those are the main reasons that you should really have a customer advisory board. And add that to as one of your collection channels. So we’ve written a couple articles on customer advisory boards. You can access them here. And finally, I’ve been talking about customer advisory boards as this official group of customers that you can leverage feedback.

But you might also be thinking this sounds like a lot of work to be to set up. But here’s the thing. It can be as simple as a slack group at ProdPad. We have a. Probably not surprising, a ProdPad Slack group two we use to reach out when we have new features or we want to ask customers for feedback.

So again, it can be as simple as that. So curious to know if anybody here has a customer [00:38:00] advisory board or something like a Slack group with their customers or anything like that.

Excellent. I can see at least one person does. I bet other people do as well. Now finally, let’s look at your customer facing teams as a feedback channel themselves. So remember your customer facing teams. Are talking to your customers, potential customers and the wider market day in, day out. So it’s really important that they’re, what they’re hearing is captured as one of your core feedback channels.

And there are two ways of breaking this down. You as the PM listening in on what’s being communicated to these teams and them telling you. So let’s address. Both of these starting with what them, them telling you. So when we say them, we’re talking about your customer support, your sales, your customer success teams.

So support tickets themselves can be super valuable sources of feedback. There are some that hate support tickets coming into their feedback inbox because there’s a [00:39:00] lot of noise. But But if you have effective filters and tags, clearing out that noise, you’ll discover a lot of gems in there, but also follow up on the support tickets, circle back and gather deeper insights into the problems and pain points that your users are having.

Your support teams have great context to dive in further, and then you have your sales team. So you’re. They’re a great source of feedback cause they’re having countless conversations with potential customers and converted customers. They have an understanding of the initial pain points and the reasons to buy or not from their conversations.

The reason certain deals were won or lost are also great sources of feedback. Whether that’s arranging monthly meetings or getting them to add feedback directly, that insight shouldn’t be lost. And finally, you have your customer success teams. They work closely with customers and they develop a deep understanding of their needs, their expectations, and their usage patterns.

And this [00:40:00] knowledge helps to interpret the customer feedback and adds context through, One to one conversations onboarding check ins conversations with churned customers. They could be arranging feedback sessions themselves. They could be working with marketing for insights, taking a look at uh, customer newsletters that are going out and analyzing the results for people more interested in some features or the other or working with support as well.

So there’s lots of different options here but you’re basically your customer facing teams are such a great. Feedback channel in them source in themselves. But one thing that you have to remember is that it’s up to you as a product manager to make it as easy as possible for them to share their feedback with you.

So how do you do this? There’s a few ways to train your teams to submit. feedback. And I know it’s a challenge that most of you face. It’s one of the fundamental product management problems that we set out to solve with ProdPad. So in [00:41:00] our endeavors to solve this problem, we’ve listened to the ways that product teams are successfully getting feedback and we developed a few good tactics on this.

And so we created a webinar on this. I’m sure some of you were at that webinar. So we created a slide deck to train your customer facing teams to gather useful feedback on. Your behalf. So download it here, presented to your teams. We’ll follow up and we’ll send this to you as well.

Another useful resource is the product feedback and ideas submission guidelines. We wrote this up because it was by popular request. It’s going to remove all doubt from your team’s minds. Be really crystal clear about how to submit feedback and how to make clear distinctions between, when to submit feedback and when something’s more of a new product idea.

So download this guideline, get it out there, socialize it with your team, drop it into your team’s Slack space, and make sure that everyone has access to it so they don’t have to hunt around for it. Again, you can download it here or we’ll follow up and we’ll send it to you as well.[00:42:00] 

So now that we have talked about how to get your customer teams to submit feedback. Let’s talk really briefly about how to make it easier for them. One of the really key things here is using integrations. You need to make submitting feedback as painless as possible for your customer teams. And you want to do that by making sure that they’re not having to switch tools.

So as ProdPad, we have a Chrome integration. So it means that wherever they are, whether you’re browsing another page reading a comment on LinkedIn or a competitor blog they can log feedback directly from wherever they are in their browser. Another is we have Slack or Teams integrations.

Team is probably active there at all times. So make it really easy to log feedback from wherever they’re already having conversations. So set up the integrations with tools like your Slack and your teams, your collaboration tools. And same thing goes for [00:43:00] support tickets, right? If you’ve got stuff coming in.

Through your support tools set up an integration so that those support tickets get pulled in directly to your product space. So your product people can access them directly as well. Remember, we need to remember that collecting feedback is hard enough for us. If we want teams to get involved, we need to make sure that it’s super easy for them needs to be a really seamless part of their process.

So I want to look at some of the general do’s and don’ts of collecting feedback as a whole. Remember that you do want to collect feedback at a time that is relevant and convenient. You want to choose the right medium and context for the feedback that you want to collect. You want to regularly update your feedback mechanisms and provide transparency and privacy.

And don’t assume that users are going to provide heaps or even feedback at all. Some of the time, and also don’t collect feedback. Don’t just collect feedback. [00:44:00] Remember to acknowledge it and reply and close that loop and don’t overdo it with the survey questions, right? Make sure that you’re setting expectations up front about how long you’re gonna, how much time you’re gonna need, and stick to that and don’t make it hard for customers to contact you.

So to round up this webinar, we did mention part two of this series, where we’ve been talking about analyzing this feedback and using it to inform your product decision webinar making. This next webinar, we’re going to guide you through how to dissect both quantitative and qualitative feedback.

So sign up using this QR code. And we’ll also share a link to this in our post webinar email. So keep an eye out for that. But that said, I do see that there’s been a couple of questions submitted, so I want to jump in and catch those. And I also see that the chat’s been going too. I want to make sure I haven’t missed anything.

Thank you, everybody. Maneesha, do you want to help me pick up on those questions? 

Maneesha Silva: Yeah. So we’ve got one from Scott Douglas. What is the best [00:45:00] approach to getting feedback that doesn’t go in the right direction or is vague? 

Janna Bastow: Good question. A couple of points there. Sometimes it’s around phrasing the the question that you’re asking people and asking a series of questions and following up because sometimes, you want to ask a an open ended question to encourage folks to.

Lay out what they’re seeing ahead of them, what sort of challenge they have, but as they start coming back with feedback, it might be vague. And this opens up the opportunity for you to get back to them with further information, that follow up point. So sometimes vague feedback is actually okay. You don’t necessarily want feedback to go in a particular direction, right?

You shouldn’t necessarily have you should be listening and figuring out which direction it’s going. So actually leave that net open and then see where it goes and then ask follow up questions to see where they take you with that feedback. If there is something specific that you’re trying to get, like if you’ve just released a new [00:46:00] feature you need to be specific about, Hey, so tell us about this area and ask questions about that specific thing, and that’s about crafting the right sorts of questions and putting it in the right sorts of places so they see it.

Maneesha Silva: Brilliant. And we have one other from Josh who I think it wasn’t addressed in the webinar. So I will use this one. Oh and Andy has the same question. One of the most frequent questions my clients have, especially those building B2C products and companies is how, sorry, how do I get more users to actually talk to me, best practices and sending out outbounds, how to message, how to compensate, what are the good benchmarks for responses?

Janna Bastow: Yeah so series of good questions there. So it depends on your users, right? I’ve worked in a variety of different types of companies and I’ve worked with lots of different people. Product people out there, and everyone has different users. Some users are more responsive than others.

So I’m talking from a place of privilege, where my users are product [00:47:00] people who love to give feedback. So we have different benchmarks and expectations for responses than other people who sometimes have trickier, harder to reach customers. I’m sure it’s harder to hear back from. Hedge fund managers or people who are, are busy professionals in completely different areas who don’t give feedback for a living compared to product people.

I’ve also worked in spaces where my users were students and we were able to get students in on a regular basis. We basically just opened up our office and had pizza and students would turn up and eat the pizza and we would get feedback. So we were lucky in that sense. In other cases, I. I’ve seen things like needing to provide compensation.

And sometimes it goes in the case of, tens of dollars or hundreds of dollars in order to get feedback from new users, depending on how high value your users are. So it’s less about an industry or it’s less about a wide benchmark that you can look at, but think about who your users are.

And What is most [00:48:00] likely standard for them based on their time and financial constraints how to message the biggest shortcut. is usually to tell them that they’re talking to the product person. The last thing they want to do is hear from the salesperson. Tell them that they’re talking to the product person that it wants to get their feedback so that they can improve the product.

If this is someone who cares about your product in the slightest and they have to, if they’re going to reply at all, then they want to be able to have that chance to talk to the person who can actually make a difference. If this is something that feels like it’s coming from your generic marketing bod or your generic marketing voice, like your brand logo, or if it feels like it’s coming from a salesperson or feels really, I don’t know.

Whatever it probably won’t resonate with them, but if it comes from like a product person, who’s there to help make a change, then it’ll make a difference. The other thing that I like to do is show them, give them [00:49:00] something in order to get that feedback. Back from them. So I love being able to say here’s a design that our team is working on.

Would love to get your feedback on this. And that becomes the beginning of something. And it doesn’t have to be a polished design. It could just be a screenshot of something that you’ve seen your team working on recently and just say, Hey, this is something that we’re thinking up. Do you want to jump in and have a call about what we’ve been working on lately?

And just catching their attention that way.

Maneesha Silva: Brilliant. And Josh did say that we, sorry, I just said Josh, just made a nickname out of you. I’d love a webinar on this, which we could potentially do. So we’ll add that to the. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah there’s a lot more that we could chat about that. Really appreciate that. And yeah, I’ve appreciated everyone’s chat and questions in this.

I think we’re just about at time and we’re also out of questions. We’ll leave it there. And we’ll sign up for this one. And in the meantime, I hope everyone has had a chance to pick up on this next webinar that we’re going to be running and we’ll pick it up from there. In the meantime, for anybody who wants to learn more about ProdPad, if you see [00:50:00] in the chat, my colleague, Rich has just dropped a link.

He’d be happy to support you in a quick chat to understand your use case and get you having a look at ProdPad. Or just. Jump in and start a trial. Try out that trial, that that sandbox that Maneesha told you about at the beginning. So in the meantime, thank you everybody. And thank you Maneesha for setting us up for this and we will see you all back here the the next time.

All right. See you all again. Bye for now. Bye everyone.