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What is Customer Feedback

Customer feedback can come from a number of different sources, including customer interviews, usability testing, support requests, and general conversations with customers and prospects. It offers direct insight and suggestions that help you to understand how you are doing at solving the problems you’re already trying to address, and discovering new problems you weren’t aware of.

Where does Customer Feedback fit into the Product Management process?

Customer Feedback is important to every stage of the product management process. Gathering feedback is a crucial aspect of deciding whether a new idea has weight and how it should be tackled, as well as how successfully it has been implemented after delivery. Ideas start and end with what the customer thinks.

Customer Feedback Best Practices

When developing specifications for a new product, finding product to market fit is key. Successful new products are put in front of customers before building starts, to validate assumptions and make sure a real problem is being solved.

For effective customer validation:

  • Use wireframes of the product to walk your customer through your product vision
  • Share prototypes with customers at different stages of product development to make sure you’re on the right track
  • Always be listening, and be completely open to criticisms. Remember that there’s no place for a sales pitch in good product management
  • Be prepared to pivot if you discover your idea isn’t important to the customer

When measuring the success of your existing products, usability testing is an important qualitative partner to your analytics.

For effective usability testing:

  • Don’t lead your customers with your own hypotheses
  • Pay close attention to the unspoken feedback of your customers – do they hesitate before clicking, or mistake something for a button?
  • Develop tests to understand the problems that might be missing in your data

How ProdPad Helps

ProdPad’s customer feedback tools, including an in-app widget and feedback portal, are designed to help product teams collect and link customer feedback directly to the product backlog. Try ProdPad free today.

Up next – Idea Management