How can feedback help you develop new products?

Feedback is a gift. The best way to know if your product is meeting the needs of your customer is by asking for - and listening to - honest feedback. Critically though, you must use that feedback to drive change and innovation.

I strongly believe in the power of Design Thinking. It is an iterative approach that involves Empathizing, Defining, Ideating, Prototyping, and Testing. The "Test" stage is particularly important because it allows you to gather feedback and refine the problem statement, solution, and user needs. Based on my experience, I have learned that products must constantly evolve in order to meet the needs and demands of users. Otherwise, they will become obsolete.

I have several examples of just looking at how equipment is being used and asking questions. A typical old propane tanker unloaded using a pump, the time to unload was based on the vaporization rate of the gas inside the tank to fill the pump and prevent cavitation. I watched the whole process and designed a hydraulic drive system for the pump using the discharged propane to cool the hydraulics and return vapor pressure to the tank to maximize the flow. I sold the patient for the concept to a tanker company. Look at the ‘Big Picture’ of any business process. How much water is required per your unit of production, cost to purchase, purify for use, and disposal of waste water ($75,000) per month was saved. $1 million+ project for me.

You are only one user of your product. Although you may have a pretty good idea of what the next version of your product should look like, it's vitally important to listen to the user and broaden your perspective. Forming a habit around going through user feedback forces you to put yourself in their shoes and leads to a more well rounded understanding of what the user wants.

Feedback is invaluable in developing new products as it provides direct insights into user needs, pain points, and preferences. Analyzing feedback helps identify areas for improvement, informs feature prioritization, and ensures alignment with user expectations. Continuous feedback loops foster a user-centric approach, guiding product iterations and enhancing overall user satisfaction. It also aids in mitigating potential issues early in the development process, ultimately contributing to the creation of more successful and customer-driven products.

Feedback can be collected in many different places (product, internal communications, surveys, interviews, ...). The challenge is to collect the insights and centralise them in one place. Tools like Product Board offer an elegant solution to this problem: not only does it enable you to collect all insights, but it also empowers you to very conveniently link each insights to your feature ideas, making them more actionable. The portal feature on Product Board is another great way to publish your feature ideas, gather direct feedback from the users and keep your users engaged about what is coming next.

Piggybacking on customer service calls and tickets is a great way to get insights, recruit users for interviews or sneak in additional questions you might have around their product usage behavior.

Build products with a feedback strategy in mind. It is important to understand the modes of feedback that are most meaningful upfront, and then structure collection of that feedback to maximize automation and minimize the human impact on customers.

Collecting feedback is very simple process , just ask your customer 1. What you liked about product 2. What you didn't and why 3. What you would like to improve upon Now this can be collected in various forms like surveys/ email the questions / just on video call etc.

The best way is to filter any insights gathers per product area and then extract opportunities from that into an opportunity solution tree. Google: Torres opportunity solution tree for deeper introduction to this

Analyzing the feeback is the most critical part as you really have to get it right else all your effort to build a product will go in vain. Your end goal is that you get really end customers for your product who are willing and excited about using it. Best way is put them in buckets and tackle those first which bothers / problematic feature for the customer first.

You evaluate identified opportunities against each other, then work in ideation. When you have a few solution proposals, map out what assumptions you have made. Then you can move forward with assumption testing to qualify or disqualify multiple ideas at once. This should be done continuously. Google: “Torres assuming mapping and testing“ for further reading

Prioritisation frameworks are a great starting point. However, I believe more important is the stakeholder alignment. Frequently communicating the priorities and sense checking them with stakeholders is essential. Especially the impact assessment can be subjective at times. A strong product strategy also informs the priority.