PRODUCT FEEDBACK MANAGEMENT:

A SurveyGizmo Resourcewww.surveygizmo.com

How to Use Customer Intelligence for Product-Market Fit

Andrew Reid, Founder and Chief Product Officer at Vision Critical, The Enterprise Guide to Innovation

Every product developer knows that customer feedback is critical to the innovation cycle. The challenge before them is to get quality feedback that can be relied on to make better business decisions.

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Have you heard of these products?

• Ford’s Edsel

• Sony’s Betamax

• Coca-Cola’s New Coke

• Miller-Coors’ Rocky Mountain Spring Water

• Apple’s Newton

Don’t ring a bell? That’s because these products appear only on lists of products that have flopped. Success isn’t easy – even for some of brands that are considered market

leaders, innovators, and even disrupters.

The need for product feedback is greater than ever before in part due to the ever-changing demands, expectations, and shopping savviness of today’s consumers. Another large factor in this need is the lack of using data consistently. At the cornerstone of product success in today’s hyper competitive market is the use of customer intelligence feedback through a product’s life span.

In this handbook, we explore how to implement a process that can used to mature and enhance products over time by integrating customer intelligence throughout the product lifecycle. We will unpack the details of the process, provide basic examples of customer intelligence collection in action, and highlight in-the-field insights and lessons learned from industry experts.

New products hit the market every day, but only 15 percent are statistically probable to be around after 24 months. Building what the industry refers to as a “long term sustainable growth engine” relies on the data derived from new consumer trends and existing customer intel to keep it running at full throttle over a longer period of time.

You’ve likely experienced some of this before:

• You’re faced with trying to make decisions about how to improve the product when you have

no data about which features of the product users find the most valuable.

• The product’s vision is clouded by a stakeholder’s “great idea” but that idea is lacking validation

or you’re just too busy trying to figure out key requirements to incorporate any feedback.

“As product managers it’s our job to make sure that the company is building the right product, but

many (possibly a majority) of us don’t feel like we’re doing that,” writes Christian Bonilla, product

manager and founder of UserMuse. “It’s a little sobering when you think about how much time,

money and energy is being wasted building features that the market doesn’t want or need.”

One huge challenge product management professionals are faced with is the competing pressure

of building a product quickly versus building a product that fits in the market and meets the needs

of customers. This time over value approach results in product leaders substituting their own

experiences and opinions in for market validation -- the very antithesis of this conversation and

common reasons products fail or not live up to their potential.

“Product failures often trace back to a misunderstanding or outright ignorance of what users (and

buyers) really care about,” says Bonilla.

Course correcting and overcoming this challenge resides in not only collecting feedback from the

beginning and throughout a product’s lifecycle, but what you do with that insight and how it

impacts the business’s bottom-line.

This short handbook is designed to help product managers at organizations big and small avoid

market irrelevance and ultimately, product failure. From interviews with product leaders and

drawing from our decade of experience working with clients to improve our own product, we

outline some actionable lessons that can be applied to your product management process.

No longer are you going to look at spreadsheets of data and wonder what’s next. After reading this,

you will be able to reap the benefits of product feedback actionably to make product improvements

and drive the business forward in a successful and sustainable way.

Don’t set product roadmap priorities without real market feedback

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Embrace the Industry Shift: Customer-Centricity

Ditch the traditional product-centricity approach to your product management process

One of the top reasons we see company’s seeking the means to collect feedback data is often to test the waters for product fit before it’s officially a market contender. While a lot of this data can be collected in

earlier phases of a product’s lifecycle, gathering consumer-level insight will determine purchase willingness and if the product is going to solve needs and relieve pain points. These insights are critical to determine product sustainability. This step, albeit often discounted and overlooked, provides time to adjust accordingly, and creates more opportunity for market success.

“What distinguishes customer-centric organizations from other companies that proclaim their customer focus? In short, they’ve moved beyond lip service and re-oriented their entire operating model around the customer, increasing customer satisfaction and their own profitability in the process,” says Booz & Company partners. “Customer-centric companies understand not only what the customer values, but also the value the customer represents to their bottom line.”

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One product professional we spoke with, who works as a product manager for a multinational corporation overseeing

product development in the refining, chemical, and life sciences industries, told us he strives to get in the mindset of the challenges customers face in their current day-to-day job. To do this requires some interviewing tactics that gradually structure the conversation around current challenges.

The company found that going into a customer interview and simply asking what their main challenges may yield flat answers. To get to the root cause of their challenges, this company began asking the customer about their career path before digging into their everyday. This helped warm the customer up and get their train of thought on the right track.

Hearing the customer’s narrative of why they choose the field they’re in will naturally expose some challenges they’ve been faced with in the past, the expert told us. From there, you can steer the conversation more to present day challenges by asking them about recent projects they’ve worked on and any associated challenges.

It is as this point where the customer’s mindset will be primed enough to talk about current projects and challenges. This is where the most insightful feedback nuggets come from and are wildly more useful to the product team and the organization.

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“The biggest thing that we consult with clients on the most is that there is that there is not just one way to ask questions for product feedback,” says Jony Piederasanta, a SurveyGizmo programmer. “It all depends on what you want to ask and what you want to get out of the data. It’s like reverse engineering where you want to figure out how you want the data to look before you actually build out any content. This backwards approach provides the best results because you have a goal in mind. Depending on how you want the data to look is going to determine the way you structure your questions regardless of your collection method and it allows you to get correct and meaningful data that you need.”

Survey 1:

• Built with basic randomization logic. Different images of the products were shown at random by shuffling the display of the products differently for each respondent. This method combats first answer bias. Respondents were asked to share how and if the products fit into the brand, how appealing the product is to the respondent, and if they were willing to purchase it.

• Questions were designed using a Likert scale on a five-point scale.

Survey 2:

• Built with complex logic. Including quotas and screening questions, which pull in demographic data to determine target markets the product would perform best in. Screening questions in the beginning of the survey eliminate collecting data that would ultimately be unuseful to the product’s development. This approach often yields more fine-tuned results.

• Instead of using the Likert Scale method, the survey was designed to select multiple product choices.

Collecting Feedback – Two Common Methodologies Using Surveys

The following two examples, derived from our experience programming surveys with our clients, had the same end goal: to collect feedback from customers on specific products that a company was looking to potentially put out in the market.

Whether it’s a brand new product about to hit market or adjustments made to an existing

product based on feedback, ask yourself one very important question as a product manager

when looking at the feedback holistically or in piecemeal:

Does this potential change meet 80 percent of the needs of 80 percent of my customers?

If the answer is no, consider de-prioritizing it until you find feedback that would entail making

adjustments that would impact that 80 percent.

Eighty percent of your customers should represent the customers who provide the highest return to your business. Some refer to this group as “super users” or “premium clients.”

At the end of the day, a product or a business is never going to solve every problem every customer

experiences. Business decisions should be made not only to support a majority of your highest

revenue-driving customers but they should correlate with supporting what the business’ needs are. If

a product was adjusted for every single need of every single customer, it wouldn’t make good business

sense to do so and your product is far more likely to flatline -- and truth be told, revenue will likely

tank. Consider the remaining 20 percent a loss from the get-go.

To be a market leader or continue to be a market leader, this 80-20 approach is critical to retain those

top customers, which always provides the highest return when compared to the cost acquiring new

customers, according to leading product experts we spoke to.

When feedback is collected from either clients or support tickets, keep in mind that a majority of

feedback comes in when something is really great or really broken. That feedback is coming from a

single user’s bias and specific use case.

Adjusting the product to fit that one need will turn that one customer around to being satisfied, but

that one customer may be a disportionate representation of your overall client base. Long-term

product relevancy is in no small part due to meeting the needs of the majority, not the few.

When adjusting your product to incorporate customer feedback ask: Does it meet 80% of the needs of 80% of my customers?

That being said, don’t turn a blind eye to that ad-hoc feedback; take it

into consideration, but rather than having a reactive approach and

making product altering decisions from it, bucket the feedback into the

laundry list of fixes or feature improvements to bring to a dedicated group

of advisory clients.

Experts tell us this group could be around 10-15 high revenue generating

clients that meet on a quarterly basis to discuss the product roadmap – the

3-6 month plan of product development – and conduct beta testing with

iterative product improvements. This is how many leading organizations

approach not only incorporating all the feedback from the many available

channels but how they litmus test the product to the market before sending

it out to the masses. This ensures the product is at a point in which the

improvements will have a positive return and ideally, increased profitability.

Identify top clients and establish an Advisory Council comprised of those clients

ISurveyGizmo | What Do Customers Want?

Three key learnings to apply to product management today

Learning 3:

Collect feedback from conversations and other automated channels, but not solely from automated channels.

Learning 1:

Validate all feedback.

Learning 2:

Avoid fostering a disconnect between frontline employees and executive management.

We recently sat down with a product leader at a multinational computer technology corporation. He told us that a lot of his most effective work

stems from his learnings at a previous company that didn’t make it. Here are the top three lessons he applies to his work for the product to be successful:

Validating early and often in the process, reduces the likelihood of failure. This step is designed to help ensure success. And given

that nearly 20 percent of all new products fail, it’s a step to help avoid only becoming a statistic rather than a reality.

1. Re-evaluate the product’s position often and objectively. Despite how close you are to the

product and how invested emotionally and financially in the company’s success you may be,

being objective is fundamental. Consider establishing a recurring meeting cadence to set aside

time to examine what the numbers say and what actions to take from it.

2. Talk to humans. Throughout this handbook, we’ve stressed the importance of getting as much

face-to-face time with customers new and existing as possible. Do this before, during, and after

the entire product feedback process so you gain validated learning about new ideas and

assumptions early and iteratively.

3. Listen to your gut, but let the data guide you. Instinct is a powerful feeling that can lead to

some game-changing innovation, but it’s nothing without supporting data. Throughout the

process, identify the most actionable pieces of data that can backup your gut feelings. Validate

your hypothesis with hard data, otherwise your feelings are just that, feelings, and have no

business impact.

4. Reduce iterative time. No matter how it’s designed in your organization, product feedback

processes take a significant amount of time. There is no ideal time to collect feedback from

customers throughout the process -- rule of thumb is to always collect it, and the sooner, the

better. Iterations big or small should be tested by your identified early adopter customer

segments so you can build, measure, and learn with extreme agility.

5. No matter your company’s size, always validate. To stay innovative, adopting what Facebook

CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously coined, the “move fast and break things” mentality is crucial.

However, despite the age or revenue growth of your company, no process is above proper

validation methods. Without validation, the process inherently creates a narrow tunnel filled

with assumptions, which brings products into a downward spiral.

Learning 1: Validate All Feedback.

Experts at Kissmetrics have consolidated validation into five steps:

Those on the front lines, the product managers and directors, are more privy to seeing the impetus or the reasons why the feedback that is

coming is coming in at all. They are on the ground floor, sleeves rolled up, and and are hand-in-hand.

Yet, a few floors up in the offices of executives, leadership is far removed from that reality. Likely, the information they have in front of them at the decision table is distilled down into what matters most to them: what’s going to make the most impact on revenue, growth, and success. Seldomly, does it include much context or granular level detail.

We spoke with a product leader who was at a software firm where this disconnect was the key driver in the company’s downfall. The company was recently acquired due business decisions that were made without knowing the impact that would have on their core product’s life cycle. If the executives had a deeper, more contextual understanding of the product’s core problems that users faced, the merger might night have been necessary.

In order for feedback to be a core business driver, it should go through proper feedback validation. This was a major lesson the product leader learned in this experience.

If that feedback is validated appropriately and distilled down into what an executive wants to see (what is going to make the most profit), decisions can be made accordingly and the very idea of a disconnect can be thrown out of the window.

Learning 2: Avoid fostering a disconnect between front line employees and executive management.

Feedback should never be collected one way. The process should always be a combination of channels. When automation is the

only way feedback is channeled into the organization, it is treated as an overarching replacement to other channels.

Experts tell us this must be avoided at all costs. Collecting feedback should be a combination of methods and channels, both automated and not. If you solely rely on one channel and one channel only, the quality of the feedback is likely to degrade and the more likely having a silo form is higher.

In short, more feedback coming in from a diversity of channels directly impacts the overall fit and quality of the product. The better fit it is, the happier your customers will be, and the higher the chance it will mature well into the market.

Learning 3: Collect feedback from conversations and other automated channels, but not only from automated channels.

Often time, product managers across industries not only collect new ideas from customer feedback, but also get viable information to contribute

toward real products. However, as much work as collecting the feedback may be, the work doesn’t stop there. It’s what you do with it all that feedback that makes the difference apparent and beneficial.

After collecting the feedback, experts tell us it’s best practice to send out the meeting minutes as well as an executive summary of the meeting to all key stakeholders in the project. This should occur as soon as possible.

From there, the team as a whole should then decide on the key focal point of the feedback. This could mean conducting more interviews or it could signal moving to the next step: writing a high-level business brief.

This brief should then be used to share information with key stakeholders to determine if it’s a good enough idea to pursue further or if it’s back to the drawing board.

This strategic, gated process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback has been proven to be vastly more effective, especially when developing a more comprehensive business case, than solely going off feedback collected through other channels. And this is largely in part due to the integrity of the feedback itself and taking the time to understand its true context versus making business decisions from a pile of support tickets that were submitted in the heat of a malfunction and in the moment emotion may skew the actual problem from surfacing.

How to Best Bring the Collected Feedback Into the Larger Business Conversation

In addition to establishing a sound process combining different feedback channels and methods, it’s important to remember

that good ideas do not always follow a structure. Be sure to leave room and flexibility in your process to iterate on a whim

– that is, if you have the bandwidth to take the issue a single customer is facing and iterate prototypes from it, it could not only be a more efficient way to meet their needs while driving loyalty, but also could be the next big innovation for your company and product offering.

This approach, experts tell us, allows those more willing to stick their neck out to not lose focus and creativity due to a set process. Product professionals need not worry about a possible failure. They have more leeway to embrace the organic nature of product development.

Embrace Risk

With 2018 deemed “the year of customer intelligence” leading organizations should ensure their focus is on integrating insights

throughout the entire product feedback process. Combining forces with digital analytics and business intelligence, silos break down, insights turn into action, and products are positioned for long-term sustainable growth and success.

Leveraging customer intelligence data doesn’t have to be only for the data scientists of the world. The value this level of data brings to a product’s lifecycle is nearly invaluable when it comes to business returns and profitability, along with maintaining high customer loyalty.

Trends in revamping product processes are moving faster everyday. Realizing the potential of integrating customer intelligence could lead to exciting new business opportunities, and has the potential to enhance an organization’s product and services to match the evolving needs of its loyal customers.

At the Core of a Successful Product Feedback Process is Customer Intelligence.

Founded in 2006, SurveyGizmo is a powerful, survey and data insights platform that empowers business professionals to make

informed decisions. Through high-powered application software, it offers user-friendly data collection tools for understanding your customers, markets, and employees in real time and communicating this information across an organization. It provides data insights in over 205 countries, with 50,000 new surveys created and 7.5 million responses collected every week, for customers like Fedex, Microsoft, Bloomberg Television and GE.

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