Editorial
The Gist
- Define clear feedback goals. Align your customer feedback collection with your product’s specific needs and objectives.
- Close the feedback loop. Build trust by showing customers how their feedback directly impacts your product development.
- Honor product principles with feedback. Use customer feedback to iterate on your product while staying true to your core values.
If you want to build impactful and valuable products that delight customers and keep them coming back, gathering customer feedback before it becomes generally available (GA) to your customers should be a top priority. This process of gathering customer feedback will give you valuable insights into how customers are interacting with your product and can help you identify any areas of confusion or gaps in the user experience. That way, you can fine-tune the product ahead of its broader launch and ensure your product aligns with the needs and desires of your customers.
I’ve learned quite a bit about gathering customer feedback in my current role. Let’s dive into a few strategies that can help you get the most out of pre-GA feedback at your company.
Define Your Feedback Goals First
The feedback you want to collect may differ depending on the feature or product you’re planning to launch, who you’re launching it to, and why you’re building it to begin with. Maybe you’ve built an automation tool for non-technical users, a task management feature for smaller teams, or an admin-focused permissions update. Understanding your goals will help you focus your efforts, particularly when you start to receive a lot of customer feedback, which can be overwhelming at a larger company.
Generally speaking, I’ve found that customer feedback about functionality and usability is more pressing and important to get right before focusing on items like aesthetics or color choices. For example, one of my team’s goals is to understand whether there are specific elements of a product or feature that users are frequently having trouble using, and why they’re having that trouble.
My company's platform values intuitiveness and ease of use in the flow of work, so my team needs to evaluate whether there’s a specific set of users that require a bit more training or onboarding. Is the product not as intuitive as we think, and we therefore need to arm our Sales and Customer Success teams with more enablement materials to prepare for the GA? Are there changes we can implement within our timeline to address our pilot customers’ confusion?
Related Article: Why You Need to Understand Customer Behavior When Tackling CX Feedback
Build Trust by Effectively Leveraging Customer Feedback
There are several ways you can establish and build trust with your customers during the pre-GA process, like opening yourself to hearing all kinds of critical feedback, and communicating early and often.
One of the most important ways we maintain trust with pilot customers at Slack is to close the customer feedback loop, which proves to participants that their input made a direct impact, and their work with us is worthwhile. Let your customers know which customer feedback you implemented, which feedback you didn’t and what you’re holding on to for a later stage.
For example, when we were testing an upcoming project management feature with pilot customers, we got a lot of feedback about the sharing mechanism. The team listened and understood and decided to prioritize building a more intuitive sharing experience prior to GA as a result.
Once those changes were made, the Product Lead for the feature announced the updates to the pilot group, calling back to the original feedback. Our pilot customers were validated and our feature was more helpful, which is the best kind of win-win!
Related Article: Enhance Your Customer Service Strategy With Consistency & Feedback
Integrate Customer Feedback While Upholding Product Principles
Product principles are the fundamental values that inform every product you build, and they serve as the foundation for your entire product decision-making process. Even if your company hasn’t clearly documented them, every product org is applying principles to their product development.
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At Slack, we’ve been able to provide better customer experiences by establishing always-evolving, mutually-agreed-upon product principles. My personal favorite is, “prototype the path,” which in the simplest of terms, means that you have to try something out and see how it feels, then make changes based on the experience, to reach a solid final version. You can probably guess why it’s my favorite principle! It so clearly fosters a culture and environment where we can easily iterate and evolve a product based on customer feedback.
As you’re building products and features to help people work more efficiently and effectively, leverage pre-GA customer feedback to optimize your product for broader market acceptance. This will help you build products that your customers trust and genuinely love to use, which in turn will help your business thrive.
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