So Many Ideas, So Little Time!

Guiding product development is a critically important part of startup success! Innovative products are novel solutions to painful customer problems, yet every existing customer and potential prospect has a unique perspective on what would make the best solution. Sifting through feedback and deciding what to invest in is crucial to building value cost-effectively.

If you listen to your customers and prospects, they will share endless ideas on how to improve your product. This kind of insight can guide you in creating a valuable solution; however, it comes with risks because, inevitably, some of the feedback will contradict other feedback, potentially pushing your product into addressing a different set of needs or muddying your product positioning. Therefore, being intentional about how you gather and act on feedback is essential to success.

Be Intentional in Gathering Feedback

Gathering that feedback in a consistent and proactive way is essential, so make sure you are intentional about exposing yourself and your team leaders to direct customer interactions.

• Ask a sample of people who are considering buying open-ended questions, like What do you think about this product/service? What makes this product hard to use/understand? What works for you? What doesn’t?  What do you wish it did? Then thoroughly listen to the answers and note down their points rather than immediately objection-handling or seeking to change the person’s mind. This takes discipline!
  
  
• Sometimes, an observer on a new client onboarding or customer support call can notice patterns in the questions new clients ask and try to figure out how to make the controls or user interface more intuitive for them. Take advantage of such natural customer discovery opportunities to keep learning.
  
  
• Periodically check in with your customers on how things are going. Ask them to give you a 1-5 star satisfaction rating, and then ask follow-up questions to understand more about how the client is using your product and what works well and what causes frustration.
  
  
• Keep a running list of ideas that are offered by prospects, stimulated by your company’s customer interactions, or are the source of technical support calls. Often, this means establishing a process that allows your team members to easily submit meaningful feedback they receive and taking every opportunity to note what clients ask or comment about.
  
  
• If possible, quietly and unobtrusively observe people using your product. Where do they get hung up?  How often do they give up? Try to observe a variety of users to see if there are patterns, and do not make assumptions about who will understand what!  I remember observing one highly accomplished doctor attempting to use our newly developed software interface and being stunned to realize that he did not understand how windows worked on a computer – and, as a result, was looking in the wrong places for the software controls.

The key to successfully gathering feedback is being able to listen rather than react, explain, or educate the person sharing. Those who really know the product (such as those who designed or sell it!) make assumptions about how it will be used. Such assumptions are often proved wrong, and the only way to discover how new users might misunderstand your product is to let them try and discover what is confusing. In this situation, being “helpful” basically negates the information that you might have gleaned in the feedback-gathering process.

Process Feedback into Meaningful and Potentially Actionable Information

Critical to translating feedback into useful information is gathering enough datapoints and then grouping the input to look for patterns. Summarize the feedback themes while not losing the details of each instance of feedback, and be sure to note how frequently the same or similar feedback was received as an indicator of the strength of the signal on that theme.

Establish a multi-disciplinary group to review and discuss the processed feedback on a regular cadence to keep you and your team close to the customer point of view. Ask yourselves:

• What will significantly improve the value you offer to your customer(s)?
  
• What are the questions that new customers have when they are using your innovative product?  How can you help them understand and interpret your product?
  
• How can you help clients self-serve / access on-demand what they need to use the product?
  
• What will simplify/make your operations more scalable?
  
• What bugs or limitations are causing the most frustration, and how might those be addressed?

Avoid assuming that you “know” what the customer thinks, a pitfall all too common as startup teams grow.

Develop Potential Product Investment Scenarios

For new product directions, once you have processed the feedback, it is time to conceptualize how that feedback might be translated into new product ideas, with the right information to enable smart prioritization and decision-making.

• Sort new feature requests into what might be considered for incorporation into your existing product(s) and what might be best imagined as a new product.
  
• Develop new product enhancement or creation scenarios for consideration and gather information on the costs and potential benefits of each scenario from your product development team, as well as from those who collected the relevant feedback. Keep refining paper designs before committing to code or physical prototypes.
  
• Make sure to mockup and test (get feedback) your ideas on “new” customers because one of the easiest blind spots for entrepreneurial teams is knowing so much about your product that you don’t recognize what assumptions you are making and fail to test your new product ideas.
  
• If feasible or for expensive development efforts, consider creating a prototype and testing it with real customers before committing to developing and launching a full-blown product development to refine your design ideas. 

Make Explicit Decisions and Take Deliberate Action

Once feedback has been distilled into tested product scenarios with potential costs and benefits attached, it is time to ruthlessly prioritize based on the greatest value or customer experience impact. Ultimately, you must strike a balance between reflecting and analyzing with acting decisively to rapidly build value.

Be sure to make explicit decisions to proceed, abandon, or hold for future consideration on each one. Ambiguity can create priority confusion for your development team. Being clear can help them know what to implement first and avoid the rework associated with implementing an unrefined design.

Customer-centered design is something that must be built into a company’s ongoing processes so that there is a virtuous cycle of new and valuable products in the pipeline. This requires implementing deliberate processes to collect, process, and act intentionally on customer feedback.