What processes do you have in place to incorporate customer feedback into your product roadmap?

Customer feedback is critical to how we build, and we incorporate it at every step of the product development process. We get customer feedback from a variety of places.

When building new products we proactively reach out to customers to learn about their needs and make sure we’re creating the right solutions for them. We have a User Research team that regularly speaks to customers via a variety of methods - everything from interviews and surveys to card sorting and field studies. Along our product development process, we have specific touchpoints where we make sure to utilize user research to get deep insight into the pain points our customers face, and the best solutions to help them.

Our customer-facing teams, like sales and customer success, are also talking to customers constantly as part of their daily jobs. These teams rigorously record all of the feedback they hear and compile it into a ranked Voice of the Customer (VOC) list, all managed within Asana. Asana’s VOC program is a critical input into our roadmap process, and helps us prioritize the most pressing needs brought up by customers.

We have a great podcast episode about this! To summarize, it’s less about explicit processes and more about tools in the toolbelt. It’s all about right tool, right job. The tools that come to mind for incorporating customer feedback are:

1. User research. This typically involves a full user research team, crafted questions and a lab that users visit to provide feedback on designs, prototypes, live product, whatever is being used for testing. But sometimes it’s something you do on your own with the help of a user researcher.

2. Surveys. This usually involves working with someone that specializes in surveys, product marketing or something you do yourself (very carefully!) to survey customers about what things they like and don’t like about new or current product features. You can also ask about how likely they are to promote the product or feature to their friends, prices they’re willing to pay for products, etc.

3. Customer Support Feedback. This is what customers tell your customer support team if you have one. A great way to collect this is to sit with your customer support team and either field calls yourself or listen in while others are fielding calls.

4. Written Feedback. Can come from a feedback widget on a website or app, app store reviews, emails to the CEO, etc. This tends to be lower fidelity but can be really useful when troubleshooting or looking for lots of feedback volume.

5. Quantitative Data. This is not something people usually think of when it comes to customer feedback! But Quantitative data is really just a data representation of customer feedback. It shows what customers are actually doing. And, when analyzed properly, can reflect what you see in the more qualitative methods above.

There are more, but these tend to be the most common ones. Depending on what the need is for a product or feature you’re working on, you might want to use different tools for different purposes and project phases. For example, if you’re trying to redesign a product page for the whole website, it’s worth taking your time. It would make sense to start looking at quantitative data and written feedback early in the process. Then, once you have prototypes to test, user research can play a bigger role. But maybe you have some bigger questions to answer before then, like what kinds of elements do users want to see on these pages? Then engaging user research to help figure that out can be a big help since it’s less structured and more complex. And of course sometimes you need something fast to ship in the next few days. Written feedback, quick surveys and customer support feedback can be really helpful.

Each of these tools have some bias baked in as well. For example, written feedback is more biased to more engaged, more passionate users. So it’s good to keep in mind what those biases are and figure out how best to use those tools depending. Great question!

The way quality overrides quantity in feedback collation, similarly, the technique employed takes precedence over the procedural aspects in gathering insights on CSAT. I try to ensure that we apply variety of approaches to gain wider understanding of product usage, feature adoption, customer sentiments and loyalty when working on the product roadmap. Each approach leads to learnings that can be incorporated in that respective function of product roadmap, while following a systematic processes to gather the learnings. Some of the approaches that work are -

1. CSAT surveys and questionnaires that are carefully crafted to seek both qualitative and quantitative insights into core feature usage with a NPS score tracked overtime

2. Focus groups within the organization that act as an internal set of Customer advocates or Advisory councils that act as the primary advocate of customer's experiences and reactions. Such focus groups relatively have a greater connect with the customers as compared to the rest of the organization and hence can become the primary driver for early user feedback

3. Customer interviews that can be conducted during any phase of product lifecycle, with the caveat of it being diverse and well-balanced to avoid any structural biases

4. A/B testing or UATs basis the scope of customer feedback required. Such direct usability tests work great to gather real-time and direct feedback from the intended target audience

5. Usage data and analytics can work as the perfect lever to understand indirect customer feedback by analyzing their usage behavior and patterns

6. Product demos and such other implementation programs (if applicable) acts as a great platform to guage customer interests and excitement on new features or product roll-outs

7. Monitoring of customer sentiments across range of their input platforms like reddit, G2, social media, LinkedIn, etc. can be another way of gathering insights

There could be more specific approaches that works basis the need, but generally a combination of the above mentioned ensures that the Roadmap stays healthy.

Customer feedback is a key driving factor in shaping the product roadmap. A good way of looking at a roadmap is categorizing intitatives into different buckets - eg. Strategic/ Innovative, Maintenance/Keeping lights on, Platform Enhancements, etc. Customer feedback can be incorporated in almost every bucket depending on how well the team has done user research and gone through the discovery process.

We use tools such as Salesforce, Product Board and Zendesk where feedback gathered from the CS teams can be directly tied to a feature/epic or even story which can further help determine the value/impact. Each request is carefully associated with a value/impact score which translated diretly into the OKRs