Did you ever consider attributing publicly damaging negative reviews a somewhat higher weight, within any kind of equation that connects user feedback/requests with product roadmap decisions?

Ideally, your product roadmap reflects long-term strategy, narrative, and investment. If you are confident in your roadmap, you shouldn't need a rule that automatically places more weight on negative reviews than positive or neutral reviews. Feedback is very important - but it's equally important to avoid knee-jerk reactions and keep Product, Dev, and Marketing teams focused on the plan.  Generally, I try to balance negative reviews with understanding that (a) we're not necessarily marketing to ...Read More

This is a really interesting question. Leadership typically look at a number of factors when determining what goes in the roadmap. For example, at Zendesk we look at industry trends, innovative use cases, new market expansion, our competitors, partners, and of course customer feedback. For customer feedback we run a robust “Voice of the Customer ” program that looks at feature requests across all our customers and then ranks them based on a number of factors including revenue opportunity, churn ...Read More

For the definition of reviews, I will consider analyst product evaluations also as reviews. It is also important to know that not all public reviews have the same weight.  From my own experience, well articulated, attributed - negative feedback can have the right impact on product roadmap decisions. It allows the PM-PMM team to even reach out for further investigations and understand the key gaps for the customer. It also gives the team a chance to respond to the feedback by providing acceptable ...Read More

I would definitely recommend taking publicly damaging negative reviews pretty seriously. They can do a lot of harm to your brand image and scare off potential customers. So, if a review points out a major problem that could really mess up the user experience or turn people away, You should definitely bump that up on your priority list when making product decisions. But there are other factors you might want to include in your equation. I also advise to look at how many people are complaining abo ...Read More

Our team always looks at negative feedback and incorporates it in product roadmap decisions... BUT there is one rule that myself and my teams always use in these feedback sessions. 1 is not a constant, meaning that if it is just one negative feedback we don't use it, as this doesn't mean scale, this could just be an issue with this customer and no one else is feeling it. So we look at critital mass of feedback or reviews around the same topic. As a Product Marketer you need to take the good with ...Read More