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How would you handle negative user feedback about your product, and how might you address it with the engineering team?
As the "GM" of your product area, it's incredibly valuable to cultivate a culture of ownership among all your cross-functional partners. When the entire product pod feels a strong sense of responsibility for the product's success – viewing all feedback, good and bad, as chances to learn and improve – that's when you'll drive greater product adoption and reduce friction between teams.
But going back to this specific question - my first step is always to process and understand the feedback myself. This involves asking a few key questions:
Have I heard this feedback before? If it's a recurring theme, that immediately flags it as a higher priority issue. It suggests a pattern and likely impacts more users than just the one reporting it.
Is this something we already know is a gap or friction point? This could be based on our internal testing, user research we've already done, or even just a general awareness of where our product might fall short compared to competitors. If it aligns with our internal understanding, it reinforces the need to address it.
Is it actionable? Is the feedback specific enough that the engineering team can understand the problem and potentially identify a solution? Vague complaints like "it's too slow" are less helpful than "the loading time for the dashboard is consistently over 10 seconds."
If the answer to any of those initial questions is yes, my next step is:
Bring the feedback to the engineering team, either through their manager or directly in our team channel. The key is to clearly explain why this feedback matters. For instance, by positioning it around the user's pain: "A user just reported that they're unable to complete [key task] because of [specific issue], which is preventing them from [achieving their goal]."
Connect it to broader objectives: "Improving this aspect could significantly improve our onboarding flow for new users and potentially increase our conversion rates."
Give the context they need to fix it e.g. relevant screenshots, recordings, the stack the user is using with your product (if relevant) and confirmation that you can reproduce the "issue" (if applicable).
Ultimately, the goals is to ensure the engineering team understands the importance of the feedback and how addressing it contributes to the overall success of the product.
Negative feedback is more important than positive feedback. For PMM, I would bring it to the PM teams and have honest conversations about the feedback and let them address it. Also look at if it is an enablement issue and how PMM can help educate customers on the use of the feature (if applicable). In my experience, PMMs are not really working with engineering on product feedback, that is more of a PM function
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