Introduction

Building a great product is always a challenge. You can’t do it alone! You need help, and the best help you can get is from your users. After all, they know best what they want and need, so you only need to listen. Or do you? Won’t that kill innovation, like in this fake saying about “people wanting faster horses (rather than cars)”?

In today’s article, we’re exploring how to set up your update process to collect and utilize user feedback in your product development process in the best way. We’ll show how to build what users ask for while finding the right balance between that and your innovation direction. Without further ado, let’s start immediately with:

How to get feedback?

Let’s open with one clarification: with feedback, you want to learn both the good and the bad. It’s not only about pursuing negative opinions and trying to address them. Feedback also means the areas of your product that impress the most and give uncanny levels of value. With this information, you can better decide on your next product releases and craft the right marketing messages and value proposition. With that out of the way, how do I get your feedback? You can look at the feedback-gathering process as two slightly different stages: Pre-release and Post-release. Let's discuss both of them in detail.

Pre-release: How to build the best thing possible

Getting feedback on that stage is one of a few balancing games you need to play when incorporating user voice into your development process. If neglected, you may discover that you are not building the right product very late (which usually means too late). If overused, you’ll take forever to add meaning to your product, potentially missing the value it would have brought if released sooner.

How to get early feedback from users:

• Polls in different shapes and… well… forms: This is the easiest and classic method, but also one that can get a limited number of replies from not statistically enough diverse users. Still, as it’s pretty cheap to run a poll, it’s worth a shot! Remember, it doesn’t have to be an email. It can be a form embedded directly in the Product itself, preferably asking very contextual questions.
• User interviews: With this method, you invite a number of your users to consult on your ideas, prototypes, and maybe early versions of the planned product or update. As long as you ask open-ended questions, you should get tons of qualified feedback. Don’t stress about doing this too formally. In small to medium B2B businesses, you can simply ask to be included in a few sales check-in calls and also to ask your interview questions!
• Internal review meetings: In the Agile Scrum framework utilized by most IT developers nowadays, there is always an opportunity to review the work completed at the end of a short development cycle called “sprint”. Here, you can also invite your clients and other major stakeholders to give feedback as the development continues.
• Fake door tests: This approach creates an illusion that something was added to the product but doesn’t yet work at a given moment. Of course, it doesn’t work, and it’s not meant to. It’s only the clicks on the fake proposal that counts to understand the potential appetite. This fake door can be easily coupled with a poll.
• Other no-code, low-code MVP (Minimum Viable Product) solutions: Other than the fake door, you can take a few different approaches that will probably require a little more time and effort, like a landing page development to gather emails of the interested users. However, this does muffle the border between pre and post-release, so let’s look at the final way to get feedback
• Social media and online forums: Why not talk directly to your followers and ask their opinion? Yes, this could be considered a type of poll, but unlike those, social media can get passive feedback that you didn’t prompt. Maybe your product subreddit has a few great ideas. How will the subreddit reader react to a little upcoming feature “leak”?

Granted, most of those methods directly or in a changed way can be also used in:

Post-release: Learn what works and what doesn’t

So, on top of the above-listed methods, here are also a few ways of getting feedback that is only available once the product/update is live:

• A/B testing: If you have more than one concept of a solution and you are not sure which approach will be better, why not let users speak in one of the most unbiased ways to test possible? Just release all your solution variations to different groups and then monitor the performance. Data from different groups will unravel the truth! However, an A/B test might not always be necessary. Sometimes all it takes is simple:
• Data Analysis: Of course, the data will show whether the newly released feature/product performs as expected. Thus it can show if the funnels work as intended and highlight the areas of interest that will require additional investigation towards understanding and potential follow-up updates.
• External feedback sources: While you can have a feedback section in your product and utilize all the methods already listed, it can also come from many different sources, which include the sales department, customer support, mobile app store ratings, and more. Make sure to keep on top of those and have the users’ voices heard, regardless of the direction.