Product development teams need a customer feedback strategy

To make effective decisions when developing products, engagement with customers is critical. Building this into your way of working should be the priority of any product leadership. Along the way, data should be captured and analysed.

There are two broad categories of customer engagement data that should be integrated into your product development process: qualitative data, which is narrative in nature, and quantitative data, which is numerical in nature. Each of these categories have their strengths and weaknesses and should be invoked in different circumstances.

Building a great framework for qualitative data

Examples of qualitative product development data in a B2B SaaS context include:

Qualitative data should rarely dictate (though it may inform) decisions about what features you should build. Rather, qualitative data is more useful for informing how features should work. The reason for this is simple: qualitative data is by nature narrow in scope and sample size. Relying on qualitative data for high-level strategic decision making often results in source bias, which leads to companies building for the customers they talk to (i.e., the most accessible or the loudest customers) rather than the broader market.

Generally, a good rule of thumb is to lean on qualitative feedback (e.g., user interviews, case studies and user testing) after you’ve decided you want to tackle a problem and during the solutioning process. When anecdotal feedback is nudging you in a specific strategic direction, try to find some quantitative data to validate your ideas.

A major challenge faced by many B2B SaaS product teams is that the majority of the data they receive is qualitative in nature (e.g., feedback on lost/won sales, support cases and churned customers). This can make it very difficult to determine what to build next and often results in features being built that only satisfy a small subset of the overall user base. The best solution to this is to try to adjust your business operations to convert what is traditionally anecdotal feedback into quantitative data.

Building a great framework for quantitative data

Most product teams have a torrent of anecdotal feedback, related to the needs of specific customers or trends that coworkers or partners have noticed, coming at them every day. Finding a signal amongst the noise can be very challenging. The best way to do this is to work towards building business operations that make it easy to record feedback from individual customers in a way that can later be analysed as quantitative data.

For example, product managers who are receiving a lot of feedback from their support team should empower their team to record this feedback in a structured, analysable way. The same can be done for other customer touch points.

Turning anecdotes into real data

Below are the key touch points during the customer journey that product companies should build business processes around for insight collection:

Try to aggregate all of the data above into a single database in your CRM, alongside other feedback like CSAT and NPS (further reading on requesting feedback).

Additional quantitative data

Beyond the above, there’s a lot more quantitative data you should be tracking. Fortunately, these data points are, by nature, much easier to quantify:

In conclusion:

Privacy and terms

I care about privacy as much as you do. I will only use your email address to send you this newsletter or to reach out to you directly, and you can unsubscribe at any time. I will not share, sell, or rent your email address to any third party, though I do store it the software I use to dispatch emails.

The information provided on this blog is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. The content on this blog is not a substitute for professional financial advice. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of other organizations. The author makes no representations as to the accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information on this blog and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its use. The author may hold positions in the companies or products discussed on this blog. Always conduct your own research and consult a financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

Subscribe for advice

Free weekly advice covering product strategy, development operations, building teams and more.

More advice

Australia to quash angel investing

The Australian Government is about to make it nearly impossible for successful startup workers to reinvest their earnings into new startups. Let’s explore the upcoming changes and how they will affect startups, workers, and the Australian economy.

 
Stepping on toes

How much should competent people, confidently managing their responsibilities, meddle in the affairs of other teams they perceive to be dropping the ball?

 
Processes make inexperienced people wiser, and experienced people dumber

People hate process, but process is crucial to scaling a businesses. Today, we explore the difference between good and bad processes, and ways to ensure startups can benefit from standardisation, rather than suffer.