Getting usable product suggestions from non-product colleagues
As a Product Manager, how many times have you heard this:
“I need <very specific feature>, it’s essential for <me/my team/my client>.”
When you work with people who are passionate about what they do, they will inevitably have lots ideas of how the products they use can be improved. If your company has a sales function, you’ll also get a lot of second-hand suggestions from end-clients about what they need to complete their tasks. User feedback is great, and as Product Manager you should be constantly seeking it out.
But the problem comes when feedback is delivered in the form above— when someone has a very specific feature they want implemented without giving context. Instead of articulating the root problem that led to the idea, you’re given a half-thought-through solution which is only applicable in certain situations.
If, as a Product Manager, you only take on feedback in the form of suggested solutions, you’re going to end up with a product full of bespoke features and no consistency that doesn’t bring users the value it could.
I wanted to create an easy way for my colleagues to share their suggestions and feedback without giving me predefined solutions. The most time efficient way to do this was to create a Typeform that led them through a series of questions aimed at getting to the root of their idea.
Asking the right sort of question was crucial to the success of this new feedback submission process. I needed to guide people down a path that ended at the context of what drove their idea, and get them thinking in a different way. After some experimentation, talking to Product slack groups and reading countless articles online, I ended up with this question list:
- Summarise your idea in one sentence
- What was the origin of this idea? (e.g. conversation with colleague, client, something a competitor is doing, an issue I had when working)
- With this idea, what problem are you trying to solve, or what are you trying to achieve?
- Why is this problem important/valuable to solve?
- What are you doing right now to solve that problem?
- Is there anything else you think it’s important for me to know?
Using the steps I outlined in this article, I set up a process that dropped completed feature suggestion forms onto a Trello board. Using Trello meant that the idea originator had visibility of progress, and could see that I was responding to their suggestion without me having to constantly update them.
The result has been fantastic — product suggestions with context that allow me to properly investigate and come up with a solution that works for the user base as a whole, rather than just this one scenario.
