How to Ensure Product Feedback is Everyone’s Responsibility

If you’ve been paying any attention to our content, then you’ll already be well aware of just how important product feedback is to a B2B SaaS company.

Most of the content you read online suggests that product feedback is the responsibility of the product team. We disagree…

Product feedback is everyone’s responsibility.

It’s crucial that you get all hands on deck. In fact, if you don’t, your product feedback management might have failed before it’s even begun.

The fact is, the way you manage feedback is impacted by, and impacts on, everyone in your organization. Your Sales, Support, Success, Product, and even Leadership teams all need to play their part.

If you aren’t all aligned on a common way of managing product feedback, and if you don’t share the same attitudes towards it, then your process is going to break down and fall apart at the seams.

Imagine running a support team with no SLAs, working with no contract or not having a clear health and safety policy in place. That would be terrible.

So, how exactly do you go about ensuring that everyone is responsible for product feedback?

Well, you need a common definition.

You need to define your procedure, your approach, and how each team can contribute.

Without this definition, each of your teams will end up doing their own thing. Your Sales team might receive feedback from prospects and stick it in a document. Your Support team might receive feedback from customers and file it away in a spreadsheet. This results in your Product team being left in the dark, and with no way of making data-informed decisions.

We’ve talked a lot about creating a Product Feedback Policy (PFP). A PFP helps explain to your customers and internal teams your approach to product feedback, and provides an outline of the process.

While the PFP outlines the general process at an organizational level, it’ll help you to create a document that explains the process at a team level as well. It needs to go into more detail than the PFP, helping each team to understand the steps they need to take in order to effectively manage feedback.

Think of it as being like an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for your product feedback process.

This SOP will end up slightly different for each team involved in the process, though it will have overlapping steps in many instances.

For each team you need to provide an outline of what they need to do at each stage of the feedback process, and how their actions link to and affect the other teams.

For clarity, we’ll work through what such a process might look like for your Sales team:

• Step 1: A prospect provides you with a piece of feedback.
• Step 2: You should enter the feedback into our central database, making a note of the prospect who requested it. (This then allows our Product team to access and review it.)
• Step 3: The Product team have reviewed the feedback and made a decision. You should inform the prospect of our decision, explaining the reasoning behind it, and encourage them to submit feedback again in future.

As you can see, the steps are clear and simple yet provide a complete depiction of what happens at each stage. They provide actionable advice and they also explain how one team’s actions fit in with the wider process.

By providing each team with their own outline, personalized to them, you’re helping everyone understand the role that they play in your overall product feedback process.

Do this for each of your teams and it’ll mean everyone understands what they have to do at any particular time or in any situation.

All of these parts will then come together perfectly to form the whole.

Product feedback is everyone’s responsibility, and by creating a Product Feedback Policy and an SOP, you’re ensuring that you manage feedback efficiently and effectively.

Receptive helps leading B2B SaaS companies to build winning products. Why not see what the fuss is about and get started today?