Building Feedback Loops at Early Stages of Product Development

As product leaders, we always seek feedback from clients, partners, and investors. However, it can be tricky and time-consuming even for experienced ones. In this article, I will explore the feedback management process: where to start and how to get better at it.

Get your mindset right

I prefer to think about the ideal feedback process in terms of a loop. That said, if you set up this process correctly across all stakeholders, you shouldn’t have any dead ends.

Here is an excerpt from “Universal Principles of Design” that should give you a better understanding of the power of loop-based processes:

Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. When reactions loop back to affect themselves, a feedback loop is created. All real-world systems are composed of many such interacting feedback loops — animals, machines, businesses, and ecosystems, to name a few. There are two types of feedback loops: positive and negative. Positive feedback amplifies system output, resulting in growth or decline. Negative feedback dampers output, stabilizes the system around an equilibrium point.

1. Starting with a feedback culture

The best starting point is your company’s feedback culture. To find out whether you have any, ask yourself a few questions: How involved are different teams in actual testing and reporting on the product usage? Are there processes that allow your colleagues to gather and share feedback about the product? What is the average awareness in terms of feedback gathering from users, and is there a process of encouraging that?

If a feedback culture is a part of the company’s principles, it will simplify the process. However, if it doesn’t, you may need to work with the C-level first to get to the same page about the importance of establishing a proper process.

Next, you need to work with the rest employees. Everyone working in the product company should understand that it’s not only the product team who should bother about feedback and it’s not only the feedback of product users that is relevant. As a product leader, you should encourage everyone to test and give feedback and then ask their circle to do the same.

Then, you need to ensure that product, support, and business development teams each have a procedure for gathering data and sharing it with other teams. This is an essential part of work, and the job of product leaders is to initiate this process if it’s not yet in place.

2. Listening and hearing to the needs of your stakeholders

Before you start building anything, engage with your potential audience. You don’t need to create an MVP or a prototype to begin conversations with your target audience. Find people you aim to serve with your product and consider how you can benefit them from the outset. Encourage ongoing communication that provides value to them (e.g. sharing relevant resources or contacts if you identify their current challenges).

By the time you launch your product, you should have a clear plan for your feedback loops, at least for the initial iteration. Categorize your users and use different communication channels for each group. Be prepared for iterative work, but don’t launch without a testable feedback process from the start.

Consider your feedback loop as one of the product components that you need to iterate on at every development stage. This means constantly testing channels, language, timing, and your overall approach to communicating with beneficiaries.

3. Continuously collecting data

Start tracking your customers’ behavior from the moment you introduce your landing page and MVP. Resist the temptation to say, “We’re too early to track anything. We don’t have enough data. Let’s keep building for now.” This approach leads to actual difficulties when you finally decide to implement tracking.

Establish a robust analytics environment. It will pay off. Even if you have financial constraints, there are various startup programs offered by product analytics companies that will help you stay on budget. Develop a habit of analyzing data and making sense of it from start and never release anything without a piece of functionality that will tell you about its usage.

Later, use behavioral data to initiate conversations with your audience. You can learn about features they use most frequently and paths they take to achieve their goals within your product. This information will help you make suggestions and predictions, providing a solid foundation for further discussions with the right people.

4. Empathizing with your people

Some product teams leave users to figure out the value of their product completely on their own, while others become overly intrusive, annoying users at every step.

Finding a balance is crucial. Start with the clear communication about the core value of your product. Your goal is to create the most user-friendly path for users to get what they pay for or intend to pay for.

You can employ various methods, such as tips, a help center, chat support, etc. to crystalize the product paths to the core value. There is no one-size-fits-all formula, but you can refine your approach by tracking how users interact with your support and get better.

Be aware that some team members may resist this approach since they may prefer to keep building stuff. However, as a product leader, you have a responsibility to make sure the team sticks to the essential direction.

5. Developing what users want, not what you want

There is a common trap for founders who become overly involved in the product’s functionality: at some point, they start assuming they know what their users want. In most cases, they don’t. To avoid investing substantial resources in something useless for 95% of your users, be conscious of your biases.

Don’t rely solely on your intuition. While it’s acceptable to come up with hypotheses based on your gut feeling, major product decisions should be grounded in reality.

The rule to remember is that if you haven’t learned something from users (through methods like customer interviews, in-depth market analysis, customer surveys, or behavioral analysis) you don’t truly know. Take time to understand the actual state of your audience.

In Conclusion

Establishing a feedback process is all about building relationships with your stakeholders: clients, partners, investors, and colleagues. These relationships don’t develop on their own, and they don’t mature quickly.

However, when product teams understand the importance, they can make good progress right from the start. Begin with your internal feedback processes, set up basic data gathering and analysis, and keep iterating. If there were any guarantees of success in the product world, they would be built on this foundation.