Why I love bad product reviews
After a lot of research, sketching, grooming, planning, prioritization and development, you finally got your product out of the door. Good job! Now you just chill, be praised as the ingenious mind that is changing people’s lives for the better and go to the next thing, correct? Well, not exactly…
Let’s say you start checking the reviews for your product when you face some nasty comments such as “this app sucks, I can’t find anything” or “there are so many bells and whistles in this app that I really don’t know where to start using it”. Does this means that all the effort and passion you employed on your product it’s not worth it? How to better handle bad reviews?
After spending a good time reading reviews on products I work on as well as randomly looking for product reviews on both Apple Store, Google Play and Amazon (BTW, there are reviews there that are pure gold!) I started identifying patterns among comments and features offered by a product and realized a few things about bad reviews that are not new but always good to remember:
5-stars reviews are awesome, but you will hardly learn anything from it: when you read good reviews about your product the only lesson you take from them is that you have done a good prediction and honored your promise of delivering value to them. It is pretty rare to find 5-stars comments with a nugget of advice on how to make your product even better. The common scenario is to have people saying they love your product, how could they live before it existed and things like that. Of course, it is always rewarding reading good reviews because they make all your efforts pay-off, but that’s all.
The more they complain, more they care about your product: I can’t recall when I learned first time the term “improvement opportunities” but I have to say that this is the way I see all problems in life. When I’m reviewing feedback I go first to the bad reviews and if I see a consistent pattern of complains for the data sample I’m reviewing, I go back to the app to try to understand whats going on. Say users are complaning they cannot find a specific information your product says they should see. The first couple things that ring a bell to me are about my user journey (“how easy/difficult it is to get to the information”) or configuration (“how easy/difficult the product setup is”).
Users wish things: there will be comments asking for features you never thought of or, if you did, you discarded because it was not part of your product’s vision. I already got comments where users stated the product I was working on would be some much better if it had a feature that already belongs to another product of our portfolio. A little incentive towards product canibalism… :-)
When your head is too busy researching and planning for new stuff, user feedback is your best assistant to identify gaps or enhancements that will increase the value your product or feature brings to users. Due to it, I have these actions as part of my Product Management mantra:
Treat feedback analysis as an hygiene task: the same way you brush your teeth everyday, you need to create the habbit of checking user feedback. The more often you can do this exercise, smaller the data sets to analyze and easier to identify patterns.
Aim for the bad reviews: since you want to learn something, focus on potential gaps and opportunities to enhance your feature.
(re)Think about your product’s goal at all times: don’t think that because you see a trend on a missing feature of your product that you need to build it. Always revisit your vision and focus to only address things that are directly related to the problem your product is trying to solve.
If these activities are already part of your routine to keep delivering awesome products, great! If not, give it a try, add or remove stuff, share your findings. Most importantly, learn and share.
