Deciding what customer feedback is important (and what isn’t)
The problem when gathering customer feedback
Long before you have customers, they have problems that need solving. And when you talk to these customers, a wonderful five step process happens. You learn about their problems, you devise a solution, you show then a prototype or an MVP, you win them over to your new way of thinking and you profit handsomely. Startups are really quite simple when you think about it.
Except they’re not. Why not? Two problems. The first? Customers often give feedback that is contradictory and hard to work with. It’s not their fault. They normally don’t have the experience needed to explain their challenges using the language you use. They ask for things that aren’t technically feasible. They are fuzzy about the difference between what is nice to have and what is truly valuable. They can’t envision a world with your new product. They don’t equate value with cost and misguide you on how much they would really be happy to pay. All this feedback can lead you in the wrong direction.
The first problem comes after the customers conversations. It happens when you round up all the useful feedback and find some useful patterns to share with your team. The second problem is, the feedback often doesn’t vibe with *that person’s* take on the direction the business should go. Maybe it’s too risky a technical challenge. Maybe delivering the solution your customer has requested is impossible given your business model. It’s one thing listening to what a customer says they want, it’s another thing entirely understanding and delivering the right solution.
So how do you break it all down? Here are some of the approaches that I use when filtering and prioritising your company roadmap based on user feedback.
Know your business model
If you are targeting a small number of customers that are worth tens of millions of dollars every year, you’ll probably be required to provide them 24 hours support, on-site training, uptime guarantees and a host of other benefits.
Conversely, if the value of your customer is just a few dollars and your are aiming for a billion users, no individual customer should control your roadmap — your roadmap has to be aggregated and data driven. You will have to automate all sales, advertising and customer support too.
In my experience, customers are generally ok when you tell them you can’t provide them a certain solution as your business model doesn’t support it (effectively — they aren’t paying enough), and they often appreciate the honesty and candor when this is communicated clearly.
In any case, any customer requests that don’t fit the business model requires you to pivot your business model first (frequently resulting in the need to alter the structure and hiring strategy of your company), or move the requests out of the roadmap.
Don’t alter your roadmap easily
Often a customer will promise to buy your product as soon as you implement that one key feature that is super important to them. The pressure to change your roadmap is intense. Having a super important big name customer will be the most important milestone since you incorporated. They love you and they are going to help you out in ways you can’t imagine yet — all because they are as excited about the product as you are.
It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of pleasing a big customer without realising you are sacrificing your best chance of growth. It can be hard to say no, but deals like this can also lead you completely down a one way rabbit hole. A big company can ask freely without commitment, but in the end they leave you chasing an empty promise of future revenue.
A good solution to this dilemma is to ask your customer if they are prepared to pay to prioritise the features on your roadmap.
If they agree, you can grow your team to accommodate them. If not, the feature probably wasn’t really that important to them in the first place. Either way, you’ll know whether there is a real customer waiting for you on the other side of the table.
Don’t offer exclusive access to new features
Certain customers are also evil for asking for bespoke features that are only accessible to them (either permanently or for a certain duration). This is something you should almost always say no to. It is rare that a feature is useful to one customer but won’t be wanted by others in the future too. You’ll end up sacrificing long term growth for short term gains this way.
If you do choose to go down this path, know that you’ll also magically and immediately double your maintenance costs and effectively turn yourself into a consulting company rather than a scalable product company. No matter what happens, never duplicate your code base to support one specific customer.
Pick the right order for your roadmap
If everything goes well and you listen to your customers for long enough, your roadmap will balloon to epic proportions. This is normal and healthy. It’s worth recognising at this stage that only the top 10% of your roadmap will likely ever get completed — new ideas and priorities will always continue to expand the roadmap as you grow. This is why learning to say no and to prioritise your roadmap using some of the tips above is so important to keeping you focused on your path to success.
Once your customer feedback starts to repeat itself from multiple sources, prioritising the research you have done by adding it into your roadmap is the final step in makes sure that the most important revenue generating features reach the top. The right roadmap for your company is the one that places the fastest path to growth first at all times.
Listen to customers not users
The simplest rule of listening to customers is this: Understand where in their journey your customers are at before deciding whether to listen to their input.
Users who are not paying customers offer great feature ideas. These users expand your roadmap and allow you to acquire customers in new niches but don’t guarantee (or even lead proportionately) to extra sales.
Users who are paying customers want existing features to work better. These people pay the bills and are your most important segment. Keeping them happy will help solidify your existing revenue base.
Users who have stopped using your product can give the best insights into bugs, issues and the state of the competition. Talking to these people will help you reduce churn and improve the long term value of your remaining customers (plus you can always win a few of them back).
Decide what metric you want to improve and focus on those customers.
Final tip
For my team, I always suggest we evaluate our growth and efficiency over a 6 month timeframe. It helps resolve any disagreements about long vs short term growth goals and allows us to effectively balance improvements like code refactoring, customer features and short term growth hacks like offers and discounts within the same product and marketing teams.
About the Author
Dave Kearney
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kearneydave
Dave is the founder and CEO of Fluid UI — a web and mobile prototyping tool that helps founders create prototypes in minutes. He loves expressing excessive levels of disgust at minor user experience foibles but is otherwise a generally pleasant person.
