Listen While You Lead
7 Tips On How To Use Product Feedback To Succeed
As founders, we make tough decisions all day long about the future of our products and companies, often relying on gut instinct in an extremely fast-paced environment. We’re doomed if we don’t project strength. If we don’t have all the answers in the boardroom or when we’re pitching, we risk losing out to our more confident competitors, who appear more trustworthy to investors.
On the other hand, we know that feedback and reflection define the ultimate path to success in creating a user-centric product that customers will actually pay for.
I know how hard it can be to stay true to my vision and not get derailed by every piece of feedback. I do my best to invite comments and listen carefully. Criticism, even when constructive, can trigger an emotional response that’s often counter-productive. Good feedback feels great, and can be motivating, but it isn’t always helpful in the long run, particularly when it’s not reflective of the target customer. Negative feedback is the worst of all. People quit their jobs over sub-par performance reviews, or they throw in the towel and stop doing quality work. So we don’t always seek out constructive criticism. Nor for that matter do many new entrepreneurs. This is a mistake.
The goal is to hold onto a bold vision for your product while incorporating the best user insights in a structured, iterative process. Consider Steve Jobs, a visionary entrepreneur who let the user inform his design, in a classic example of design thinking. Henry Ford claimed that users don’t know what they want — which may be true, if we’re asking the wrong question. That’s why the ability to carefully ask the right questions and listen attentively to the answers is as vital to a successful entrepreneur as standing in the boardroom and exuding confidence.
I would even venture to say that as female entrepreneurs we’re uniquely qualified to do so.
Women know how to listen. That’s so true it’s a cliché. It’s certainly been well researched. But your true competitive advantage comes when you take that valuable, innate ability to seek out key insights and stamp your product with your vision and leadership. Women will lead in this emerging product development methodology because we’re born to nurture. Now, as founders, we can marry that with the clout of being the boss.
Here are some tips to crafting a productive feedback loop.
Gather feedback early and often.
Let’s start with branding. Before you create all the marketing materials and branding tie-ins, make sure the name isn’t a complete fail. This applies to product development as well. Before you get too deep into the process or too attached to an idea, gather some data. The sooner you get people engaged who are potential users and even non-users, the better the MVP (Minimal Viable Product). You’ll save money and create a better product in the long run if you don’t waste time and effort on something that clearly misses the mark.
There’s a time and a place.
Be careful about how you get feedback. You need to know which criticism to respond to, when it’s objective and genuine, and how to apply it to make changes. Control the forum, the format, and the actual guidelines for how to get the most effective input.
- Sites like usertesting.com and steadfast.io can streamline the logistics of recruiting participants, running tests, and collecting insights.
- Feedback forms, surveys, testimonials and the like are also appropriate tried-and-true approaches.
- If you’ve got a thread going on your social media channel, monitor and curate it. You don’t want an unhappy user going on a public rant and damaging your reputation. Consider a Facebook user testing community to contain testers in one forum.
- Ideally you also dedicate time and resources to in-person UX testing. Sit down with real users, not just your friends or your tech team.
Stay strong.
Try not to take product input too personally. You put your heart and soul into your startup. But remember that this criticism isn’t ultimately about you, or the amount of work you’ve invested, but instead about users expressing how the product might best work for them. Research on women-owned businesses and the gender pay gap, as reported recently in The New York Times, suggests that women women need to “develop a thicker skin.”
“Men tend to shake off rejection more quickly than women,” Sheila Lirio Marcelo, the founder of Care.com said, “but it’s absolutely true that entrepreneurs are made or broken by how they bounce back from adversity.”
Don’t skip the testing stage.
It’s tempting to skimp on the testing stage when you’re excited to deploy your new release and meet project development deadlines. But dedicate time to testing, and you’ll know before your version gets out there that it works for people.
Ask the right users.
Make sure you’re iterating for a variety of use-cases and responding to trends, but don’t get paralyzed trying to please everyone. If you’re creating a product for women, you’d better test on women. But also test on men, and include different demographics. Your product will be more rounded and versatile.
Be a good listener.
You don’t need a personality test to tell you that you’re a natural leader. It’s the core of your being. As you stay true to your idea, your commitment to creating a product you know will make a difference will help you lead your team in doing their best work. But to make a great product you also need to be an anthropologist. Balance your leadership qualities with the skills of a good listener.
Fail forward.
It’s standard fare at a startup conference to hear at least one presentation on lessons learned from failure. These founders didn’t give up when confronted with failure or they wouldn’t be up on the stage celebrating their successes in front an audience. They learned how to pivot.
If you’re intrigued and want to give feedback to six startups seeking feedback, join us on June 15th at Pivotal Labs for Sneak Peek: Behind the Scenes of Startups. We’ll talk about feedback and more, including: How do you tell if you’re building the right thing? When is the best time to ask for feedback? What do I need to do to get to the next stage? You’ll test products and give feedback to our featured founders. It will be a night of fresh innovation, networking, and a good glass of wine … behind the scenes.
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