Understand. Decide. Build.

A manifesto for customer-driven teams.

Paul Graham famously coined “Make Something People Want”. Well, if you want to do that you should start listening to People.

Airbnb’s founders had to fly to New York to understand their users and realized the pictures on most offers were not good enough. This is a famous example of user feedback turning into good product decision. You most probably can’t fly to see all your clients, that’s why you use online tools to get insights from them.

To build a sustainable business you need more than efficient product processes. You have to constantly be listening to and adapting to user needs, shipping new features to keep a competitive position in your market.

We previously experienced the pain of gathering user feedback through several tools. It led us to build Gitscout to channel GitHub feedback. We then realized we needed a wider net to catch feedback from all sources.

So we built Draft.

At Draft we are changing the way you make product decisions that have a positive impact and fit your business. We believe that Product Managers need a single space to simplify their workflow and make sure users are always at the center of their decision-making.

Listen 👂

Your approach to your customers is a reflection of your company’s mission. It’s not just about product-market fit, but positioning, marketing and sales. A customer-centric ethos will keep your entire company focused on building the best, most useful product it can.

– Hiten Shah, Product Habits

Listening to this feedback as it comes in from different sources (your users, other teams within your company…) is important. Making sense of it should be mission-critical.

Draft helps you manage feedback in a simple unified Inbox. From there you can easily highlight parts of the conversation to turn them into tasks that shape your roadmap and align it with user needs.

Draft integrates the tools you already use like Intercom, Zendesk, Github and many more…so getting set up is easy, and you’ll never miss important information.

From conversation 💬 to production 🚀

If you want to sprint, it might as well be in the right direction.

While building Gitscout and in our previous experiences we regularly shipped features, even though coming from user requests, but without really prioritizing them. And we eventually ended up putting a lot of effort on features which were not necessarily urgent.

That’s why it’s important to prioritize and plan which tasks would have the most impact on your product.

This will help you focus on the work that needs to be done first. Organizing your user requests clearly helps define where your team needs to put their effort to have the best impact on your business.

With Draft you can easily turn user feedback into tasks. Draft allows you to arrange tasks using a formula that calculates the most impactful features, weighted by effort, letting you easily prioritize and organize your roadmap visually. Having people’s comments on your product linked to a task helps your team build better features and drives their decisions according to user needs.

Draft also provides the option for you to share a public version of your roadmap with your users, giving them an overview of when you’ll be shipping the features they requested.

Closing the loop with your users 🤜🤛

Once you have released a bug fix or a feature request from your users, communicating with them is important. Sending users a message to show you appreciated their feedback and acted on it will reinforce the bond between them and your product.

Communicating what’s new in your product within the rest of your company — just as with your users — is vital. Don’t miss the opportunity to give your marketing and sales teams visibility into what is shipping so that they can activate users.

Many teams assume that when they release a new, better feature that people will use it and like it. At the same time, habits are not always easy to change even if it is for the better. Miscommunication about those changes is very often the reason users will bash change. Upending your users’ habits by springing updates on them in this way can end up creating a bad public image for your company, so you should probably avoid doing this. 😉

With Draft, everyone in your organization is able to follow what’s happening with the product team in real time. Draft automatically generates a weekly report that’s shareable in one click so you can keep your stakeholders in the loop.

Meet Draft

The first Customer Driven Product Management platform.

With Draft you can collect feedback from different sources, qualify it in seconds, have a clear overview of what needs to be done and communicate internally and externally on what has been shipped.

We are very happy to announce that we are opening our private beta. If you think that Draft’s vision is going to impact how people build products, please share this article.

Also, feel free to hit me up at adrien@usedraft.co if you want to learn more about what we are doing at Draft or request early access on our website.