How to integrate your user feedback in your product sprint.
Our experience from Gitscout to Draft.
Last year, we shipped Gitscout, a beautiful GitHub Issues experience for macOS. Gitscout’s goal was to simplify how teams work together.
We launched it on ProductHunt in December 2016. After three months, we gathered 4,000+ users from renowned companies such as Stripe, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba, GitHub, Intercom, Shopify, Sketch, Framer, Algolia, Baidu, Heroku, Basecamp, Docker and many more.
And for sure, we received a lot of feedback from our users… 😅
Our process to handle user feedback.
Our process back then was to let users open issues on a dedicated repository, so we could use Gitscout to gather feedback and bug reports on Gitscout. 😎
Being able to browse all our feedback and all our tasks in the same app changed a lot the way we used to build products in our past experiences.
From there, we essentially had to copy-paste a summary of those issues to the appropriate private repository (“api” or “client”) so we could assign them and set milestones. This way, we made sure we’d treat them and ship them on time for the next release.
This was also helpful to get back to our users to announce our fixes and new features.
Thanks to this workflow we released 10+ different versions and closed 100+ issues opened by the community. (Thanks again people! ❤️)
Your user feedback is the key to build a product people love.
Having users in the loop during every step of our product development was a big chance: our users loved our product. 😍
We really loved this workflow because it was making us so much more productive and building features for your users is much more fulfilling than following a roadmap fixed months in advance.
It’s not just about GitHub.
As much as we love GitHub it doesn’t necessarily fit other teams workflow.
There are a lot of tools to gather feedback (and actually more and more) and there are a lot of tools to manage your sprints.
Switching a whole team to a new tool is quite hard. That’s why we built Draft as a platform to handle your whole Product Management process in one tool, but tightly integrated with the other solutions your teams are already working with.
Customer support still happens on Intercom, Zendesk, Frontapp, you name it, and your development workflow still happens on GitHub, JIRA, or whatever tool you’re the most comfortable with.
In that sense, Draft is a bridge between Customer Support and Product Development, helping you understand better your user needs.
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 jeremy@usedraft.co if you want to learn more about what we are doing at Draft or request early access on our website.
