Wantoo Pro Tips
How to Take Action on Customer Feedback
Good product teams are passionate about what they build, and are of course product experts. Great product teams realize that their customers are the true use-case experts. Your customer base is larger than your product team, and using a product in the wild will always surface insights unforeseen in an in-house testing environment.
This is one of the main reasons why feedback matters so much, and why the best product managers are building bridges between their teams and their users. We’ve written in the past about why gathering feedback is so crucial to agile development, so we’ll just assume that you’re on the same page. What you might be wondering is, “Okay, but now what? How do I actually turn feedback into an agile strategy?”
The key to making feedback actionable lies in how you and your team prioritize it. This may (and indeed should) be informed by how popular an idea is with your users.
But your team has other criteria — and constraints — that must be taken into account. This can include time crunches, technical debt, upcoming features that you’ve kept under your hat, and so on. Fortunately, Wantoo provides you with tools that help you shape the conversation around your roadmap as easy as gathering all those ideas in the first place.
Ideas on the Move
Go into Idea Management mode, where you’ll see each idea, along with how many votes it has, displayed as a card. These cards can be dragged and dropped into columns that denote an idea’s status. Within each status, cards can be moved up and down to denote priority.
This is what it looks like:
You can have Status columns for the basics like Planned, Not Planned, and Completed; as well as statuses such as In Progress, Under Review, Maybe Later, or whatever you and your team find useful internally and in terms of communicating with your users… because Wantoo lets you automatically communicate with your users. Yeah. As you and your team move an idea into a new status, that idea’s supporters are alerted via email.
As you drop an idea into an actionable columns and start prioritizing it, you can develop it through conversation with your team, as well as with the customers who support that idea.
When the Answer isn’t ‘Yes’
Since you can’t build everything right this second, Sometimes the answer has to be “No”.
We understand how disappointing that can be for everyone, so we made the process as painless as possible. Managing expectations is part and parcel of product management, and Wantoo helps you out.
You can mute certain Status columns, so that ideas moved into them no longer generate automated updates, thus gracefully removing them from the conversation.
The key to making feedback actionable lies in smoothly transitioning from user feedback to product-team ideation. To unlock your agile potential, you need a collaborative mindset, the bravery to make decisions, and of course the right tools for the job.
About Wantoo
Wantoo is a simple, powerful cloud-based platform that makes it easy to listen, analyze, and act on feedback from your team, your customers, or anyone else. For more information, visit wantoo.io.
