Achieving effectiveness (part 2): turning Feedback into Insight
Achieving effectiveness (part 2): turning Feedback into Insight
In this second instalment of the series on Product Effectiveness, we focus on the process for turning Feedback into Insight
Back in May I wrote about the need for companies to build what they should, rather than what they want to. The “should” being defined as the stuff that your customers want you to build, not your VP of Product (as great as they might be). The argument is that through the Journey-led method, you help teams know what is important to the customer now, know how their role evolves along the full journey, and they know how to prioritise their work.
This all sounds great but it relies on a crucial bit of process… that’s creating a feedback loop form the market into the business. All the best companies I have worked at do this. Those that don’t, take a hit, or a thousand.
Turning customer feedback, into Insight
At TheyDo we have developed a crucial bit of process to help us answer market needs effectively. Here is what it is:
Why We Do It
In any customer-facing industry, feedback is an essential element of improving the product and refining the business strategy. We recognise the need to structure a process for actioning feedback, but the constant influx of ad hoc feedback on a wide variety of topics (such as product features, user motivations, usability, product experience) presents a challenge. Without a structured process, feedback becomes difficult to analyse, prioritise, and turn into actionable insights. To address this problem, at TheyDo we designed a customer feedback loop engine to streamline the process and maximise the value derived from customer feedback.
What We Do
Standardise the Feedback format
Feedback comes in various forms from different sources, including product reviews, market research, user testing, sales calls, and support tickets. We standardise this. (More on the how we standardise, in the next section)
Create the channels for submission
Team operate in various platforms, and not everyone has access to the platform the Product team will ultimately use. To this end what we do is create a few emails to submit to, and templates to fill out. The instructions live in a Notion portal to ensure everyone has easy access to the submission channels.
Agree on a way to process the Feedback and validate as Insights
Before we even began the whole project, we agreed on what is “feedback” and what is an “insight.” We do love definitions, as they are crucial for communication and decision-making. We agreed also on what steps we take to sift through and synthesise.
Dedicate the time to process
Our Product team dedicates a bit of time every week to go through the feedback, and process it. This should be planned, it is not an ad hoc endeavour.
How We Do It
TheyDo operationalizes the feedback loop through a three-stage process:
Feedback Submission: The feedback collected from different channels such as the Enablement Team, Sales Team, and TheyDo broader Team is submitted to the ProductBoard via notes or email. All submissions must identify the company and client and use the HS snippet template.
To ensure that the feedback is useful, it has to adhere to certain guidelines.
First, it should focus on the 'why' behind a particular occurrence or issue, then reflect on the root cause of the problem.
The feedback needs to be succinct and avoid being too feature-focused, vague, verbose, or opinion-based.
Each feedback instance is logged separately, avoiding blanket feedback for multiple clients or instances.
Feedback Processing: The Product Team reviews the feedback weekly. This feedback is synthesised and prioritised based on
the number of customers it pertains to,
the number of instances, and
its importance weight score.
Once prioritized, the insights are grouped into high-level themes and tagged to relevant existing or planned features.
Insight Action: Decisions on when to address feedback are made based on the fit with priority work and the current development cycle. Insights are then populated in TheyDo’s Journeys on a weekly basis. Those populated Insights are validated insights anyone in the company can work from.
Post-processing, the feedback status can be seen on Product Board. The TheyDo team can see new insights in the Core Journeys and the roadmap that the Product Team works from.
Hope this is useful, and as always if you have questions, you can find me on LinkedIn. For those in London, we have began to do intimate meet ups: groups of 5-7 people across everything Biz Ops (RevOps, FinOps, Partnerships, Business Analytics, or other criss cross of a Strategy and Ops roles) get together and… chat. The next meet up will be August 15th, 6pm, Fitzrovia. If you would like to join us, please apply for a spot through this form.