Where does your customer feedback go?

Oliver Jack Dean Dec 2, 2022

I’m going to fire a question out there, which may hurt.

How much customer feedback do you integrate into your Product Roadmap?

Where am I going with this?

Let me paint a well-known picture. You are a product team, spinning up new ideas all the time. The team is in multiplayer mode. It’s going well.

It’s exhilarating when you’re in the very early stage of building a V1 product.

But there is one mistake many tend to make.

As one foot is placed in front of the other, many bypasses using customer feedback.

Why so?

Well, there are many reasons.

But it is strange. Because customer feedback will obtain your first ten customers, then the next 20 customers and so on.

Product Market Fit

Well, no, let me rephrase that. My bad.

Customer retention is the biggest challenge of any product team spinning up a V1 product.

Right, it’s the “how to make sure the early-door customers we have stuck around?” problem.

So, why does this appear to be a bottleneck for many?

Well, once you have those 10 - 20 customers, then for you as a product team and business, this is the moment when - “what work you prioritise” becomes precisely what it takes to ensure customers adopt the product and buy the product more. So, in short, you have to listen to customers. And listen carefully and attentively.

Now, I am alluding to the challenges of Product Market Fit.

It’s that tipping point that many product teams face when customer validation counts for everything.

So, again, if you manage to get those 10-20 customers onboarded and they are paying, you want to ensure that your product teams’ ears are open, listening to customers and customer support. Your teams are watching the tickets; they are watching what’s working versus not.

But then, here comes another problem, sales are trying to expand and get more customers in parallel.

So you have to work with sales because they are under competitive pressure.

You have to catch up with competitors on some features as well.

Hence, you must win enough in the market to get enough revenue and prioritise that simultaneously.

Conundrum!

All of a sudden, product teams start moving in multiple directions.

Then so those the sales, legal and marketing. All these different product growth dimensions start to overlap.

Actually, I like the analogy that the French digital Healthcare Insurance provider Alan used in the following article.

In particular, they mention the following dimensions always emerge:

[Product-led] product has always been at the core of our strategy, and we have achieved product-led growth, especially in Tech companies.
[Sales-led] Now have 100+ Sales in 3 countries, our front line in accelerating on core segments and also penetrating new markets (Spain, Belgium, Enterprise, Wholesale, Manufacturing, Retail)
[B2B-led] As a B2B business (we sell our product to companies), marketing is key to generating leads and nurturing them — before handing them off to sales.
[B2B2C-led] As a B2B2C business (our end-users are employees being reimbursed and using our health services, and HRs using our tools daily), marketing is also key to understanding the users’ pain points, convincing them, engaging them and turning them into ambassadors [via] [customer-led].

In fact, please go and read their article; it’s much better than mine.

Anyway, after listening to others carefully over the years, three key questions become entangled.

You know, it’s the:

What do we need to win more revenue today?
What do we need to keep our customers happy?
What do we need to win more revenue two years from now?

And in reality, balancing all three things takes balls of steel and hard work.

“But we have the Scrum Framework”...

What? Sorry?

“Yeah, the Scrum Framework and Agile methodologies, right? That will help us balance these challenges”.

Come again?

Well, there always appears to be a tug and pull between, focusing on the “right” type of problem to “solve” for the greater good of product growth vs scaling the product in multiple different directions.

So, solving the correct problems is key if you want to succeed long term.

Luckily for many, the Scrum framework emphasises the use of measurement to make decisions.

And this is great for us. So, yeah, that guy in the room who told us about Scrum earlier was correct.

Well, in principle.

Scrum is great at enabling product teams to measure the value being produced (holistically) and weigh the value against the cost of producing it.

So, in theory, Scrum is all about measuring the value of what is going on.

It’s easy to measure how busy people are, right? It’s easy to get multiple people working on doing everything and anything. I even do it when I get bored.

And here, we see again that many companies don’t measure value very well.

What companies or product teams do measure well is the effort that goes into creating value.

But they miss out on making sure it’s an effort that produces great uncontestable customer business value.

Now don’t shoot my brains out here.

What I am talking about is a very complex topic.

If you think about it, this problem of measuring progress meaningfully and scaling products in parallel at neck-breaking speed is freaking hard.

Epecially, for super large mega organisations with dozens of products. The list goes on, from understanding how best to invest capital to belt-tightening costs all the way into product team productivity. Etc.

BUT there are a few tips and tricks. And people may be misunderstanding Scrum.

Here comes the Scrum ☀️

So, as you are evolving away, V1 product shipped, and those few early worm customers are onboarded, you still feel like things need to become more stable.

Now there are a few ways to move forward from this position.

You might want to do what Slack do and give away services for free - following a “give-it-away until they max out storage” growth strategy.

You may want to lock in users early instead, asking them to start paying on the spot because you genuinely believe your product is the bee’s knees.

But let’s bring it back to basics.

With Scrum, you have an excellent opportunity to emphasise operationally and organisationally how to focus on growing your product and balancing customer retention properly.

How? As mentioned, Scrum is about making decisions based on empirical facts, and customer feedback is a great way to establish the defacto facts.

Scrum, if used carefully, is a great way to make your product roadmaps laser focused on customer feedback. But in hindsight, you must ensure that the chain link is in place from the beginning.

Team Topologies are Evolving

As a company and product team, you may need to establish smaller pods, think about how you take action and prioritise them damn backlogs.

So, it’s about onboarding all these different teams and squads, and building bridges between them using one common framework.

From here, training and grooming a backlog aligned with what customers are saying on the frontline.

Now, this is tricky, but if you can figure out a way to parse customer feedback through all the aforementioned dimensions of Sales, Marketing, and Product-led growth, you are onto a home run.

Now, it’s about getting consensus and agreement on what to focus on across those dimensions just mentioned.

To get your sales team, visual designers and engineers to agree on what makes sense, you must ensure you communicate to the decision-makers - why such customer feedback matters and the overall return on value.

If you can’t do that, the product roadmap never takes off because the customer feedback identified or the research you’ve parsed doesn’t get the visibility or attention required from the decision-makers.

So you almost have to create a new evangelical pre-sales team. Which, in big tech companies, in particular SaaS companies, has started to take off. And for a good reason.

Think of this new team as a sidecar next to you and the sales, marketing and product teams. The idea would be to ensure that backlog has a steady stream of customer feedback being parsed, curated and integrated. They provide a feedback loop between teams that is watertight.

The pre-sales or customer-feedback team moves in parallel to help unearth real value from customers and get the visibility needed internally to ensure decision-makers are seeing real value earlier rather than later.

Now, I am aware that this more or less overlaps with “customer success” and SalesOps or ExOps. And no doubt it does. As I said, big tech and SaaS companies are already onto this, but not many have figured out how to thread the “red string of wool” through all the dimensions mentioned above.

The good news is that startups and smaller companies have an excellent opportunity to establish universal cultural values and objectives that will set them up for long-term success if they can figure out this Scrum-like operational model early on. It's tricky stuff. But I have no doubt.