When Product Managers Should Listen to Their Users

In Product Management, we are constantly working on building products that solve our users’ problems. However, consumers don't want companies to just provide products; they want to have a personal connection to the organization they give money to. The demand for a continuing exchange between buyer and seller even after signing a contract is on the rise. And companies, as well as customers, love it.

The benefit of exchanging feedback for features is clear to both parties. You give, and you get. However, since this level of customer-centricity seems to be a fairly new phenomenon for many companies, there are no clear rules for the game yet, especially when it comes to saying no to feedback or feature suggestions.

Just because it seems to be new to some companies does not automatically mean that's the case for everyone. I have come across many companies that know exactly what they are doing when it comes to feedback management. But for every company that thrives in this area, there are five that struggle. Even though some of those try their best to be customer-centric and ask for customer validation, they still can't seem to build the successful product they aim for.

But why?

What are common struggles regarding product feedback?

Every PM has once in their career come across customer product feedback in some way. And all of us have probably been faced with one common problem: the quality of the feedback.

Customers sometimes struggle with calling a spade a spade. However, it is our job as product managers to find out what they want. It is not the fault of our clients that they can not explain our product back to us. Rather it is ours because we have not explained it well enough.

To overcome the struggle of "low-quality feedback" it is essential to engage with your customers. This can happen on multiple channels. While some companies validate through customer interviews, others might use email surveys. The pros and cons of each channel typically become clear after the process is set up, which often is too late if the cons exceed the pros. In my experience, the most helpful way to engage with your customers while offering them one central space to share their ideas or issues is by using a product feedback management tool. I have worked with tools like Userwell and Feature Upvote.

If you receive feedback that doesn't offer the depth of insight you are looking for you will simply have to dig deeper. This can best be achieved by asking the 5 w's - who, why, what, when, and where.

When you should actively listen

The thing is, you should always listen to your customers. Provide them with a way of communicating their ideas but also issues with your product. However, offering to listen to them does not oblige you to act on all the feedback you receive. And believe me, there is a lot of feedback you will have to look past, either for the moment or for good. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First, let us take a closer look at the feedback that deserves a lot of attention and also how you can engage your customers to provide you with such quality feedback.

Validating your product roadmap

Here's the thing. Your customers are not responsible for finding solutions for their problems. You are. And the solutions you want to build make up your product road map. Justifying your ideas and decisions to team members or other stakeholders can be difficult and frustrating. Viable feedback data can help you overcome this obstacle. This is where you should listen to your customers.

Validate your roadmap by aligning your ideas with your customers' feedback. If you have viable data that shows that your customers want and need those updates, you can justify the importance of your roadmap without breaking a sweat.

However, you must have a plan or vision that you are following. Adding features without a clear game plan just because your customers think they need them can be the downfall of your product. Custom-tailored features, no matter how robustly executed, will have a hard time scaling. And suddenly you are the manager of a product with no clear strategy and direction.

High frequency of requests

Sometimes it's tricky to connect the dots. While you might have received the same feedback or feature request multiple times, it isn't always that clear. Maybe your customers have different use cases that lead to the same problem, or the description of the requests differs, but in the end, they can be solved with one feature.

Of course, sometimes it is clear as day, that multiple customers want the same thing. Either way, this is the time to look closely and listen to your customers. Even if your roadmap does not have a milestone designated to the topic, you might want to keep it in mind further down the road. In order to successfully integrate such requests, you must have a process in place for collecting feedback and acting on it. If you are just starting with collecting product feedback, here you can find a good introduction to the feedback management loop.

When you shouldn't listen

If it isn't clear by now, not listening does not mean that you should not offer your customers the possibility to voice their concerns or ideas. It just means that now and then, there will be feedback that just will not get you anywhere.

I used to work for a company offering an applicant tracking system. One of our biggest and long-term customers, a bank, requested that candidates should be able to give feedback about the application process to the company. This was in the early days of our product. It was important for us to hold this big client and make them happy. Since the idea itself did align with our vision for the product we decided to go ahead and build the feature for our client. The only problem was, we hand-weaved the solution. In the end, we could not use it for any other client since it was too specific for this bank. And the client realized their candidates would not use the feature either.

On the other hand, we had a lot of small customers, one-person recruiters. After a while, it became clear that this segment wasn't just looking for an ATS but rather a CRM light. Since this was a request that reached us quite frequently and even encountered us in sales pitches, we had to consider if we wanted to implement this or not.

We as a company prided ourselves on being customer-centric and always open for user feedback. But now, we found ourselves in a pinch. While we appreciated the feedback and wanted our customers to be happy, the suggested features did not fall in line with our product vision. In the end, we decided to stay true to our vision and did not go through with the request. This, of course had its consequences. But for us, it still paid off.

I am sure every PM has stories like that. Sometimes you go through with a request and sometimes you don't, but when is it actually unwise to listen to your customers' feedback?

• When you want to grow your current product.
• When the requests don’t align with your vision.
• When you are looking to innovate with a new concept.
• When you want to surprise your customers with something unexpected.
• When you want to challenge the norm.
• If you are a startup on the verge of explosive growth.
• When there are only a few loud voices, don't let the noise fool you.

Organize your feedback

One last piece of advice I want to give you on your way is to organize your feedback. While this might seem obvious, I know from experience that many companies might think their feedback is organized but believe me - it probably isn’t. There are so many channels that feedback can reach you from, like other departments, social media, rating platforms, and so on.

If you really want to be a customer-centric company and rely on customer feedback for your decision-making process, you need to step up your game and get all the feedback in one central place. If you don’t have the time to get your hands dirty, there are plenty of tools to help you with your product feedback management. However you choose to go on with it, it will help you and your company save resources in the long run.