Connecting “what” and “why” with Pendo Feedback’s new machine learning and roadmapping capabilities

Editor’s note: The Pendo Simon beta and design partner program is now closed.

Like Pendo’s CEO and co-founder, Todd Olson, said during his keynote at Pendomonium last week, “Being product led is how you stay ready for anything.”

Being product led isn’t just a mindset we encourage our customers to embrace in their organizations—it’s also the ethos behind the way we work. It’s listening to what our users say and leveraging their feedback to inspire new functionality. It’s putting the product and customer experience at the center of our culture. And it’s using everything we learn along the way to guide where we’ll focus our efforts next. 

This product-led approach has driven us to create many of the features our users love most about Pendo. And last week, we announced several exciting new initiatives driven by and built for Pendo Feedback—to help our customers get ready, and stay ready, for anything.

Topics and theme extraction with Pendo Simon

There is a lot of data in the world.

We collect over 12 billion events per day in Pendo alone. The average app gets more than 12,000 pieces of customer feedback a year. And companies are spending over 10 hours a week triaging all that incoming feedback.

This information is crucial for helping businesses make the right decisions about where to spend their time and invest their resources. But it also creates a lot of noise, making it tedious to synthesize the data and hard to know where to focus.

In the past, the process for making sense of customer feedback has been a highly manual task. From processing large data sets, to grouping and identifying themes, to tracking trends over time—all the steps involved in analyzing what users think and say about their experiences have fallen on the shoulders of (usually small) voice of the customer (VoC) and customer feedback teams.

We knew we needed to find a scalable way to help our customers evaluate the massive amount of customer data and feedback they are collecting in Pendo Feedback. Some customers even told us that they’ve been hesitant to open Pendo Feedback to external users in an effort to avoid receiving a large influx of user requests. But that misses the whole point of Pendo Feedback. And we want our customers to reap the benefits of receiving direct feedback from their users.

So we turned to machine learning for the answer. Enter, Pendo Simon: our new machine learning engine named after Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winning scientist whose research helped shape the artificial intelligence field. 

The team behind Pendo Simon chose to focus on Pendo Feedback first—leveraging machine learning technology to separate signals from noise, help our customers make sense of all the data living inside their Pendo platform, and mitigate the problem of qualitative data sprawl that often comes hand-in-hand with VoC programs. 

Pendo Simon surfaces topics and themes from the data, streamlining the synthesis process. This gives customers a clear picture of areas within their product with the greatest potential reach or impact, and allows them to easily aggregate and analyze all their feedback data in one place. Pendo Simon turns what was once an overwhelming volume of qualitative data into actionable insights—so you can confidently validate your decisions and help your product and VoC teams efficiently triage massive amounts of user information.

If you’re an existing Pendo customer, contact your CSM to be placed on the early adopters list.

A new way to roadmap in Pendo Feedback

Good roadmaps keep your team aligned and your stakeholders informed about what’s on the horizon for your product. Great roadmaps tell a story about your future vision and why each project on your roadmap matters (and how it will contribute to your goals)—informed by feedback and built on a backbone of behavioral and usage data.

Most roadmaps show the “what,” but don’t paint a clear picture of the “why.” Too often, product teams create something that looks like a beautiful roadmap—but no one really understands why particular features made the cut.

As data becomes an increasingly important driver of product innovation, product teams need to be able to connect the dots between what they’re working on and the impact it will have on the customer experience. In short, you need to be sure that what’s on your roadmap today both reflects the needs of your customers and aligns to your company vision and strategy.

Pendo Feedback brings all your qualitative and quantitative feedback into one system, giving you a clear picture of what’s happening inside your product. This single source of truth creates a powerful library of roadmapping inspiration for your product team to draw from.

Pendo Feedback’s new roadmapping UI includes drag-and-drop functionality to make it easy to organize your roadmap into swimlanes, initiatives, and features. You can even search for specific stakeholder requests in Pendo Feedback to add rich context to any item on your roadmap. And nesting allows you to group related requests under a shared theme. This helps you close the loop and scale communications with users by demonstrating that their requests have been heard, while illustrating the overall value of that item in the roadmap. 

This new roadmapping functionality in Pendo Feedback will be available in closed beta in Q4.

Want to learn more?

Want to see Pendo Feedback in action or learn more about our new machine learning and roadmapping capabilities? 

Take a self-guided tour, request a custom demo, or check out our customer stories to see how others are using Pendo to close the feedback loop and revolutionize the roadmapping process.