What Your Product Teams Want to Know (and How You Can Tell Them)

If you think about it, product teams often work miracles. They’re given all manner of feedback, strategy, and stakeholder demands, and they somehow turn that into an amazing product that people want to buy. This is no easy task.

A product strategy may demand that the product team focuses on one aspect, while the feedback you collect may suggest other areas are more important.

This essentially places your product team on a high-wire, hands them several balls to juggle, oh, and gives them far too little time to make it across.

There is, however, one simple thing you can do to make life slightly easier for your product team if you work in customer success. You can make sure they have all the information they need to make the best decisions.

Here’s what product teams need to know, and how you can help them:

Ask for problems, not feature requests

Photo by James Pond, Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/HUiSySuofY0

One thing that infuriates most PMs is when they’re given feedback in the form of solutions. This is annoying because coming up with solutions is basically a PM’s job. It’s like going to the doctor and not only telling them what’s wrong with you, but also what treatment you need.

PMs thrive on problems and pain points. Building a product is like solving a puzzle, and a crossword that’s already filled in doesn’t entertain anyone.

Any feedback or requests that contain solutions will likely be ignored. Instead, requests need to explain the problem that the customer is facing. What is it that they’re trying to achieve? Remember that every time a feature request is made, ask WHY.

This way, your product team can find the answers to those problems, without being told what they should be doing.

Round & round & round we go…

A lot of the time your customers will have devised some sort of workaround to help them solve the problem they’re facing. While this workaround isn’t always the best approach, it can help your product team understand.

For starters, it provides them with extra context. If a customer works around your lack of a commenting feature by manually emailing a link to their colleagues, then perhaps the problem isn’t the lack of commenting, but how hard it is to share items between people.

This extra context can help the product team narrow down the list of possible solutions.

Another way the workarounds help is that they show how serious the problem is. If a customer is going to great lengths to work around the problem, then chances are they really need it solving. If they’re simply ignoring the problem for the time being, it can’t be too important.

Priorities & data

Photo by Devin Avery, Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/9zB3txA-Lw8

Which brings us nicely to the final thing that product teams need to know — How much of a priority is it and what does the rest of the data show?

SaaS companies receive a lot of feedback. That in itself isn’t a bad thing, as it helps you to build up your feedback library. The issue is deciding which requests should be prioritized.

There are all manner of methods that product teams use to prioritize, ranging from RICE to gut decisions, but actually, the best way to prioritize requests is to not do it yourself.

Instead, let your customers decide which problems are more pertinent and which can probably be sent to the back of the queue. This frees up more time for your product team, and it means that you understand what matters most to your customers. It’s a win-win.

As well as priorities, you can empower your product teams by providing other data that is important to them. The types of data will vary from one organization to the next, but being able to demonstrate ARR at risk due to an unsolved problem or the volume of good fit users with the same point, will go a long way.

Remember that the “most popular” requests are rarely the ones you should build. When you ask customers to prioritize, you start to get a clear picture of what matters & why.

How to get the data your product teams need

So, now you know exactly what your product team needs to know, how do you go about getting that data, and how do you pass it on to the PMs?

The answer is deceptively simple — You should ask your customers.

What I mean is, you should ask your customers those questions specifically. Don’t simply ask them to provide their feedback. Ask them questions that will provide your product team with the answers they need.

Having a series of questions to guide your customers’ thoughts not only means you collect the relevant data, but it also helps your customers to express and communicate the problem they’re facing.

It means they can’t just write a long, detailed rant, or a short, vague sentence. It means they have to engage. And that means better feedback for your product team.

So remember, some key questions to ask your customers are:

1: What problem are you trying to solve?

2: Do you have a workaround?

3: How much of a priority is this, on a scale of 1-10?

Those three questions will provide your product team with the information they need to make the best possible product decisions.

If you liked to learn how to do this at scale, sign-up for early access of Pendo Feedback.

This post originally appeared on www.receptive.io/blog/.