Why product teams are uniquely positioned to be champions of VoC

Product teams have a lot on their plates: development deadlines to hit, features to build, bugs to squash, internal and external customers to keep happy. 

When you’re heads down and focused on getting your next release out the door, it can be hard to make time for anything that isn’t already in your project plan. So it’s no wonder that, historically, Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs haven’t been a core focus of product teams. But as the way we interact with our products has become more “love it or leave it” and less “til death do us part,” it’s never been more important to look to your customers’ feedback to guide your product decisions.

A VoC program allows you to engage and learn from the people using your products and services every day. It gives your team direction and structure around what to build next. It shows your users that you’re maniacally focused on their needs. And it helps you continually deliver value through features that generate outcomes and product experiences that delight.

Product teams are uniquely well-positioned to help lead the charge and foster a more VoC-focused company culture. With more organizations embracing a product-led strategy to super-charge their growth, expanding their product teams to keep up with demand, and leveraging the power of a great product experience to generate lasting brand loyalty, there’s never been a better (or more influential) time to be a product person. 

Here are a few ways product teams can use their influence to champion VoC in their organizations.

Building organizational buy-in

In an ideal world, VoC programs would always be greeted with enthusiastic support from stakeholders across every part of the organization. But in practice, building VoC buy-in can sometimes be a challenge.

For starters, no one likes it when someone calls their baby ugly—which is how receiving negative feedback on something near and dear to your heart can feel. Plus, for companies that haven’t historically considered themselves customer-centric (a core tenet of any organization considering a VoC program), the groundwork to implement VoC can seem daunting. It requires a mindset shift that puts the customer experience at the center of every decision. It calls for a commitment to continual iteration and bottom-up ideation. And it demands investments in systems to capture and act on feedback at scale. 

Product teams can play a key role in catalyzing customer-centricity and advocating for VoC. By operating at the intersection of business strategy, technological innovation, and customer needs, they are uniquely positioned to influence (and benefit) from VoC programs that unify these three branches. And as products continue to become synonymous with the companies who create them, product teams can lead by example—leveraging customer feedback to plan their roadmap and prove the positive impact VoC can have in the products they build.

Sharing a unified vision

Most enterprise organizations have to contend with silos at one point or another in their evolution. But silos can render VoC programs useless, sending valuable feedback to a black hole where it goes unaddressed. This means success teams miss out on valuable customer experience insights, support teams get stuck in reactive cycles, and product teams are left to guess which features their users actually need.

A strong VoC program can help unify teams and improve collaboration across the organization through a shared vision and single source of truth—focused on the customer, driven by the product. Again, product teams have a powerful role to play here. By rallying their colleagues around a unified understanding of their customers—through roadmaps, closed-loop communication, and user sentiment data—product teams can foster a culture of transparency that helps everyone see how customer feedback fuels product (and company) innovation.