Feedback First

The first feature I would like to build in a product is feedback. I know it sounds like being stretched too far but I don’t know how you would call yourself customer obsessed if you don’t provide them an option to communicate their problems to you in the simplest way possible.

We had been struggling for months trying to improve our metrics. While we were making improvements of the order of 5-10%, none of them was drastic enough to give us the boost badly needed. When we called customers they would talk about how much they loved our product but just didn’t get enough time to use it. We weren’t becoming more important for them than Facebook and YouTube and it did hurt a little even if it was obvious.

Then we noticed a pattern where people were using the core feature of our platform to get help regarding the platform or to report issues. We decided to build a simple feedback form. Starting next day we were receiving dozens of feedback which increased over time. A lot of them was high praise but it helped us believe in our mission and gave us the boost we needed.

But a lot of them also consisted of problems user were facing. If you look at those problems individually, you can never build enough features to deal with them. But when we looked at them from users’ perspective, trying to understand where the problem originated and what the user really wants to do with our app, we could come with extremely simple solutions.

When we started building those simple solutions we saw the most drastic improvement in our metrics of the order of 30-50% change. To be fair we had done a lot more than building a feedback feature, we had changed our attitude from being focused on metric to be focused on customer. But undoubtedly getting the feedback from users helped a great deal in moving to a customer focused approach.

That’s why I recommend having a simple channel to get user feedback. Don’t build for the individual problems cited by the users but use it to be obsessed with users.