Designing an engaging and functional product relies heavily on identifying and acting upon valuable feedback. However, feedback can come from multiple sources and stakeholders, such as team members, users, and external collaborators. Each stakeholder brings a unique perspective, shaped by their expertise and motivations. Therefore, the collected feedback can become conflicting and even unclear to determine the best course of action for your product.
As a product manager, it's imperative to grasp the art of selecting, organizing, and prioritizing feedback based on the product's goals, feasibility, and estimated timeframes. In this post, we’ll discuss how to make the most value out of your product feedback, regardless of the source. But first, let’s define what makes feedback so important and how your product can benefit from it. Let’s get started.
Why Does Product Feedback Matter?
Feedback is the key to successful product development, ensuring a user-centric approach, and understanding the current market.
For starters, user feedback will help you:
- Know their likes and dislikes
- Learn about their priorities
- Recognize and anticipate trends so you can keep a competitive edge
- Identify where your product isn’t intuitive enough
- Discover what solutions users need but the product doesn’t provide
- Acknowledge what your users value most about your product and, therefore, your real value proposition. This will give you a hint as to what features may be ideal to keep intact.
User feedback will serve as a compass for your product’s decisions. It will help you learn Yet, to avoid confusion, all this feedback should be filtered and organized before landing in your team’s hands.
On the other hand, feedback from the product team will allow you to:
- Learn the reasoning behind the product design
- Know what is feasible from a developer’s perspective
- Understand the customer’s business goals and expectations
- Share new ideas and explore alternative solutions
- Check the design's scalability and accessibility
- Ensure everyone stays on track with project goals
Overall, stakeholders provide feedback from different perspectives, goals, and motivations. A product manager should understand them to ensure effective collaboration and smooth product development.
4 Best Practices to Organize and Prioritize Product Feedback
Now, let’s explore some best practices to organize and prioritize product feedback. We suggest you:
- Define your goals and choose your sources accordingly
- Gather feedback methodically
- Analyze and prioritize feedback
- Share the next steps with the relevant stakeholders
Let’s take a closer look.
Define Your Goals And Choose Your Sources Accordingly
First things first, start by setting clear feedback goals. Otherwise, you might get overwhelmed with information covering multiple issues.
“As a product manager, you know that gathering feedback and organizing them can be a daunting task. Sometimes, the feedback you receive is overwhelming, and other times, you may receive little to no feedback at all. Regardless of the amount, you need to organize the feedback and convert them into trackable issues, which can be a time-consuming and frustrating process.” Hakan Baybas, CEO at Commented
Additionally, be mindful that different types of feedback may require different criteria and goals. You may want to prioritize feedback related to your competitive advantage, customer satisfaction, market fit, etc.
You can set feedback goals by defining:
- What would you like to improve or validate with this feedback? (E.g. customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, innovation, etc.)
- What solution do you want to provide with your product?
- What’s your product's stage of development?
- Are you targeting a specific customer segment?
- What KPIs will you use to measure feedback's impact?
Once you set your goals, you'll know what sources you can rely on to meet them. There are multiple feedback sources, including analytics, reviews, team members, and more. So, for example, if you want to know the viability of a new feature, you may consult your UX team to know if it’s a market fit. To test new features, you may want to run interviews or beta testing with current users.
It's important to communicate your feedback criteria and goals to your sources. This way, they can be as specific as possible.
Gather Your Product Feedback Methodically
Now it’s time to gather and organize your product feedback. We advise you to implement a systematic and organized approach for collecting feedback from various sources, such as surveys, reviews, analytics, etc. As a result, you will be able to recognize patterns and gaps in your data much easier afterward.
To gather valuable feedback, we suggest you ask stakeholders to:
- Provide enough context
- Remain objective
- Explain the why (with as much detail as possible)
- Deliver actionable insights with specific courses of actions
Analyze and Prioritize The Collected Feedback
Once you’ve collected your feedback you should categorize it based on:
- Source
- Type and theme (e.g. feature suggestion, pain points, etc.)
- Specific feature or issue
- Frequency
- Segment benefited (i.e. Would this benefit all users or just a specific segment?)
- Reach
- Effort
- Cost
- Urgency
- Possible impact
- Must-have/Should-have/Could-have/ Won’t have
Then, you should rank it based on your goals, urgency, and relevance to your product strategy and value proposition. For instance, you should be on the lookout for critical user feedback that’s stopping them from having an aha moment with your value proposition (i.e. realizing your product is the absolute solution they need).
Additionally, consider ways to quantify your qualitative feedback. This will help you prioritize the most critical feedback. You could implement a structured framework, like the Eisenhower matrix, RICE score, or MoSCoW method to objectively prioritize the feedback. Moreover, it's important to identify trends, discrepancies, and contradictions within the feedback and strive to uncover the underlying needs or potential opportunities.
Share the Next Steps with The Right Product Feedback Tools
It's time to put your feedback into action and effectively communicate the upcoming steps to the relevant parties. This includes explaining:
- The multiple feedback sources
- What you could conclude from it
- The rationale behind your prioritization
- Your final decisions
- What you expect to achieve with this product optimization
As a result, you should use effective communication methods and tools to ensure everyone is on the same page. We suggest recording a video or holding a meeting to go through all the relevant points and explain in great detail.
However, although meetings and videos are great for providing context,
it can be difficult to leave a record of where your changes should be implemented. This results in designers and developers having to switch back and forth between screens to make the changes, wasting valuable time. Fortunately, here’s where Commented can help.
With Commented, stakeholders can add feedback to your deployed product with one click. You can easily manage all the feedback you receive, without wasting time organizing or turning them into issues. Plus, it seamlessly integrates with Figma, Linear, and Slack.
Want to try effortless collaboration? Click on ‘try live demo’ below and
Victoria Lescano
