Adventures in Product Feedback: Q&A with a Trailblazer in B2B SaaS
We were recently lucky enough to spend some time with a talented team building a new B2B SaaS product within a global organization. They are an impressive bunch who are cracking into a huge market with their new product.
We talked about building SaaS products, the challenges we are working on, the power of Customer Success and how product feedback can be used effectively.
They raised some excellent questions about product feedback and getting started with Receptive. Here are some of the highlights from the Q&A with Aly Mahan (Director of Customer Success at Receptive) and Hannah Chaplin (CEO at Receptive).
Question Time
Thanks to Scott McLeod, Flickr
If you want to skip to a specific question, hit the link to view on the original article.
Q4: Product Development: Speed vs. Quality. What’s your priority?
Question 1: Easy tasks vs game changers — When is it time to tackle the big chunks that make a difference, rather than picking cherries?
Two things matter here — balance and strategy.
Very often the “cherries” can be beneficial for customer retention. Surprisingly, the smaller items that are low in effort for you as a development team, can often have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction. This is one of the biggest “wow” moments you get when you have a separate channel for customers to submit and prioritize product feedback.
The prioritization in Receptive helps an awful lot with this — customers can prioritize ongoing so you always have an up-to-date view of the problems that matter the most to them. By looking at your Customer SmartList and effort vs value chart, you will be able to quickly and easily see which improvements will have the most positive impact on your product.
Strategy is also key here. If strategically, your business needs your product to solve a certain market problem, that can act as the guiding light for the larger projects.
We find that the strategic and larger projects are often driven by the leadership team and not customer feedback; this is especially true if you are pushing the boundaries and solving market problems in a new way.
At a practical level, there are a lot of ways balance your smaller & larger projects. You have to spend time on lower effort “quick wins” and larger projects too so be aware of that and plan accordingly. Here are some examples:
- Split the development team so some focus on bug fixes and “quick wins” while others run the strategic, larger project on their own timeline & roadmap;
- Alternate development sprints OR once a month, dedicate a few days or a week to tackling the smaller product improvements;
- Dedicate time within your larger product roadmap for customer improvements — this can work well if a larger project touches on other areas that you would like to improve.
In summary, a successful product will require the implementation of both larger initiatives and “cherries” or “quick wins” too. Be aware of this and plan in a way that suits your team and business.
Further reading: Your Silent Customers Have Something to Tell You
The Ultimate Product Strategy Guide
Question 2: Would you take a large customer who lifts your business to the next level but who has specific product requirements blocking your development resources for months?
It depends.
“Stretchy” deals (as we call them) are brilliant for pushing your team and product to improve but it’s vital that any custom work required for a larger account should align with:
The needs of your ideal customer; and Fit with your overall business strategy.
*Note that the large customer may fit your “ideal customer profile” for where you want to go, but you should also take care to think about the impact on your existing user base if you want to retain them.
The second point is key here.
If the one large customer starts pushing you around and taking all your development resource, this can be terrible for the rest of your customer base. SaaS is all about building a product that scales and taking on one-off pieces of work that are very specific to that single user can be an absolute disaster.
However, if the development work for the larger customer is going to help you:
- Develop great improvements & features for your ideal customer;
- Positively impact your current customer base; and
- Open up new sales opportunities…
…then you should consider it. Just be wary of ALL the development resources getting tied up for too long and validate the idea first (see the important side-note below). You should still make some time for the smaller improvements that can be very beneficial for your users.
Further reading — Roadmap Poison: Building Features for Prospects
An important side-note: At prospect stage, people are still “imagining” how your product will be used in their current process so their requests might “vanish” or get deprioritized when they actually get started.
These requests can be hard to spot but are another key reason that you should segment product feedback from prospects from product feedback you receive from customers.
At Receptive, it is common for our customers to find that new cohorts of users have very different requests to experienced users. Often, initial requests are down to gaps in help documentation or them getting used to a new process.
Top tip:Use these requests as an opportunity to build the relationship, show your expertise, share best practices and check over your onboarding & help materials.
Further reading: Watch out for Whales
Question 3: In Receptive, is every customer vote worth the same, or do you categorise groups by importance and give certain votes more power?
Product feedback is not equal so you should always segment it. You can do this with one-click in the Receptive reporting — you can look at feedback from different customer segments, prospects and also based on the request type like “integrations”, “design” or a specific product area. You can automate a lot of this with auto-tagging.
The types of feedback you need will be relevant depending on your strategy. Always pick the feedback you need when you need it; don’t worry about anything else.
We do, however, allow you to pull in the customer MRR into the Receptive reporting as part of the integration. This gives more “weight” to accounts with higher MRR in your reporting but this is customizable too.
Question 4: Product Development: Speed vs. Quality. What’s your priority?
Quality.
We make regular releases and ensure the quality is high. Test-driven development helps an awful lot with this. Putting out poor quality work can affect customer perception of your product and your brand as well, especially in a B2B settings.
However, to ensure we deliver at a good rate, we do a couple of things:
- Separate the development team into people working on more strategic, longer term projects vs people working on bug fixes and smaller product improvements;
- Ensure larger projects are delivered in iterations. We often product the minimum to solve a problem, get feedback and build on it from there.
By doing this, we are ensuring a good balance between speed of development while also keeping the quality high and the customer voice prevalent in our product decisions.
Question 5: Do you weight product feedback depending on the type of user. For example, everyday users vs the account decision-makers?
Yes absolutely.
It’s not necessarily about the weighting…more about making sure we split product feedback into segments so we can use and understand it properly.
Again, this all comes back to your product strategy. The weighting of feedback from everyday users vs decision-makers will change based on what you are working on.
For example, last year we ran a large UI project — we didn’t need to look at all of our product feedback to make sure we did a good job of it. We just used the Reporting in Receptive to see all UI/UX/Design feedback from our good fit customers and prospects. That way, we knew we were solving problems and improving the product for the people that really count.
Question 6: How do you deal with requirements with low feedback? How do you prevent clients from feeling ignored?
The best way to do this is to put a Product Feedback Policy in place. It’s a short document that sets customer expectations from day 1 on how you gather, review and use their product feedback. There is a description, best practices webinar and template available here.
Using Receptive is great for this too because:
- A Product Feedback Policy sets expectations;
- Customers can see what you are working on & what you have released;
- Everyone is updated automatically as requests change status.
Adding even a small amount of transparency & communication with customers around product feedback & development means they understand how and why you make the decisions you do. It stops saying “no” to a request from feeling uncomfortable and personal.
This is brilliant for customer service too — you stand out and it gives customers a great experience. If you don’t let customer feedback go into a blackhole or be ignored, you will reduce churn, increase upsell and create some brilliant advocates.
Question 7: Prospect Feedback — How early do you source feedback? How do you maintain informed prospects accounts when new product releases could help converting?
You should track this data as early as possible. Prospects are one of the inputs into product decisions. You have feedback from your customers, teams and the market as you can see here:
If any problems / ideas / feature requests come up during sales discussions (which they usually do!) then we make sure that we record this information in Receptive so the product teams can understand and segment this information.
This is a brilliant way to spot new opportunities and understand where there may be gaps in your product.
With the “Prospect SmartList” you can quickly see the top priority requests for best fit sales opportunities. It will help product teams with their roadmapping decisions a great deal because it will allow them to balance the needs of sales & the market with the current customer base and your strategy.
Webinar Roadmap Fuel: Market & Prospects
The SaaS Leader’s Guide to Customer Feedback
B2B SaaS company? Need help with product feedback?
Schedule a free call with a member of our Customer Success team today to learn the best practices from leading SaaS organizations.
Originally published at www.receptive.io on June 5, 2018.
