Checking off the list of essential features is important, but what comes next after you’ve completed them yet your product is just another “alternative” in the market? There’s nothing worse than being good but not competitive, and losing your product-market fit because you didn’t innovate.

I had to experience this the hard way, however there is light at the end of the tunnel. When Usersnap first started, the tool was to help digital products collect bugs from users with an easy snap of their screens and annotation to visualize the feedback.

And it took off!

We heard many praises from our users, we were also getting a lot of new requests, which paved the road for Usersnap to become a comprehensive feedback platform. However, when we are just shipping the small improvements requested by users and neglecting innovation through discovery research, we found ourselves in a dangerous position of not solving any critical needs, 

Fortunately, we already have the most valuable resource for product discovery: user feedback.

By conducting more research and analyzing requests and core problems more deeply, we started to connect the dots and build a product that made sense. Today, Usersnap is the top tool for product teams to streamline user feedback and connect insights to development workflows. 

If you want to adopt a continuous product discovery approach to stay ahead of the game, establish effective ways to foster customer interaction. Engaging with users and customers regularly ensures that our products evolve based on actual needs rather than assumptions. This practice revitalizes product development and keeps our team aligned with the market’s pulse.

Continuous product discovery is an actual team effort in our context. Involving all stakeholders in the research and ideation stages brings insights throughout the customer journey.

Of course, a platform to streamline and accumulate the data helps immensely, but we’ll get to that later. The creativity and momentum from the collaboration were the key for us to build something unique and meaningful. 

Why product teams are not doing enough continuous product discovery

All visionary product managers are user-centric and love product discovery work. However, very few can execute properly, let alone continuously, and we must address this pain and problem first before we discuss how to solve the matter. 

  • Product managers wear multiple hats. Due to time constraints and resource limitations, the hats of research, managing customer feedback, and validating ideas have limited wearing opportunities. Product teams face significant time constraints and often operate with limited resources.
  • Not planning ahead enough: For bigger, innovative solutions and getting caught up by small, too-obvious-for-research features can lead teams astray
  • Competing priorities: With numerous stakeholders vying for attention, the real importance, which is the voice of customers, can slip down the priority list.
  • No good sources of direct user feedback: gathering user feedback from customer support, sales, and marketing is a common setting, but this becomes an obstacle when those departments try to push their agenda and bias the feature requests.
  • Lack of actionable questions: When teams struggle to ask specific, contextual questions, the discovery does not yield valuable insights, leading to irrelevant conclusions and poor decisions. This is not the incompetency of product managers but gaps in the process and tools to perform discovery research at the right time and to the targeted audience. 

Stop assuming; go validate

The danger of skipping validation, evidence collection, and customer interaction when writing user stories is you will end up with fluff. Pretty fluff, sure, but how will customers react? it’s crucial that product teams, including the development team, step out of their internal echo chambers and validate ideas and test prototypes with real users to ensure alignment of product strategy and customer expectations.

At Usersnap, we have seen startups and enterprises come to us seeking ways to automate and scale the collection of user feedback directly in the product experience. Giving ownership and easy-to-use tools to product teams so that continuous product discovery is feasible.

Sustainable product discovery processes and best practices from my experience

A major driver for both our product-led growth and team motivation has been our commitment to continuous improvement and feedback loops to learn from our customers.  I love the thrill when we discuss business strategies, and someone can whip out several user feedback to back up our ideas, and when hypotheses are formed we also go the extra mile to validate with users. This is all possible thanks to the strong cross-team alignment and a robust centralized platform.

All the methods of user feedback with one tool

Successful product discovery needs a good project management tool, and continuous product discovery needs a versatile platform that can capture specific product feedback as well as streamline different types of user insights. At Usersnap, we use various methods to interact with our users and collect feedback, such as.

  • Product quality-related issues: Users are most eager when facing issues. What’s very interesting to me is that often, bug reports are not actually bugs but missing functionality! These small feedback pieces go a long way toward continuous improvement. 
  • Beta user feedback: Selecting and inviting relevant users to try new features or do research interviews provides critical yet actionable insights to ensure successful product adoption. 
  • Feature Surveys: We use in-product surveys to understand user preferences, validate jobs-to-be-done, and even discover retention features. Check out our templates library to launch research instantly.
  • Feature requests: We use two methods to collect feature requests: a reactive method—there’s a form from our feedback menu for users to fill in what they need and some additional questions to understand the pain point—and proactive research surveys to ask certain segments how we can bring the feature to the next level. 
  • Persona research surveys: our marketing team geeks out on persona and use cases, we love using conditional questions to dive into specifics and quantify the delivery of value proposition and content with rating questions.
  • Browser Extensions to streamline the messages from customer support and sales: Sales and customer support forward their meeting notes or conversations that shed light on new product capabilities to our platform.

What’s truly awesome is that the above discovery insights can all be collected via Usersnap’s feedback widgets, micro surveys, and browser extensions. I guess this is another advantage of our team to be laser-focused on user feedback!

Empower teams to be curious and discover new product values 

With the ease of creating customer feedback and interaction channels, I love that each team can do micro-discovery and gather evidence to resolve their uncertainties. To obtain tangible actions and decisions from feedback and insights, we also had a learning curve, and here are some of my takeaways:

  • Feedback prioritization: We define categories for labels to track the frequency and impact level of each product area. Our prioritization and ideation processes are very transparent; the search and sort filters of Usersnap labels allow our teams to read first-hand what users say about different topics. This method helps us address user concerns systematically.
  • Integrations with tools: We integrate Usersnap with development tools like Jira to allow developers to consider the users' expectations and pains when developing solutions. The two-way status sync of Usersnap’s feedback and Jira’s ticket with the integration ensures that stakeholders can watch the progress and contribute seamlessly.
  • Collaboration to boost user engagement: Our teams regularly collaborate to act on the insights plus align on the user journey and segments. We want the experience and relevance of our surveys and feedback widgets to be optimized for high response rates.
  • Closing the Feedback Loop: Our product team is committed to closing feedback loops. They personally follow up with users and inform them when relevant new features are shipped. I love that these customers are also most likely to advocate for and write stunning reviews about Usersnap. Over time, our users recognize that their voice matters, which encourages them to share more feedback with us.

Strategies for integrating regular customer interactions

Regular customer interactions are vital for continuous product improvement. I am a huge advocate that teams must establish efficient strategies for collecting and analyzing user feedback to stay on top of what pain points need to be solved and how to innovate. 

But be careful not to fall into the trap of “feature factory”, not every customer’s request is a real need, and you should not act without knowing why. I hate saying no to customers, but what’s worse is delivering features that only satisfy a couple of customers. To avoid this, I have learned the importance of validating hypotheses.

Micro surveys to quickly reach the mass audience

Every product in 2024 should have a micro survey tool. Not just because our attention span can only make it through short content formats, but the simplicity of micro surveys increases the likelihood of response engagement. And once users enjoy this interaction, they will repeat this behavior and fill out more surveys from you.  

Micro surveys are also easier to set up for teams, the feedback forms should start with a short yet targeted question, such as asking to rate the experience. Then it can expand to a conditional qualitative question or a couple of multiple-choice questions. Another great tactic is to invite those who have provided interesting insights to user interviews or user testing sessions. 

Collecting feedback at important milestones, such as after the release of a new feature or during significant updates, ensures that insights are contextual and your team can act timely. This approach helps us understand the immediate impact of changes and address any issues promptly. We always recommend our customers identify these times to guarantee the quality of the feedback.  

Cultivate an engaging user experience to get more active users

There is no one-size-fits-all survey template, and in reality, people have different types and urgency of feedback. To harness the insights and issues, you should utilize various micro surveys and feedback widgets.

Selecting a tool that supports multiple options for bug reporting, satisfaction rating, multi-choice surveys, interview invitations, etc., is a strategic move to build an interactive product environment. As we fostered more active users who frequently engage with our product, we’ve created a template library to help you get started faster.

The goal is to develop surveys and widgets that can obtain valuable, accurate, and in-depth feedback. When your users spend time to contribute and share their experience, they will actually become more invested and intrigued by your product advancements. Active users can provide practical insights on use cases and the effectiveness of highly actionable improvements.

Automating feedback transfer processes to democratize knowledge

The capabilities of automated feedback collection and integration to distribute insights for teams are imperative to maintain a continuous cycle of product discovery. For example, our customers rave about the consistency and improving efficiency that Usersnap has brought by forwarding incoming feedback to Slack for team awareness, Jira or AzureDevops for backlog and sprint operations, and PowerBI for synthesizing business data.

Automation ensures ongoing feedback collection and analysis, not just one-off activities. This continuous data stream helps teams stay aligned with user needs and market changes, fostering agile responses.

Additionally, product discovery in the product development process helps mitigate risks, avoid the feature factory mindset, and improve resource optimization.

Cross-team collaboration to add context and creativity

Involving various teams—marketing, sales, and customer support—provides a comprehensive view of customer needs. Each department can offer unique insights into user behavior and expectations, enriching the overall feedback and making the product more user-centric.

An important note from my experience, the format of customer interaction and insights collection should be tailored for each team. Customer support needs to reduce the friction of technical explanation in communication, therefore they appreciate screen-capturing tools with feedback widgets. While marketing aims to grab the attention of users and favors the combination of a release announcement banner along with a short poll. (Shameless plug alert! Visual feedback with screen captures and flexible form design capabilities are top value propositions of Usersnap.) 

Asking the right questions

Formulating effective questions is an art that requires understanding the user’s perspective and the specific information the team needs. Here’s my learnings on how to get better at it:

  • Be clear and concise: Users are more likely to respond to straightforward questions requiring minimal effort.
  • Timing is key: Choose the right moment to ask for feedback. For instance, soliciting input immediately after a user has experienced a new feature can yield more accurate and actionable insights.
  • Use open-ended questions sparingly: While open-ended questions can provide rich qualitative insights, they should be used judiciously to avoid overwhelming the user.

Scaling user feedback gives you a head start in product discovery

Integrating user feedback is crucial in the dynamic landscape of product management, as a product is never truly finished, and its development thrives on continuous user input.

Ongoing feedback not only ensures competitiveness but also accelerates product improvement. Much like the rapid development of AI, driven by extensive simulations and feedback, continuous user input helps us iterate and enhance our product more quickly.

Segmenting users based on behavior and usage patterns is essential for gathering relevant feedback, as continuous discovery requires going deeper and being more specific. This strategy helps tailor development efforts, build stronger relationships, and encourage a steady flow of valuable insights.

User segmentation and automated research with Usersnap

Usersnap offers robust segmentation capabilities that are instrumental in refining user feedback collection:

  • Targeting by user properties and behaviors: With your application’s API events or custom attributes, or uploading an email list, you can design highly relevant and smooth experiences to approach your users. As well as ensure the feedback derived from the targeted users are most impactful to potential changes. Once you set up the project, just sit back and relax as feedback starts pouring in.
  • Conditional questions: You can tailor each survey based on respondents' previous answers, making every question count. With adaptive questions that change based on prior responses, users feel understood and valued.
  • Auto-forward integrations: Incoming feedback can be automatically sent or personally reviewed and managed with integrations of 50+ tools, such as Jira, Linear, AzureDevOps, Zendesk, etc., to track user-centric improvements effectively. 
  • AI-assisted labeling and summary: Accelerate the categorization and learning process with the help of AI, so that you can divert your time on strategically planning and pivoting the research direction and discovery outcomes.
  • Enhanced data analysis: With features like enhanced CSV exports that include user properties, Usersnap facilitates better filtering and analysis of user data. Teams can leverage this data to make informed decisions that align closely with user expectations and behaviors.

4 step guide on how to execute the product discovery process

To summarize and set you up for a low-effort, high-impact product discovery, here’s a four-step process to continuously evolve product-led growth.

Following this structured approach to product discovery enables my team to make informed decisions that enhance user satisfaction and drive sustainable growth.

1. Learn about users and uncover their needs

I start by conducting user research to gather deep insights about our users. I engage directly with them through customer feedback surveys, customer interviews, and product usage analysis, utilizing tools like Usersnap to understand their challenges and expectations. This initial step is crucial for aligning our product’s direction with real user needs.

2. Define direction and decide on priorities

I identify the core problems our users face. By evaluating the impact of these issues and the value our product can offer by solving them, I can prioritize which problems to address first. This evaluation helps me ensure we allocate resources effectively to areas with the highest return on investment.

3. Ideate solutions and prioritize development initiatives based on customer feedback

I develop various solutions for the identified problems, brainstorm with my team, and consider different angles and innovations. Navigating between the problem and solution space is crucial to reducing uncertainty and increasing confidence in building the right product. Once we have a list of potential solutions, we prioritize them based on their expected impact and feasibility.

4. Create prototypes and test with your users

I turn our top ideas into prototypes. These early models of our proposed solutions allow us to test assumptions and gather feedback in a controlled, cost-effective manner. Testing these prototypes with actual users is vital; it provides direct insights into whether our solutions meet their needs and how they could be improved. 

The focus then shifts to preparing and transitioning these validated ideas into product delivery, which involves refining the concept, slicing it into a prioritized list of backlog items, and prioritizing the most valuable features for early iterations or MVPs.

Conclusion

Continuous product discovery is essential for effective product management and significantly enhances product strategy and development. We at Usersnap not only benefited in making impactful decisions with actual user data and reduced reliance on internal assumptions, but we’re proud to have built a platform that allows other product-led companies to prioritize features with clarity of user motivation, and constantly validate the product is evolving to solve user pains.

Embracing continuous product discovery ensures that products launch successfully and remain competitive and relevant. I hope this journey for you is full of sunshine and rainbows, and not fog or thunder, with user feedback being that ray of light.

A little about the author

Ashley Cheng, Head of Growth at Usersnap, is a customer-obsessed explorer of new product growth opportunities. She loves to push product-market fit boundaries to help the teams at Usersnap deliver new features users love. In this article, Ashley shares her insights on continuous product discovery and the innovative strategies employed at Usersnap.