This article is based on Amy’s appearance at the Product Operations Summit in New York, 2024.

Listening to customers is the cornerstone of a successful product strategy. 

I'm Amy Bither, Senior Director of Product Operations and Intelligence at Fullstory, and my extensive experience across various roles has given me a unique perspective on the critical role customer feedback plays in product development. 

I've seen firsthand how strategic feedback can transform product operations, leading to products that truly resonate with customers. 

In this article, I'll explore the essential strategies and practical steps for designing and implementing a customer-centric product strategy. 

The product development life cycle

I've decided to frame implementing a customer-centric product strategy in terms of the product development life cycle. There are four main stages:

1. Observe/Discover

In this initial stage, you gather ideas and start bringing in thoughts about what you want to do next. This phase is all about observation and discovery, where you begin to understand potential opportunities and areas for innovation.

2. Define/Validate

Next, you move into defining and validating those ideas. This involves setting up your product strategy and determining how you'll position the product in the market. Validation ensures that your ideas are feasible and align with customer needs and business goals.

3. Develop/Build

After defining and validating your strategy, the actual building and development of the product begin. This stage is where your plans and ideas transform into a tangible product.

4. Launch/Release

Finally, you launch and release the product to your users. This stage marks the culmination of your efforts and the introduction of your product to the market.

A strategic feedback program should involve customers in every piece of these four stages. Engaging customers throughout the entire product development life cycle ensures that their needs and feedback are continuously incorporated, leading to more successful and customer-centric products.

Observe and discover stage

Let's start with the observe or discover stage, as this is arguably where customer feedback plays the biggest role and also presents one of the biggest challenges. 

During this stage, you'll encounter an overwhelming amount of feedback from various sources, such as support tickets, customer satisfaction surveys, in-app forms, mobile app reviews, sales recordings, product calls, product research, marketing surveys, and customer advisory boards. 

Additionally, you'll receive input from internal stakeholders, including top-down initiatives from product leaders, insights from sales and success teams, account executives, support, and marketing.

Managing feedback overload

If you don't have a strategy for taking and prioritizing this feedback, your product roadmap may end up being influenced by instinct or the loudest voice rather than data. 

To take control of customer feedback and turn it into a strategic asset rather than an overwhelming noise, I recommend three steps:

Step 1: Centralize feedback

First, move all feedback into a central repository using a tool designed to manage feedback. There are many tools on the market, and while I have my personal favorites, what's crucial is the functionality and metadata they offer. 

Here's what to look for:

  • Search across multiple sources: The tool should allow you to search for feedback from various sources in one place.
  • Automated sentiment Analysis: Built-in sentiment analysis helps parse incoming feedback efficiently.
  • Custom tags: The tool should let you create custom tags tailored to your business's unique terminology.
  • Filtering capabilities: Robust filtering options are essential for generating reports and making prioritization decisions.
  • Automated alerts and Notifications: Automated notifications help prompt timely review and action on feedback.

Step 2: Metadata management

The metadata associated with feedback is crucial for effective prioritization. Here’s what you need:

  • Customer segmentation tags: Tag feedback with your customer segmentation (e.g., B2B, B2C, personas, industry, SKU).
  • Revenue Attribution: Assign revenue value to feedback to understand its financial impact.
  • Criticality assessment: Determine whether feedback is a "nice to have" or a "need to have" and its impact on purchase and renewal decisions.
  • Thematic grouping: Group feedback by themes to identify recurring problems and opportunities.
  • Product team identification: Tag feedback with the product teams responsible for addressing the requests.

By centralizing feedback and using detailed metadata, you can turn the observe or discover stage into a strategic process that effectively leverages customer insights. This approach ensures that your product roadmap is data-driven and aligned with customer needs and business priorities.

Strengthening relationships between product and sales

The second critical aspect in the observe/discover phase is the relationship between product and sales teams. This relationship is vital to any business and can easily become strained. 

Investing in this relationship is crucial because the sales team offers valuable customer insights and advice. Without a clear strategy, communication can devolve into a chaotic mix of Slack messages, emails, and escalations, sometimes even reaching the CEO. This reactive approach can undermine your control. 

Here are a couple of suggestions to build a stronger relationship with your sales department:

Create a personalized feedback form

One effective strategy is to create a personalized feedback form specifically for the sales team. Provide them with a dedicated space to submit what they hear from customers and their own insights. 

Ensure that every submission receives an update, whether the feedback is included in the roadmap, not considered, or not going to be acted upon. 

Transparency is key; let them know the status of their submissions. This way, they won't feel like their feedback is disappearing into a black hole. It's important to provide honest updates, even if it's not what they want to hear. This builds trust and encourages them to use the form rather than escalating issues elsewhere.

Provide insight into prioritization decisions

Another crucial step is to offer the sales team insight into how prioritization decisions are made. Explain why certain requests are not being addressed and what the team is working on instead. 

This helps them understand the broader context and the rationale behind the decisions. Many feedback tools offer features that allow users to see other requests and their statuses, which can help sales understand why some requests are prioritized over others. 

Providing access to a live roadmap tool can also be beneficial. It shows what the team is currently working on and how progress is being tracked. This transparency helps the sales team accept and support the prioritization decisions.

Regular meetings

Finally, it's beneficial to have someone from the product team, such as a product operations manager, hold regular meetings with the sales team. These scheduled meetings provide a platform for the sales team to share their thoughts, feel involved in the process, and ensure their feedback is heard. 

Regular interaction fosters collaboration and keeps the lines of communication open. In the meantime, product operations can play a crucial role in facilitating these meetings and ensuring that the relationship between product and sales remains strong and productive.

With these strategies, you can create a more structured and collaborative environment where both product and sales teams work together effectively, leveraging each other's strengths to create better products and drive business success.

The third step in the observe/discover phase is to surface a quarterly report on the trends you're finding in all the customer feedback data. This practice has become a cornerstone of our product operations, and we share it with the entire company. 

Everyone knows to expect it, and it garners a large readership. It showcases our efforts and assures that feedback is not being ignored. These reports also emphasize the importance of customer feedback during roadmap planning cycles.

Here are some key components to include in your quarterly report:

Celebrate shipped features

Start by highlighting any features that were shipped over the last quarter and the customer feedback or value attached to those. This demonstrates progress and shows that feedback is being acted upon. It's also a great way to recognize the hard work of the teams involved and the impact of their efforts.

Identify new trends

Use the report to identify any new surging trends that might not have been on your radar in the previous quarter. Quarterly intervals are ideal because they allow enough time to build real data trends, unlike weekly or monthly views that may not capture significant shifts.

Highlight outstanding issues

Remind the company of outstanding issues that have yet to be addressed. This ensures that persistent pain points remain visible and prioritized. Bringing these issues to the forefront prevents them from being forgotten and underscores their importance.

Include quantitative and qualitative data

Incorporate both quantitative signals and qualitative insights into the quarterly report. Sometimes, you might want to raise a red flag or alert the product teams to potential issues. Quantitative data can highlight measurable trends, while qualitative data provides context and deeper understanding.

Competitive analysis

If relevant, include a section on what's happening with competitors. Highlight any significant moves or trends observed in the last quarter. This keeps the team informed about the competitive landscape and can inspire strategic adjustments.

Preview upcoming initiatives

Provide a preview of what will be happening next and any customer feedback associated with upcoming initiatives. This not only shows progress but also sets expectations and keeps the team aligned with future plans.

Responsibility and ownership

In our team, product operations take responsibility for compiling and sharing this quarterly report. It's a natural fit for us, but I understand that team structures can vary. Regardless of who takes ownership, the goal is to ensure that the report is comprehensive, informative, and actionable.

Implementing a structured approach to quarterly reporting on customer feedback trends means keeping the entire company informed, engaged, and aligned with customer needs and priorities. This practice reinforces the value of customer feedback and its integral role in shaping successful product strategies.

Define and validate stage

Now, let's move to the define and validate stage. This is where you transition from a reactive strategy to a proactive one. Instead of merely responding to incoming feedback, you now need to validate the trends and assumptions you've identified by engaging directly with customers. 

This stage presents its own unique challenges, particularly in reaching the customers you want to talk to, dealing with limited research budgets, achieving demographic balance, and accurately gauging customer willingness to pay for new features.

Building an evergreen research community

To address these challenges, I recommend building an evergreen, open, ongoing research community. This approach allows you to have a proactive strategy in place at all times. 

Here’s how to set it up effectively:

Recruitment and structure

  • Collaborate with sales: Work with your sales team to recruit participants. They can help identify key customers, whether they are very unhappy customers who need more attention or very happy ones who want to stay engaged.
  • Open enrollment: Keep the community open for continuous enrollment. Unlike customer advisory boards, which have fixed terms, this community should allow participants to join or leave at any time, providing ongoing opportunities for engagement.

Engagement and participation

  • Consistent outreach: Regularly reach out to your community for participation in research activities. Understand that not everyone will participate every time, but maintaining a large and active community ensures sufficient involvement for each activity.
  • Ease and enjoyment: Make participation easy, convenient, and enjoyable. Vary the types of surveys and topics to keep it interesting and prevent fatigue. Remember, participants are doing you a favor, so the process should be as engaging as possible.

Sharing results and building trust

  • Feedback loop: Always share a summary of what you learned from the research with the participants. Let them know how many people participated, what insights were gained, and what the next steps are. This builds trust and shows that their input is valued and acted upon.
  • Community updates: Share findings not only with participants but with the entire community. This transparency reinforces that feedback is being listened to and acted upon, encouraging continued engagement.

Creating a sense of exclusivity

  • Exclusive benefits: Offer exclusive benefits to community members, such as product updates, sneak peeks, or beta test opportunities. Make the community feel special and valued.
  • Personal connections: Foster personal connections by allowing community members to know you by name and having regular contact points. Spotlight individual members to facilitate peer interactions and create a sense of camaraderie.

By implementing these strategies, you can create a dynamic and engaged research community that provides invaluable insights during the define and validate stage. This proactive approach ensures that your product development is closely aligned with customer needs and expectations, ultimately leading to more successful products and satisfied customers.

Develop and build stage

After gathering insights, defining your strategy, and writing your user stories and acceptance criteria, it's time to build and develop the product. The challenge here is that you might forget to continue engaging with customers during this stage. 

It's understandable, given the pressure of timelines and demands and the need to work closely with engineers. However, it's crucial to keep customer engagement alive even in this phase. 

Here are two effective ways to involve customers during the build and develop stage:

1. Quantitative data experimentation

Implement quantitative data experimentation by testing new features under a feature flag. This allows you to introduce changes to a subset of your users and observe their behavior without prompting them. 

User behavior is often the most honest form of feedback, revealing how they interact with new features naturally. By monitoring these interactions, you can gather valuable insights and make necessary adjustments before rolling out the features to the entire user base.

2. Formal beta testing

Conduct a more formal beta test by reaching out to your research community. Invite them to participate in testing new features and provide a platform for them to give feedback. 

Encourage ongoing conversations where participants can discuss their experiences and suggestions with you and each other. This approach allows you to gather in-depth qualitative feedback and fosters a sense of involvement and collaboration among your most engaged customers.

Importance of continuous customer engagement

Engaging customers during the build and develop stage ensures that the product remains aligned with their needs and expectations. 

Whether through quantitative experimentation or formal beta testing, maintaining this connection helps you identify potential issues early, refine features, and ensure a smoother transition to the launch and release phase.

By involving customers throughout the development process, you not only create a better product but also strengthen customer relationships and trust. This continuous engagement demonstrates your commitment to delivering value and listening to their feedback at every stage.

Launch and release phase

The launch and release phase is primarily about relationships, both internally and externally. This phase is not the final stage but a continuation of the feedback cycle, emphasizing the importance of ongoing customer engagement and improvement.

Internal collaboration

Work closely with your product marketing partners to ensure a seamless launch. This includes creating comprehensive documentation for the support team and holding enablement sessions for the sales team. These efforts ensure that everyone involved is well-prepared to support the new product or feature.

External engagement

Externally, view this phase as an opportunity to restart the feedback cycle. Open up channels for customers to continue providing feedback, which you can analyze and use to identify new trends. This continuous loop of feedback and improvement is crucial for maintaining a customer-centric approach.

If you have advocates within your research community who have been involved throughout the development process, meet with them individually before the official launch. Provide them with a high-touch, custom experience, such as a private walkthrough of the new product. This makes them feel valued and part of the development process, fostering loyalty and a sense of ownership.

Monitoring new and existing users

The launch of a new product may attract new users or customer segments. Monitor the feedback you receive, noting whether it comes from new users or your existing customer base. 

Analyze the differences in feedback between these groups to understand how different segments perceive the new product or feature.

Quantitative data and success metrics

Don’t forget about the importance of quantitative data, which provides an objective measure of your product's impact. 

Set up success metrics and monitor dashboards to track real-world performance and user interaction with the new product. This data helps you hold yourself accountable and make informed decisions based on actual user behavior.

Final thoughts

The launch and release phase is not the end but a new beginning in the product development cycle. By maintaining strong internal and external relationships, continuously gathering and analyzing feedback, and monitoring success metrics, you ensure that your product evolves to meet customer needs and expectations. This approach fosters a culture of continuous improvement and keeps your product strategy customer-centric.