Amazon has a user feedback problem……but in a good way
Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io.
Hello, all you product-loving folks! 🥰
Welcome to this week’s edition of Product Café, your weekend cup of coffee for everything product management, startups and more. ☕
First of all, let me start off by saying Happy Pride Month! 🌈
I found some really cool outfits on Amazon’s pride shop 👚– which features products from businesses owned by LGBTQIA+ entrepreneurs. Anyway, as I was checking out and hitting that “place order” button, I started pondering about how Amazon at one point was an online store that just sold music and books. Fast forward 25 years, and just like its “a to z” logo, you can literally get everything from a to z.
How did that happen? User feedback.
Amazon listened to what its customers wanted. They emailed 1000 customers and asked them “Besides the things we sell today, what would you like to see us sell?”. All the responses were lengthy and included a wide variety of things. That’s when Jeff Bezos thought “We can sell anything this way.”
Credit: https://www.pisano.com/blog/ceos-guide-to-the-galaxy-customer-obsessed-management-model
Jeff Bezos says “At Amazon, we innovate by starting with the customer and working backward. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.”
Just like Amazon, let’s take a look at some companies that leveraged user feedback to build better products and services:
1. Lego 🧱
I stepped on one of these last week....I don’t think I need to explain the rest 🥲 Jokes aside, they’re really fun to play with and provide a great way to boost creativity. As a company, they’re not just customer-centric but want their customers to be part of the design process. For instance, Lego has a dedicated site where fans can submit their ideas and designs for new products. Once 10,000 users vote for a particular idea, then the Lego review board decides whether to turn it into their next latest release or not.
Credit: https://ideas.lego.com/projects/create
2. Apple 🍎
Did you know that Steve Jobs assumed the iPad was going to fail? Because he thought people wanted keyboards. After Apple carefully surveyed and analyzed customers, they understood that there was a sizeable chunk of laptop/computer users who were only using the device for emailing and consuming content. Sure the iPhone could handle those tasks, but its smaller display was a hindrance. That’s how the idea for the iPad was born.
3. Hootsuite 🦉
The social media platform allows all its customers to manage all their social media accounts in one place. Hootsuite assumed that their website visitors knew what services they offered. So they only packed their landing pages with visuals of their high-level functions. But after surveying their customers, they realized that 65% of website visitors needed more information before making a decision. Hootsuite revamped its landing pages to explain its core services using a language customers could resonate with – resulting in a 16% lift in conversion rate.
Good reads for extra credit 📖
Customer feedback stories from companies like Keap, Blend and more
Read how 6 different experts from various companies used customer feedback to build better products.
Build-measure-learn
Learn how continuous feedback loops is the key to building better products.
What’s brewing on Zeda’s side? ☕
We at Zeda recently launched a few info products on Product Hunt and we’re happy to announce that some of our products made it to #1 product of the day and #3 product of the week. But this was only after we had our fair share of research, trials and errors. So we've put together this blog to share our experience and learnings, and we hope you can find some key takeaways to use for your product launch.
That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon.
See you again next week! 🥂
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