How do you collect customer feedback?
How do you collect customer feedback?
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 weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕
Riddle of the week 💬
What question can you never answer “yes” to?
The answer is at the end of this newsletter.
A Product Manager that doesn’t rely on feedback to make decisions is like if I started my day without coffee. No thank you! 🥴
“Collecting effective feedback” is the alpha and omega of a Product Manager’s skill set. It helps make sure that your product is built for the customer and by the customer. This is why in every meeting that Jeff Bezos attends, there’s an empty chair that represents the customer. It is to remind everyone there that even though customers cannot speak, they are the main stakeholders in every decision that the company makes.
“Is there a market for this idea? Is the product solving the major pain points? Is the market positioning correct?” “Is there going to be another Avengers movie?” (kidding). Answers to all these questions can be only known through effective customer feedback.
Here are 3 ways you can collect effective feedback to help you at different stages of your product development:
1. Conduct field research
Considering you don’t even have an MVP of your product, your goal here is to validate the problem you’re trying to solve with your idea. This approach may seem old school but it is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to collect your first set of feedback before working full-fledged on bringing your idea to life. Think of the potential target audience for your product, now go to physical places like shopping malls, events, and so on and meet these types of people. The idea is to engage with this group and get them to reveal their approach to the same problem. Mention the problem to them and ask if it’s something they’re experiencing or can relate to.
Ask them how they currently solve the problem.
Ask if they face any challenges when trying to solve the problem.
Ask how significant the problem is in their lives.
Ask them how important a solution is to them and how much they think it will improve their lives.
Source: How to Validate Your Product Ideas Cheap and Fast
Simply asking these questions and getting your target audience’s attention is much easier said than done. That’s why the below tricks are worth looking at:
- The 20$ Starbucks test
Treat a person from your target audience to a cup of coffee and request their time to give their honest feedback on your product idea. According to Mark McDonald’s Medium post, one way to do this is by politely walking up to one stranger at a time and calmly explaining your situation: “Excuse me, do you have a moment to help me with something? My brother will be quitting his job at the end of the week and investing his life savings into an idea we have for a start-up company. If I were to buy you a coffee would you be willing to give me your honest thoughts on whether you think the idea would work? That’s it, no catch — just your honest feedback.”
- Creating a mailing list through landing pages
Another effective way to capture your target audience is by collecting their email IDs through a landing page. This page could include details of your product, its USP, pricing, benefits, potential launch date, and so on. The incentive you offer in exchange could be a minimum viable product, or exclusive access to your product when it launches, like a free copy.
Source: 7 Ways to Test Your Product Idea
2. A/B testing
If you're caught between two ideas to improve your product, the best thing to do is A/B test it and wait for real-time feedback from your customers after they use it. This involves splitting your users into two groups and letting each group use different versions of your feature. It could be something as small as a different call to action button color, or it could be two versions of your onboarding sequence.
After running this test for a couple of days or weeks, a PM will be able to receive enough data to decide which version to roll out to the entire user base.
Netflix has been relying on A/B testing for most of its enhancements for a very long time. Your Netflix feed is constantly running experiments to figure out how to improve your experience. If the Netflix algorithm learns that you like action movies, then it will re-order the feed to show you similar movies.
Source: Product Management Skills: A/B Testing
3. Quantitative methods
Qualitative feedback tells you how to improve your product whereas quantitative feedback tells you if there is relevance for your product in the market. Google Trends, for example, is a free tool that you can use to understand how much a topic is trending over a period of time in any location. This would give you a good idea of the relevance your product or problem has in your desired audience.
For instance, if you plan on starting a car-tracking software startup, Google Trends would let you know how many people in a particular country or city care about car-tracking software through the number of online searches or browsing popularity.
Source: How to Validate Your Product Ideas Cheap and Fast
Song of the week 🎶
In other news.…you can watch this new Netflix show in any order! 🎬
After giving users the power of storytelling with the Black Mirror movie Bandersnatch, Netflix has done it again with a new innovational series called Kaleidoscope that can be watched from any episode and does not follow any linear order. The series will air its first episode on January 1st, 2023.
Although I don't know more details about the show, I personally think that this non-linear order will give users different perspectives based on how many episodes they’ve seen before watching a particular one.
And Apple launches SOS calls via satellite 📡
Apple pledged nearly $450 million to enhance its satellite network and infrastructure, and on November 15th, they launched emergency calls via satellite for iPhone 14 and 14 Pro models across the US and Canada. Supported iPhones in the U.S. and Canada that are updated with the latest iOS 16 can send an SOS even when they’re off the grid, no dish required, thanks to an upgraded wireless chipset and Apple’s partnership with satellite service provider Globalstar.
This service is currently free for existing iPhone 14 and 14 Pro users while new iPhone owners will receive free service for two years from when they activate their phones.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/15/apple-emergency-sos-via-satellite-hands-on/
What’s brewing on Zeda.io’s side? ☕
Product Management is a vast field and while in your career growth as a PM, you will find yourself doing many roles and wearing many hats. We wrote this article on all the possible hats and salaries a PM will receive—from a Product Management intern to a Chief Product Officer and more.
Read the article here: https://lnkd.in/dyqbNuXZ
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! 🥂
It’s hard to explain what a Product Manager does, we get it. But you know what’s not that hard? Sharing this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!
Answer to the riddle: Are you asleep?
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