How-to use customer feedback to inform product decision-making

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In this article, we want to share some best practices around how to infuse day-to-day product decisions with customer feedback. We do this by sharing our own experience and examples of how we operate in the Jira Product Discovery team.

Like (👍🏽) this article if the content resonates and do reach out (see below) if you want to learn more about best practices to unlock success for your team.

What are we referring to?

Customer feedback refers to the insights and information provided by customers regarding their experiences with a company's products, services, or overall brand. This feedback can include praise, complaints, suggestions, and general comments, which are valuable for guiding product development, enhancing customer satisfaction and making a business successful.

Capturing customer feedback is a critical component of successful product development, but it comes with several challenges that teams must navigate.

Challenges integrating customer feedback in product decision-making

The process of gathering and integrating customer feedback into product development reveals several common patterns and challenges across different teams within organizations. Here are some key observations:

Volume of feedback

One of the most significant challenges is the sheer volume of feedback that can be gathered from various sources such as social media, customer support tickets, surveys, and user testing sessions. Managing and organizing this data in a way that makes it accessible and actionable can be daunting.

Quality and relevance of feedback

Not all feedback is created equal. Some of it can be highly subjective, based on individual preferences rather than broader user needs. Distinguishing between valuable insights and personal opinions is crucial.

Timing and frequency of feedback

Collecting feedback too frequently can annoy users, while infrequent feedback may not accurately reflect user needs as they evolve. Balancing the timing and frequency of feedback collection is essential.

Best practices when using customer feedback in product decision-making

Diverse feedback channels

Utilize multiple channels to gather feedback to ensure you're capturing a broad spectrum of user experiences. This could include in-app feedback tools, customer support interactions, social media, online surveys, and direct emails. The key is to be where your users are and make it easy for them to provide feedback.

Feedback integration with Product Management tool

Integrate feedback directly into your product management tools. This allows you to easily link feedback to specific features or issues, ensuring that user insights are readily accessible during the prioritization and development processes.

Regular user interview

Conduct regular user interviews to delve deeper into the needs and frustrations of your users. Structured, semi-structured, and unstructured interviews can yield qualitative insights that are often missed in quantitative data.

Using customer feedback in the Jira Product Discovery Team

One of the key beliefs in the JPD team is that we don’t want to have to run a research project every time we need to make a decision. It is unrealistic, unmanageable and inefficient.

We want each product team across JPD to move autonomously and as fast as possible and that requires teams to be as close as possible to customers.

In fact, one of our product principles is

We do things for users (and it’s ok to be dogmatic about that)

• Everything we do, we anchor on customer/user value.

• We don’t imagine things and ship them because we think we know better than everyone else.

• We do it because we talked to users, they expressed a need, and we try to meet this need.

• We know our customers, we can always give the name of the users we’re creating a product experience for.

And the truth is, working this way is not as complicated as you might think.

How we apply this in 3 steps

Step 1: bring all customer feedback in one place

As a team, we capture feedback mainly from 4 sources:

• In-app
  This is feedback provided by users through a modal in JPD. The feedback lands in a JSM queue.
  ⚠️ We don’t want all individual feedback items to land directly into JPD because the volume of feedback would be challenging to manage and we want to have an opportunity to triage before we group the feedback into JPD.

• From customer interviews
  We save our Zoom calls with customers into Dovetail, a research platform. This allows us to reference entire conversations or clips where needed.

• The JPD Community Group
  This is where our users come to engage with us, ask questions and get support around their use of JPD.

• An internal feedback Slack channel
  This is used by client-facing teams at Atlassian (sales, customer success, etc.) and internal users of JPD.
  
  

Step 2: adding structure, detail and nuance to customer feedback

We assign each feedback item that we have collected and triaged to an existing idea in our JPD “User feedback” view.

This ensures we have a comprehensive view of a problem area or theme over time and allows us to understand the nuances in solving for a problem as our product matures and our users' needs evolve.

The User feedback view is structured like this

• Ideas represent a theme for customer feedback

  • Each idea can have multiple insights attached. Each insight represents a specific piece of feedback we have collected from a user.

Step 3: making it a habit 

Product teams make decisions every day. Our goal with continuous discovery is to infuse those daily decisions with as much customer input as possible. If teams are only engaging with customers on a monthly basis, they are making a month’s worth of decisions without customer input.
Teresa Torres (Continuous Discovery Habits)

Unlocking product decision-making in teams is about ensuring that each decision made is infused with customer knowledge.

That is why one of the practices we have adopted within the JPD team is feedback rotation.

Every Monday, all the Product Managers jump on a call and we review feedback that has been gathered in the last week.

This habit develops our discovery muscle and allows us to be extremely dialled in into what truly matters to our users.

Outcomes

Using customer feedback in product decision-making unlocks a lot of potential in downstream workflows for teams:

1. Improved Alignment: everyone is on the same page
   Team members know why they are working on something and have a shared understanding of what matters to users.

2. Smoother prioritization: anchored in evidence
   When teams need to prioritize, they do so based on the insights they have gathered over time. Deciding where to invest is a much more objective exercise.

3. Roadmapping
   Sequencing work and clarifying investment areas becomes much easier. Insights gathered over time provide a sense of weight to areas of investment and resource allocation becomes easier.

4. Stakeholder engagement
   Communicating a clear narrative to stakeholders about customer struggles, priorities and areas of investment is much more straightforard. Teams can easily reframe conversations around customer struggles and impact. Trade-offs are can be made in an informed way.

Next steps

Interested in understanding how you can use Jira Product Discovery to collect feedback from customers/users and other teams (support, sales, customer success, marketing)?

Head to our FAQ section and you'll find resources to find Loom for each step of the process.

Check out these articles

How we built Jira Product Discovery with Lighthouse users (3 part series)

How can we use Jira Product Discovery to collect feedback from customers/users and other teams (support, sales, customer success, marketing)

______________________________

I'm Axel Sooriah, a Product Management Evangelist here at Atlassian. I sit in the Jira Product Discovery team and I'd love to learn more about your challenges when it comes to bringing product management best practices to your team.

👉🏽 You can reach me here.

[Doug Rhoten]

Very helpful to see how you have this structured, and it has given a few ideas we can experiment with our product backlog.

Do you map each piece of feedback to a new idea, or a new insight?

I assume it's the latter but I was hoping you could clarify as we need to do something similar - collect information from various disparate information sources including customer discovery interviews and map them back to insights on one or more different ideas or pain points we are focusing on.

[Axel Sooriah]

Great question @Doug Rhoten !

In our set up, each piece of feedback is an insight attached to an idea. 

The idea represents a theme/area for product improvement.

In the case you are describing, where would the customer interviews or information extracted from the interviews be stored/referenced?

[Doug Rhoten]

Thanks for the clarification.

As of right now, information could range from private industry reports and forums to public news articles and social media forums. For formal discovery interviews we'll be using one of two products geared towards conducting interviews. If you are looking for specific names to help with integrations, let me know and I can reach out directly.

[Axel Sooriah]

@Doug Rhoten would love to learn more indeed. Chat soon. :) 

[Luke Abel]

Great article! With your ideas that you use to capture feedback, do have fields that make them structurally different to say, an idea that you would put on the roadmap?

I'm only using JPD for Ideas that will transform into roadmap items, but have found it hard to capture insights that aren't directly related to one of those ideas without it getting out of hand, or just lost. 

Also, how does your team then take an insight/group of insights and turn it into something actionable/visible on a roadmap?