Why Customer Feedback Should Influence your Product Roadmap?

When you think of creating or developing a product, there are several goals to achieve by you as a Product Manager and your product development team. Keeping these goals in mind, a Product Roadmap is created and implemented. These goals can be attracting new users, resolving users’ issues, fixing up bugs and defects in the product, making innovations and being the first to bring new and advanced features to the market, or creating anyhow a better version of the product.

While considering these goals and creating a product plan, you need to look and decide what your priorities are and what’s more important to achieve. But merely looking at the priorities won’t help much unless you know what your customers want from your product. But how would you know this?

Here comes the need for gathering Product Feedback. It is a medium for the users to share their experience and the expectations they have in mind with the product and a source for you to have this valuable piece of information. Moreover, it is a guide that helps you create effective Product Roadmap.

In this article, we will learn how User Feedback affects your Product Roadmap and how you can obtain valuable customer insights. Let’s start with exploring what is Product Roadmap.

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What is a Product Roadmap?

A Product Roadmap is a visual summary that outlines the vision, direction, priorities, plans of action, and progress of a product over time. It is a tool that shows what are the short-term and long-term goals of a product, and the entire plan for achieving them in the product journey.

A Product Roadmap is an important document that shows the product goals and the strategy to achieve those goals. These goals must be set keeping in mind what your product users want from the product because the ultimate goal is always User Satisfaction and thus making your product successful and achieving high business growth with it.

And to know whether your users are satisfied with the product or will be satisfied with your upcoming product or not, it is necessary to collect and consider Product Feedback while making the Product Roadmap. Let’s understand more clearly how User Feedback Affects the success of your product.

How user Feedback Affects the Success of your Product?

User Relationship is not one-way relationship. It is and it must be a two-way relationship where you just not only convey what you want but also listen to what the users want to share. It is crucial to listen to the voice of the customers to know what they want, what they don’t, what they expect from your product and what they are ready to pay for. All this information is pretty necessary in order to be able to develop a great product and make it a success.

Great products are not developed in vacuum. If you really want to develop products that your customers love to invest in, you must care for their needs and expectations. In an isolated system, you just take suggestions from your internal teams, but when you collect User Feedback, you get rich insights from the actual users who are going to invest in your product and use it to do their tasks and make their lives easier. Who would be better than them to give you an idea of what you should develop? You must develop such products which are in line with the needs and expectations of the users.

User Feedback lets you know their likes, dislikes, issues, frustrations, satisfaction, and much more to let you know how an ideal product should be. Collecting this information will save you from just imposing a product of your own wish onto the users and then trying to persuade them to invest their money in that product without much success.

The best approach is to be in a two-way conversation with your users and potential customers to develop what they need. Conversate with your users, send them surveys, ask their opinions and suggestions and collect Product Feedback to know how your product works for them and how they want it to work. Address customer issues, resolve them on time, and close the feedback loop effectively.

Measure User Satisfaction with your product with the help of effective Product Feedback Surveys and improve your product with Product Feedback in accordance with the needs and expectations of your users. In this way, you will be able to develop products that your customers love and reach heights of success.

How to Collect and Use User Feedback to Build an Effective Product Roadmap?

There are several ways of collecting User Feedback and using it for improving your product. Here are some effective ways that you can use for the purpose.

1. Ask for Suggestions from Users and potential users

As stated above, user relationships should be built on two-way communication, so you cannot impose products of your choice on the users. It is always better to collect users’ opinions and ask for their suggestions regarding your product. The best way is to share open-ended surveys for this purpose.

Open-ended survey questions give an opportunity to your users to share their detailed opinions and suggestions in their own words. They can suggest features, tell you what they feel is missing in your product, and can even tell what competitors are offering them better and how you can make your product better than your competitors.

This valuable information helps you know about the market and understand more clearly about the users’ perceptions, and expectations, and think from a broader perspective about what you can do to fulfill those expectations.

2. Share Product Feedback Surveys to collect feedback

Product Feedback Surveys are the best way to collect User Feedback about their experience with your product.  By using a good Product Feedback Tool or app, you can easily create powerful and effective Product Feedback Surveys and share them with your users through multiple channels like emails, SMS, website-embedded surveys, slideouts, and feedback buttons.

Use almost every channel you can to share surveys and provide opportunities for your users for sharing their feedback. You can use multiple types of surveys and metrics to measure User Satisfaction and loyalty to your product and brand. You can use NPS Surveys to measure loyalty, CSAT Surveys to measure Customer Satisfaction, and CES Surveys to measure the users’ effort in working with your product.

You can even use surveys to send to your target audience or potential users to understand better their needs and ideas of an ideal product so that you can work on them to develop powerful products.

3. Analyze User Feedback

When you receive User Feedback, the next task is to analyze all the feedback data. With an effective Customer Feedback Software, you get a powerful dashboard and reports to analyze the feedback and feedback trends to understand about users’ reactions and perceptions towards your product and its various features.

Analyze the feedback data to know what most of your customers like and dislike about your product. Maybe there’s a feature you are thinking of removing but most users love that feature. Maybe there’s a feature that most customers don’t need and you are continuously spending your resources to make that feature more advanced. There can be a bug that bothers most of your users while using your product, or there can be issues with your customer service team and its performance.

Analyzing feedback will help you know all this and know the strengths and weaknesses of your product and make better product decisions.

4. Use the analytics to take action and develop or improve products

When you have analyzed the feedback data, use this information to make better decisions. Strengthen the aspects that most of your customers like, and eliminate bugs and issues that your users find as a hindrance in using your product.

You can also review and use Product Analytics as User Feebdack. Product Usage data is a great source of information that you can use as Product Feedback. Although, your customers didn’t provide this feedback intentionally, however, this helps you understand how they use your product and what you can do to ease their work and improve their experience.

All these ways and sources of information help you make better strategic plans and prepare a great Product Roadmap to achieve your product goals. But here’s a caution too! Let’s explore this caution you should pay attention to while using customer feedback tools to make your Product Roadmap.

Analyzing Priorities and Creating Product Roadmap Accordingly

User Feebdack is important and helpful for creating a Product Roadmap effectively, but this is not the soul thing that matters and you can’t rely on just every feedback. Sometimes, users themselves don’t know what they actually need. So you must take care while following users’ suggestions and working on their feedback.

You must analyze all feedback and suggestions and see what’s more important before following a suggestion or making a decision. For instance, some users want a certain feature added to your product, but to add that you have to make major changes in those aspects of the product which are the greatest strengths of your product, or there is a heavy cost involved which most users would not like and can churn.

Therefore, you must analyze thoughtfully what your customers say and what they really need, and what are your own objectives. Remember that you cannot always sacrifice other strengths to fulfill one user expectation. Analyze the trends that follow, keep priorities in mind and make wise product decisions while creating a Product Roadmap.

Conclusion

User Feedback is crucial to building an effective Product Roadmap and taking your product toward success. The best way to collect feedback is using Product Feebdack Surveys and making your Product Roadmap considering the Product Feedback so collected. But you can’t take just feedback into consideration and ignore other aspects. Analyze feedback and consider your priorities while making product decisions and creating a Product Roadmap.

For sharing feedback surveys and collecting User Feedback, you should use a good Product Feedback Tool that helps you not only collect and analyze feedback, but also measure trends, and take action on feedback accordingly to enhance User Satisfaction.

Zonka Feedback is one of the most effective Product Feedback tools that you can use to create effective surveys, and share them with your users via multiple channels and collect feedback. With its powerful reporting and dashboard capabilities, it also enables you to analyze feedback and trends and take action on feedback to improve your product and enhance User Satisfaction and prevent churn.

You can start using Zonka Feedback for free and see how it works for you. Take a free trial for 7 days.