Before we delve too deep into what is product sense, and how to go about it as a product team, let's start by thinking about our own behavior as a customer.
Recall the last time, when you shared an idea or complaint for a product. If your feedback went unaddressed for a long time, how likely are you to continue using the product?
You might be lenient for once, twice.. but if the product team keeps ignoring your perspectives for long, you will most probably walk away from the product with a bad taste.
In fact, you might even consider sharing negative reviews with others in your network.
What I am describing here, is still what we observe with a very forgiving customer.
Research suggests that 32% i.e. 1/3 of customers say they will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience.
Given this, it is crucial for product teams to always stay on top of their user needs, continuously engage with customers and scope urgent asks as soon as possible on the product backlog.
This is where product sense comes in.
What is product sense?
Product sense, is nothing but the ability to collate customer data, synethesize it to gain a deep understanding of what users want and developing an intuition of what would make a product great.
The challenge of product sense.
Typically, developing product sense is NOT a one-time kickstart activity. It's a continuous one throughout the product lifecycle.
It's natural for product teams to plan a lengthy customer research cycle at the start of building a product. However, the trap that many teams fall into, is not engaging with the customers on a continuous basis.
Sure, the initial customer research would help the product teams develop a sense of what the customer wants for minimum valuable product (MVP).
However, customer needs evolve regularly. Their feedback keeps changing as they interact with the product. What was relevant for users at the start might have completely changed now.
If we were to ask you to keep a tab of customer feedback across multiple channels (even if it's just 2 or 3), how good a job you think you would do on a regular basis?
Users tend to use any channel available, to talk about the products they use. They are everywhere.
Product teams can't really control where users voice their opinions.
Organizations spin up an official customer support channel. They might also provide a portal, where customers are meant to share any product ideas or requests.
However, they can't stop customers from talking on other channels.
Customers share feedback on social media.
They are talking to your sellers and customer success representatives regularly.
They are escalating tickets via emails.
They are interacting with your web chat feature.
And using any other channel they can find to make their voices heard.
So, building a rhythm of product sense depending on manual analysis of customer feedback across channels is nearly impossible. This absolutely needs automation.
Even if the team is highly disciplined, they can only reach a handful of customer feedback on a weekly or monthly basis at best.
That's where an AI copilot like Flash comes in.
Flash consolidates customer voice across multiple channels, sorts it into relevant themes and makes it available in a unified view.
Product sense: Which data should you tap into?
In order to keep a continuous tab on all user feedback across channels, product teams need to think of all potential avenues where their customers might be talking about the product, and figure out how they can operationalize insights on top of this gold mine.
Here are key customer feedback channels to consider:
Customer support interactions:
On launching products, organization typically convey a support channel for users to raise any issues they face while using the product.
These could be in the form of support portals, web chat, in-product or simply an email to reach out.
Internally, organizations use tools like Zendesk, ServiceNow, FreshDesk or Intercom where the issues get collated.
Product teams need to tap into these customer support tickets/ interactions regularly, to get a sense of complaints or concerns that users have.
Customer collaboration platforms:
Modern product companies now use Slack, Teams, WhatsApp or even GitHub to collaborate, discuss or help customers.
Although community managers typically own first-response, product teams need to regularly review these discussions to get a sense of frequent asks and sentiment.
Social media/ Discussion groups:
Users engage with other product users in open forums.
Sources like Reddit, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Product Hunt etc. are actively used to voice perspectives and get community help. Even more so, when its an official channel - for eg. a product specific sub-reddit or LinkedIn group.
These channels are a rich source of insights, not just for product feedback but also for a broader market or compete pulse.
Review sites:
Users tend to submit product ratings and reviews on websites like G2, Capterra or even cloud marketplaces (AWS, Azure and GCP).
User reviews are a direct source of whether customers are appreciating the product, and are they voicing any pros and cons of the product.
Emails & Meetings:
Sales, customer success, support and product managers, all engage customers regularly via email or meetings.
Although the agenda might be different, users tend to voice their product asks or complaints in any forum they can get hold of the team.
While it would be ideal, it's not humanly possible for team members to be present in all conversations.
It's important to build mechanisms that consolidate and extract product-specific insights from these scattered interactions, and make it available for the team.
When automation is not prioritized, teams tend to request team members to share any customer learnings either through emails, IM or in meetings - although this carries a risk of missing out crucial updates.
CRM activity history:
If sellers diligently note all these customer interactions in CRM, it could be an important source to know whether customers asked for any product features, or sellers made any timeline commitments.
Major CRMs include Salesforce & Hubspot, but there could be industry-specific or niche CRM systems that your organization might be using.
Discovery interviews:
Product managers or UX researchers organize discovery interviews to validate hypothesis/ assumptions with users from time to time.
While this approach can reach only a handful of users, this is a very rich source of insights as product is the clear agenda in these meetings.
Typically, organizations tend to use Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Zoom to conduct these meetings - so their their transcripts are available and can be analyzed to draw intelligence.
Surveys:
Now, while interviews/ meetings have a limited audience reach, one of the techniques product teams use to cast a wider research net is surveys.
There are multiple avenues - in-app quick surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys or multiple question study surveys.
Short quick surveys with just 1 or 2 questions get the maximum responses.
In fact, LinkedIn polls is a great way to facilitate such a quick survey.
Conducting a survey inherently means that teams would need to analyze the responses thereafter for insights.
Focus group discussions:
If you think about it, FGDs (focus group discussions) are simply another form of customer meetings.
Just that it's likely to be conducted with a mixed group of users.
Still, mining these FGD recordings is very similar to insights from direct customer interviews.
You can extract ideas, complaints, appreciations, questions or any compete mentions.
It might get tricky though to extract which user from which organization within the FGD gave what feedback - that requires some advanced AI or manual annotation.
In-app feedback:
Many product teams deploy in-app widgets which they can use to get inputs, right when users are using the product.
It can be a flexible way to get any type of quick feedback - how they find the feature experience, their in-general NPS or sentiment, their ideas or new capability requests and so on.
Or another creative way of using in-app widgets is to simply ask time for a discovery meeting, which could later be scheduled.
This form of customer engagement is gaining a lot of adoption.
Research reports:
One other source of customer engagement, often ignored by product teams, is industry/ research reports.
Let alone the well-known Gartner or Forrester reports, there are instances where an industry specific agency feature a product in a report, and users start actively talking or evaluating the product from there.
Product teams need to keep an eye out for such opportunities, and ensure they capture the right insights and capitalize product growth opportunities from such exposure.
Other sources:
While feedback is a gold mine of qualitative insights, another important source to understand customers deeply is behavioral data from web/ app usage, but that's a topic for other posts.
And there are many other customer data sources like past purchases, credit history etc. - you can think of those more as customer 360, to help shape the product .
Holistic product sense factors all possible avenues which offer deep understanding of the customer, so that the product team build what users love and get accelerated growth.
Conclusion
Product teams tend to consolidate feedback across channels, but that alone is not sufficient.
Gleaning insights from collated customer data on an ongoing basis is challenging and time consuming.
Think about 100s of customer quotes showing up in Slack - will you be comfortable reviewing them daily?
That's where a solution like Flash comes in.
Flash connects with customer voice sources and continuously analyzes it to surface relevant product insights in the form of ideas, complaints, appreciations, questions, compete mentions etc. in a unified view.
So, what are you waiting for?
Connect with us TODAY, and explore how Flash can help you build and grow better.