Create Win-Win-Win situations: Bring your Product team and your community together

Graphic about a win-win-win partnership between a product team and its community.
Graphic: Create Win-Win-Win situations: Bring your Product team and your community together

So you are actively identifying customer experience issues by now. It is now time to really boost your community by building a Community Feedback Program.

If you do it right, you can create a Win-Win-Win situation:

  • The Program adds great value to your Product team – because they can directly talk to the customers who are using your products
  • It makes your users feel seen and be heard – because they have influence in the products they use
  • and it positions your community as THE destination for customer centric exchange

So, let’s take a look at how your Feedback Program will fit your Product Development Cycle.

Connect feedback with product development

Circular product development cycle: Market Research, Analysis & Positioning; Product Development; (Beta) Testing; and Release Iterations / Maintenance.
Graphic: Integrating Community Feedback into the Product Development Cycle

This is a simplified version of a Product Development Cycle. It includes all the steps where the voice of the customer can have a direct impact in making the product better.

  1. In the Research phase, your product team can use the community to find out the needs and wants of the customers.
  2. In the development stage your product team can test first prototypes or they can get feedback about the user journey for the product.
  3. Then, there’s the Beta Testing stage. You can let community users find bugs, let them test the user journey and your can get feedback about feature priorities.
  4. And after the product is launched, you can again listen to the community in terms of bugs and pain points and you can include users’ feature requests for future updates.

Launching and growing a Community Feedback Program is a topic of its own, so let’s focus here on the basic principles every feedback project should follow.

Community feedback project guidance: Time is finite, Precise Scope, Benefits, Communication, and Close The Loop, with supporting explanations.
Graphic: How to: Community Feedback Projects

Run feedback projects people value

No matter if you start an Ideation Program, do Market Research surveys or launch a Beta Testing Program, there are some rules that you should follow.

  1. Don’t waste anybody’s time
  2. Be precise in what you want from your participants
  3. What do the users get out of it when they take part? 
  4. Keep a conversation going – ask follow-up questions
  5. Let the participants know what will happen with their feedback

In the end, you want them to trust you with their time, and with their feedback. You want them to be motivated for the next project because they see that their opinion matters and it makes for a better product. And you want them to feel a sense of ownership and become an advocate for the product.

You want your users to feel proud and say
“Hey, I’ve been a part in making this product”

Next step: Now it’s time to focus on building a strong community where people really feel like they belong.

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