This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube talk titled "Ron Gutman: Don't Fear Feedback" (created 2015-04-17) featuring Ron Gutman speaking to an audience about product development and user engagement. He advises launching simple proofs of concept, iterating rapidly based on user feedback, treating vocal critics as valuable QA, and describes how involving early-adopting physicians made them feel ownership and drove organic, clinician-to-clinician growth.
Chapters
But in order to make better products, you need to keep iterating on them all the time. Start simple and then iterate and iterate. Listen to users, listen to what they say and just don't be afraid to launch products very quickly. Not everything that we launch or I launch in my career worked, a lot of things didn't work. Don't be afraid, just go out. And the best way to testing is with people. Test small, don't test big, don't wait for a long time, wait for many, many months and years to build the perfect things. You are going to be too late because if it's an amazing thing, someone would have launched it before you, right? And if it's not so great, you just wasted a lot of time. Create a proof of concept, go simple, get it into the market and iterate very, very rapidly with users and it's okay. A lot of them will tell you that it's not working well. One thing that I really liked at the beginning with the early adopting physicians and people are asking me all the time, Why do physicians do that? Like how did you start the whole thing, right? I'm sure that someone will ask it here. And the reason that physicians at the beginning got really engaged in what we were doing is we got them really involved in the process of giving us feedback. And they felt that they actually have a huge impact on the product itself. And the doctors that helped us most were the ones that were most vocal. And trust me, you start getting these snarky emails about how useless what we're doing is and like this long 4-page email that's like the whole email is like, this is terrible and this is wrong and it's like when I see these emails, the first thing that they do is pick up the phone and talk with the person and make best friends with them. Why? Because you just spent 3 hours QAing my product. It doesn't matter how snarky the email is, they care about my product. They're the best thing that can ever happen to you. They love it enough to just maybe use a few curse words or whatever it is, but it's okay, you can filter through that because they will give you feedback. And they were the best people for us when we didn't have money to hire QA people, they were the best QA people and they got very excited because we listened to them. They participated, they felt it's their own. And now the doctor community owns what we're doing, they love it, they invite— doctors invite one another, the best way for us to bring more doctors on board is doctor inviting one another. Why? Because it's their own and we still do that.
