Mike Lyons walks through five ways to collect customer feedback: surveys, focus groups, shadowing, product demos, and data telemetry. Each reveals different truths about what customers say versus what they actually do. Pick the right mix to understand your customers.
As you can imagine, there are a plethora of different ways to get customer feedback, and there's a time and a place for each different type. Some methods, they work better than others, depending on what you're trying to learn. But here are five feedback methods that I use with product teams all the time. Let's start with the basics and something you are no doubt familiar with, probably because you ignore them just like I do. Surveys, they're like casting a wide net. They help you collect quick responses from many people at once. But the response rate is typically pretty low, and the responses tend to be a little shallow. Surveys only tell you what people say, not what they actually do. For instance, if you survey people about their morning routine, they might tell you that they eat a healthy breakfast every day. But if you could dig a little deeper, you might find that what they mean is they grab a cup of coffee and a donut on the run, for example. Well, then we have focus groups. Now, focus groups, that's like having a conversation with six to eight customers at once. You can show them your product, watch their reactions. You can hear them build on each other's ideas. But remember, people often act differently in a group than they do in real life. Don't underestimate the power of peer pressure, both positive and negative. You know, it's really only when you watch what people actually do that you see the real story. In his powerful book, Leadership is Language, David Marquet talks about blue work versus red work. Red work, well, that's just what we were talking about. It's executing tasks like filling out a survey or following a script and focus group. But blue work, that's about thinking and exploring and learning. This is like where real insights come from. And that's why customer shadowing is so powerful. You literally spend time watching your customers use your product in their actual workspace. No artificial settings, no prepared questions, just people doing real work. I know. I talked about the team in Kenya that I worked with where we learned that they needed a lightweight app that could run on basic devices. You'll remember the problem wasn't connectivity, it was the device itself. Well, we discovered that through direct customer shadowing. Okay. Another great technique for gathering feedback is something you're probably familiar with, and that's the product demo. A product demo is a live walkthrough of your product with real customers or stakeholders, where you show working software, not slides or mockups, but actual software. Now, the product owner typically runs the demo, and anyone who's interested in the product can attend. Customers, users, stakeholders, the development team. And as a po, you're going to do a lot of this. It's actually one of my favorite things to do. Now, just a pro tip here. Instead of trying to prove our product at the demo, we want to probe for better understanding. See, when we probe instead of prove, we learn what customers actually need, not just what we want to hear. Let them see how your product solves real problems they face every day. For example, don't just show how a button works. Instead, ask how would this quick submit button compare to your current end of shift processes? See that question? It lets them kind of connect the dots between your solution and their daily work. And guess what their response it will tell you if you solve the right problem. Okay, one more here. Data telemetry. Now, data telemetry is just a fancy way of describing the automatically collected data about how people use your product. Think of it like a security camera in a store. It captures everything that happens, but it doesn't interfere. This is sort of always on and recording. Every click, every page view, every feature used or ignored gets recorded. The data tells you the real story of how people use your product when nobody's watching. For example, telemetry might show you that users spend three minutes on step two of your checkout process, but only 10 seconds everywhere else. Or maybe 80% of people never scroll down far enough to see your most important features. A company I worked for once thought their new search feature was a hit because customers said they loved it. But the data telemetry showed that only 5% were actually using it, and everyone else was using the old navigation menu instead. The beauty of telemetry is that it's honest. It shows you what people actually do, not what they say they do. All right, there you have it. 5 Ways to Gather customer feedback. Surveys, focus groups, customer shadowing, product demos, and data telemetry. Now, this is going to sound a little weird, but as a po, your job isn't to collect feedback. No, it's to understand your customers. So pick the right tools for the job, and don't be afraid to mix them up. You can either guess what your customers want or. Or you can get out there and find out for real. One of these approaches, it works. And the other approach, it creates. Quickster.
