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Paul VanZandt

How early did you start integrating user feedback?

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User feedback is crucial to the product development cycle - but it isn't always the first step to building a successful product. How early in your journey did you start integrating user feedback? "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford
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Pablo Fatas
From the beginning. At SigmaOS we have a slack community of our users (sigmaos.com/community) and they give us feedback and report bugs everyday. We use these reports in our sprint plans to plan our tasks everyweek. We also have a subset of them we call QA squad and they get early realeases to beta test before the official release and it has worked great for us 😊
Paul VanZandt
@pablo_fatas Creating a slack community for your users is a really great way to interact with them and include them in the process - thanks for the tip!
Pablo Fatas
@paul_vanzandt It is something I am quite proud of. Feel free to join just to check out how it is set up 😊 I mean you could always try and use SigmaOS as well 😉
tneogi
This is one of the questions I think about pretty much every day as a product builder. Personally, I start very early but I keep a filter on - I don't think we live in Henry Ford's era so sticking to that line completely wouldn't help. Users today have a higher openness to tech adoption and to trying out new ideas. However, not everything that people say should make it into the product. And not everything that people reject should be thrown away. I have tried my best to keep getting feedback as early as pre-MVP and I typically do a lot of closed betas (even with things that have only UI and no backend) and rapid iteration developments. I keep listening but don't necessarily change the product direction or feature set until it hits a milestone. In the earliest phase, it's not strictly a "user" but a potential user, and in many cases, it's just one or two people, to begin with.
Paul VanZandt
@tneogi I completely agree. I think gathering feedback across every stage of development is important, but that doesn't mean that all of that feedback should be integrated at that time (or at all). As builders, it's our responsibility to find solutions, and customer feedback is usually the best mechanism to point out problems. This means that sometimes, their proposed solution won't actually be the most effective one.
NotesbyHugh
I store all feedback requests in a database and usually seek to implement (if it aligns with my vision) after at least 10 counts of the same feedback. Not a perfect method but it's a start!
Paul VanZandt
@hugh_dawkins putting an emphasis on vision alignment is super important because that's a slippery slope
Solomon Bush
I integrated user feedback after my first beta release.
Paul VanZandt
@solomon_bush I see you didn't waste any time - good advice.
Mark Wellman
We started right at the beginning but sparingly. Some feedback was for very niche use-cases which didn't make sense to add early on. Similar to what Hugh said, start an Excel sheet to track incoming feedback. This will help identify specific items or themes that come up regularly so you can prioritize better.
Paul VanZandt
@mark_wellman I agree - feedback is most effective when there are recognizable patterns that you can act on.
Dylan Merideth
In an ongoing fashion, after the initial build and flow of the product was cohesive. Ramped up for private beta
Paul VanZandt
@dylan_merideth Sounds like a steady, controlled strategy.
Svetlana Bulega
We started collecting feedback right after the first release. Beta testers were willing to give feedback. Thanks to this, we knew what our product was missing and quickly reacted to it.
Paul VanZandt
@svetlana_bulega This is the blueprint that most people should follow for successful feedback integration. Congrats!
Liana Karapetyan
You need to integrate user feedback from the very very early begining when you don't even have the product, so that you can build it based on validated hypothesises.
Paul VanZandt
@liana_karapetyan7 I couldn't agree more - this is also a place to validate if people will pay for the end product!
Hannah
In my opinion, every launching product needs feedback from the user for better improvement and innovation. User feedback contributes to the Marketing and Business Development Team to deliver the right messages and ways to work with them, the Developers Team to build and innovate features in that product.
don alex
However, not everything individuals say should be included in the final work. Furthermore, not everything that people reject should be discarded. real estate istanbul
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