Episode 73: The other F-word, FEEDBACK w/Melissa Klemke

Feedback, both positive and negative, plays a crucial role in shaping the success of any product. While personal feedback might be hard to digest, feedback related to your product is a goldmine of valuable insights. Melissa emphasizes the need for a constructive approach to distill and utilize feedback effectively.

Melissa shares a feedback exercise she conducted with her previous team, designed to challenge the team's assumptions and ensure they were working on the most important aspects. She asked her team to identify their top three problems and articulate why those were the most critical issues to address. The exercise also involved rating their confidence level in each problem and identifying the sources of feedback that influenced their decisions.

During the exercise, Melissa discovered a range of common feedback reasons that teams often rely on to prioritize their work. These reasons included sales feedback, analytics data, competitor influence, customer requests, and defect tickets. While these sources can provide valuable insights, it is crucial to critically evaluate their significance and align them with your overall product vision.

To avoid tunnel vision and gain a broader perspective, product managers should actively seek feedback from a variety of sources. Melissa highlights the importance of stakeholder feedback, ad hoc feedback, workshops, product communities, defect check trends, analytics, customer feedback requests, and customer market research. By diversifying their sources, product managers can obtain a well-rounded understanding of their customers' needs and market dynamics.

Melissa encourages product managers to challenge their own assumptions and be open to refining their confidence levels. The exercise she shared provides a framework for revisiting and reassessing assumptions, allowing product managers to adjust their confidence levels based on new insights. Learning from failures and experiments is an integral part of growth and improvement.

Once feedback has been collected, distilling and prioritizing it becomes critical. Product managers need to evaluate the potency of different feedback sources and consider the biases associated with second-hand feedback. By triangulating insights from multiple sources and building a compelling confidence story, product managers can enhance their decision-making and become more effective in their roles.

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