Opportunity

A small B2B software company like NewsWhip will always struggle to find good qualitative feedback with such a small pool of customers. I drove the adoption of a continuous feedback process across Design and Product. This allowed us to gather got as much feedback as we could from our limited resources. The initiative involved collaboration across multiple departments within NewsWhip.

Enthusiastic Ownership

I've learned that the key to making any initiative successful is appointing someone to own it and giving them the support and guidance they need. For this project, I assigned Sorcha Doyle (a newly-hired junior designer) who was very enthusiastic about UX research. I explained what we were trying to achieve and helped her establish the process, checkpoints and success criteria.

The Process

Firstly we established that all feedback gathered from customers across the company would be documented in Craft.io, our PM tool. This required buy in from all customer-facing teams. Sorcha rolled out training across all departments so everyone understood not just the process but also the benefits for everyone.

Once feedback started coming through the funnel, Sorcha triaged it and identified any opportunities of interest to PMs. These opportunities would be sent to them where upon they would quickly reach out to the customers and invite them to discuss further. Our goal was to build up a pool of customers around each of our key initiatives that would provide ongoing feedback.

Results

The process was a huge success and has remained in place for five years. By enabling direct and quick feedback loops between PMs and customers, we embedded user-centred product development throughout the product lifecycle.