Workflow of the Week: Improving Feedback with Product Management Survey Workflows
Delivering the product features your clients want and need with feedback and survey workflows.
Ask product managers how they prioritize building new features, and they will tell you that it is a careful balance between building what the customers ask for and staying one step ahead of features clients don’t even know they want yet. . How do product managers get these insights, and how do they leverage it to build the features of their customers’ dreams?
The answer is actually pretty simple: no psychoanalysis or Rorschach test required. Product managers engage with their field, scope out their competitors, engage with the latest technologies, and above all — get in touch with their customer base. The people who know your product best — who know what it is like to come up against a challenge and immediately look to your product as the solution — are the ones who are going to have the most information about how your product could be improved.
How workflow automation scales feedback
But as many product managers know, asking for feedback can sometimes open the floodgates. When dealing with hundreds — or even thousands — of users, gathering impactful feedback requires a combination of quality and quantity, like vetted polls, surveys, and more finely-grained questions. How do strategic product managers go about this challenge? Product managers who leverage workflow automation find themselves at an advantage when it comes to collecting, reviewing, and analyzing product feedback and feature requests.
Product feedback can be gathered in an ad-hoc manner in the application itself, as a customer identifies a particular problem or solution that they’d like to implement. But when product managers look for thick data sets to use in their roadmapping process, they often will send out a survey to a larger customer base.
Delivering quality feedback with automatically-customized questions and survey workflows
It’s critical that these surveys display uniquely for different users, depending on how someone interacts with the product. It wouldn’t make any sense for an end-user to see the same questions as systems administrators, or vice versa. Too many questions —especially when they are irrelevant — cause respondents to feel overwhelmed, undervalued, or simply lose interest. Workflow automation tools account for this by adjusting questions depending on how someone fills out their role in the very beginning.
Workflow automation also enables finely-grained routing capabilities. For product surveys, this means that depending on someone’s stated role, how they answered a particular question, or how close your relationship is to this particular customer, you can route the feedback in several different ways. For example, suppose your customers only provide answers to multiple-choice questions. In that case, your workflow’s analytics feature can pull them into charts and graphs to enable data visualization and data-driven decisions. But for your more complex answers, depending on the question or the customer, you can route them to your product owner, your product manager, or others for review.
Workflow automation encourages qualitative and quantitative feedback, so you can deliver the features your customers want and need.
