We have a plethora of tools at the ready for understanding what happens when (and for how long) on any pixel we wish to study—giving product teams an incredible amount of power (and leverage).
As with all sources of power comes a trade-off; by over-indexing on quantitative data you forsake a crucial source of information: your end users’ wishes.
Losing the voice of your customer begins to fragment the bias associated with what’s most important on your team or within your org—it starts a little fire under the bridge connecting the customer experience and the product, and unless it’s tended to, it can get out of hand.
I’ve seen first-hand where teams have fallen into the trap of almost exclusively leaning on quant. Focusing on a metric in a funnel that screams “improve me” is only part of the story. The bigger, unanswered questions within the datapoint always harken back to “why?”, and to answer that we need grounding in qualitative feedback.
The question becomes: How might we design an experience that heightens our overall knowledge (and perception) of product health through a qualitative lens?
One thing product managers are especially good at is “Monday Morning News”: interpreting data, analyzing competitor goings-on, and other events from the past week. It’s all voluntary, but highly necessary to keep up-to-date with what’s occurring inside and outside of the product.
The answer to the above question is the establishment of a “River of Feedback”, and idea that I had originally learned from Reforge. Aggregating qualitative input sources into one channel allows the team to dip in, reading at-will like Monday Morning News. It allows everyone the same level of access to information derived directly from customers.
A River of Feedback instruments and funnels the voice of the customer directly back to Product. When consumed, it begins to remove recency bias as readers start to readily recall what customers needs are when speculating on metrics.
The ingredients in the recipe are the inputs your team deems most valuable, and they are funneled into a team channel (ie Slack). We funneled everything we knew we could: NPS feedback, market research, cancellation messages—and did so with a custom filter on each to reduce overall channel noise (posting a monthly NPS report rather than every submission, for example).