Hey there, I'm Pietro, Head of Product here at FeedBear.
I've spent the last 10 years building products. Along the way I've learnt that relying on intuition or brainstorming sessions simply isn't the best approach to define your roadmap or product strategy.
It's essential to follow your vision, but if you find yourself thinking customers "should want" something, you may not truly know what they want. Don't leave it to chance or a gut-feel, don't waste precious time and money building the wrong thing.
Trust me, I've done that mistake a couple times. Through multiple changes of direction, good and bad ones, I've learnt to listen to customers.
Our experience taught us that the best ideas come from engaging with customers and observing their interactions with our products.
Customer interviews are useful, and we use them frequently, but there's an even more efficient and effective way to tap into a continuous flow of ideas from customers: opening a dedicated channel for their feedback and insights.
FeedBear's solution: a simple idea board to collect ideas, feedback and feature requests directly from customers (or by your team on behalf of customers). Let customers vote on the best ideas, comment and participate. Share a roadmap to keep them up to date with what you're working. A space to for customers to participate and engage in your product building process.
This direct line to your customers will:
- Give you a constant stream of product ideas, problems and needs
- Reduce support requests, as customers learn to use your board to make suggestions and report issues
- Bring structure to feature requests, feedback and bug reports – ending the chaos of tickets, spreadsheets and Slack channels.
General tools like spreadsheets, Trello boards, and Notion can help you store ideas or tasks, but are not designed to truly involve your customers and let them participate and fail to provide meaningful opportunities for customer engagement, digging deeper to find the source problem and closing the feedback loop by keeping customers updated about what you've released.
Thanks for giving FeedBear a try. If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly at pietro@feedbear.com.
