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How to use customer feedback in your PLG product roadmap?

How to use customer feedback in your PLG product roadmap?

Collect, Organize, Influence, Prioritize

Gary Chan
October 30, 2024

Are we building whatever we want or what the customers want?

Here's how we use customer feedback in our PLG roadmap…

How can we collect user feedback to inform a product-led growth strategy?

We collect user feedback from:

Superhuman onboarding
Follow-up from tech touches

We launched PLG in 2022

We took the "superhuman onboarding"

A 30min call to help customers onboard and get activated

We have 5 - 10 calls everyday

And we collect experience feedback

From listening 👂🏼

From observing 👀

From asking 🗣️

What I called the PLG Learning Flywheel

We translate these feedbacks

Into the roadmap

After the call…

We follow up with our customers

For customers likely to upsell 🙋🏻‍♂️

We have high-touch manual cadences

We hop on additional calls to get them activated

We listen for feedback from buyers, and end-users

For customers not* likely to upsell or ready… 🙅

We automate sending them low touches

Emails include reminding customers to activate

If there any issue, reach out to us

So we collect feedback slowly from nonactivated customers

How can we organize user feedback to inform a product-led growth strategy?

We did NOT do a good job here

It's based on sentiments

Our PLG team will communicate to the Product team when …

Likely-to-upsell customers have bugs or issues 🪳

If they have big advanced product feedback…

We share it with the core product team

All of this is on Slack… unfortunately

So it's easy to lose track of it 😫

We send feedback to ProductBoard, our roadmap tool

But making sense of the PLG themes was difficult… 😫

Reflecting back, it was cumbersome and not effective 🤦🏻‍♂️

Because

We would share a huge feedback list

… OR …

Share feedback as they come in

To our team

^ Unfortunately, I think that impacted our credibility 😰

If I were to do it again… ✍🏻

I would review monthly customer conversations from

… Email, chat, calls, support tickets …

Organize feedback by segments

From likely-to-upsell customers

And unlikely to upsell customers

Then, I would prioritize this into

⭐️⭐️⭐️ The "Top 3 PLG Themes" ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Present this to the Product team

It would be a more strategic way

To influence the overall product roadmap 👍🏼

How do we gain the trust of engineers and designers regarding user feedback for a product-led growth strategy?

We clipped Gong calls

We share emails

Direct quotes

We use usage data to back up

Some of it is still not* convincing enough 🤔

What helped tremendously 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

Is getting Core Product Teams (engineers, designers)

Onto the "superhuman onboarding" calls

Our team observes how users interact with the product

Letting Engineers and Designers ask customer questions

Getting Product folks as close to customers as possible 🫱🏽🫲🏼

This establishes trust

Our product team now knows how PLG team conducts these user calls 👌

Our product team now see real human users struggling 👌

Our product team can now prioritize the roadmap knowing that users are struggling 👌

All assumptions are out the door

Hopping on a call did wonders 🙌🏼

Engineers and Designers clearly know the process where we get feedback from

We can now pass the trust & credibility part 🤩

And into solving and prioritizing the issues

How do we prioritize user feedback in a product-led growth strategy?

Prioritization Rubric

♦️ Bugs

♦️ Likely to upsell customers

♦️ Non-bug Experience issues many customers faced

First and foremost, we need to squash bugs

By hitting 404, we lose trust in our users

Specifically when most of our experiences are self served

The networking effect can go bad as well

… "It's PLG, but the product is not ready"… 🤬

… "It's easy to use, but it always crashes"… 🤬

… "Great team, but it's so slow to load"… 🤬

We have to fix it

Otherwise, our trust erodes with the whole community

Then…

We focus on prioritizing use cases for likely-to-upsell customers

Most of the time…

It's making sure

👉🏽 How-to use the platform

👉🏽 The Why* behind advanced features

👉🏽 How to Quantify the value & ROI

Paying customers want to make sure

They are making the best business decision possible

We focused on building

Paywalls

Discoverability

Entitlement

With the theme of upselling

Finally

Any feedback on user experience

We gather feedback as much as we can

We discuss with our designers

What is the intended UX

How can we educate the customer on the product better 👍🏼

—

We are listening to our customers

Through calls, emails, chats

We could been more strategic…

… in how we communicate feedback back to the team

Into "Top 3 PLG themes"

So we can influence the roadmap better

And narratively, keep sounding that alarm

While getting engineers and designs in front of customers

It helps humanize building a better product

Making sure customers can self-serve

Without hitting bugs

And that customers find paywalls

By listening to our customers and their upselling

Creates a powerful PLG feedback loop

Into our product roadmap

And

Into our product development cycles