Background
We had a hypothesis based on feedback from various departments that customer feedback was communicated through various channels in an unstructured way resulting in frustration and a lack of transparency for both internal teams and our clients. I led an initiative to benchmark the current state of how the business has been communicating customer feedback with the product squads and how they received product updates. I spoke to the folks who interact with Product the most across Customer Success, Sales, People (HR), Finance, Payroll and Marketing to better understand how we could make better use of customer information.
Internal Research Findings
1. The Product Digest (a monthly report) isn’t working for everyone. Omnipresent staff would rather receive custom short highlights from the Product Team for each department with only relevant information that impacts them
2. Roadmaps need to be simple, digestible and accessible for both internal staff and customers
3. We need to create some defaults for communication with everyone - there are too many formats and too many channels. This applies not only to comms from Product, but how staff submit insights or requests to Product and know that it is being accounted for.
Recommendations and Implementation
Following an analysis phase with the VP Product and alignment with senior stakeholders, a new standardised process was communicated to the business:
1. Customer feedback typically comes into these first three categories, which are customer support, sales and marketing.
2. Those are external sources and of course those people also have internal needs. But also there's other groups who just have internal needs, such as finance and the people team as well as other groups.
3. So all of those things go into an issue list which we launched as part of this initiative - Canny.io
4. Canny gives us a way to track suggestions that our internal team make based on data from customers as well as other sources.
2. Those are external sources and of course those people also have internal needs. But also there's other groups who just have internal needs, such as finance and the people team as well as other groups.
3. So all of those things go into an issue list which we launched as part of this initiative - Canny.io
4. Canny gives us a way to track suggestions that our internal team make based on data from customers as well as other sources.
We also use two other tools for analysis in Product and Design:
5. TheyDo is where we do our journey mapping. This is where we capture these giant streams of the way in which users work through our system (Service Design)
6. Dovetail is our research library, where we aggregate all our clues and form themes and insights out of them, which then helps inform our roadmaps.
7. These tools can be viewed by anyone in the business - TheyDo, Dovetail or Canny, for example: and staff can see where the status is of their requests are and how we’re prioritising.
5. TheyDo is where we do our journey mapping. This is where we capture these giant streams of the way in which users work through our system (Service Design)
6. Dovetail is our research library, where we aggregate all our clues and form themes and insights out of them, which then helps inform our roadmaps.
7. These tools can be viewed by anyone in the business - TheyDo, Dovetail or Canny, for example: and staff can see where the status is of their requests are and how we’re prioritising.
8. Using the info in those tools, we create Roadmaps, Product Requirements Documents and Demos, all which you can find in Notion. They have the details of the features we will build and in which order.
9. All of this becomes the formal output which product marketing is going to use to create specific outputs for everyone, including our customers. They don't exist yet. So we're going to lean-in to help Marketing as much as possible
9. All of this becomes the formal output which product marketing is going to use to create specific outputs for everyone, including our customers. They don't exist yet. So we're going to lean-in to help Marketing as much as possible
We also experimented to get Intercom, Gong and planhat data into our analysis tools too and standardising our tagging across all platforms.
Launch of Canny.io
I then launched Canny in a company all hands:
This is THE place to start a conversation with the Product Team about your idea. We will send across a loom recording to get you started. Product Squads will use your ideas as well as other inputs, to help them work out which problems to tackle and how.
This is THE place to start a conversation with the Product Team about your idea. We will send across a loom recording to get you started. Product Squads will use your ideas as well as other inputs, to help them work out which problems to tackle and how.
Here you submit an issue to solve. It is a really simple short form. The best is a clear problem statement; you may even have an idea on how to solve it. Then we'll engage with you to try to help figure out how we find the right solution The Heads of Product will regularly review Canny and ask you for clarifications and provide updates on its status
In a business like ours with so many of you interacting with clients and client employees, we expect lots of ideas to be coming in so please engage with this tool.
