WHEN BUILDING A PRODUCT, TREAT NEGATIVE USER FEEDBACK LIKE GOLD. AND, DIG FOR IT

Here's what I learned as a former Startup Founder of a 2-sided decentralized marketplace, current CEO of a software design, development & consulting corp, and an often misunderstood quote from Steve Jobs.

I've been in rooms full of Startup Founders, Fortune 500 CEOs, CMOs, or Product Leaders, and I've rarely met one that didn't acknowledge how critical user and client feedback is to building a great technology product.

And yet, I cannot express how often I've worked with large corporate clients and startup founders who actively avoid negative feedback or skip gathering user feedback about their product, especially when they're married to a deadline.

Here's the thing about deadlines. They're valuable for aligning time, capital & teams. But some leaders are so date-focused they'll bypass feedback in exchange for earning a deadline trophy. Worse yet, some will avoid negative input and explicitly seek false confirmation.

Many of us who have built or are building products forget that it's the product getting negative feedback, not us. Negative feedback doesn't feel good - especially if you've invested tons of passion, energy, capital & resources. We care about our work.

What if we treat negative feedback as Useful Insights? Can those insights help us create more value for users + a product they love? Interactions (good, bad & ugly) with users are ideal moments to learn more about them. This shift in mindset opens up a world of opportunities.

So, THE MINDSET HERE treats negative user feedback as Useful User Insights = food for building products that people love. As a result, opportunities to optimize, monetize or charge more for greater value – beyond what we may have thought existed.

Following is a 3-step practical approach that can be applied to building any tech product (or any product): 

1. Start gathering critical feedback, build a prototype, and get it in front of real users before you fall in love with your product concept. 

2. Pursue clarity about the problem you're solving + who your primary users are is table stakes. And, being sincerely obsessed with user feedback from real users & customers - versus friends & family (or mythical users that don't exist) is a must to build a great product.

3. Make user feedback a normal part of the prototyping, design & build process. Incorporating user feedback in week one, design decisions, and bi-weekly sprints sets a tone and mindset for the entire team. User feedback becomes normalized learning, iterating + optimizing

Ways to gather user feedback

1. Factor in + document intuition-based design at every stage – from prototyping to endless

2. Observe how users behave with the product

3. Run 1on1 user interviews

4. Test, measure, document, and repeat - with data

5. Research & seek out trends

6. Gather feedback using heatmap software/user analytics tools (https://www.guru99.com/best-heatmap-software.html) and via team members that often interact w users and buyers (beta testers; early adopters; sophisticated consumers & established enterprise clients)

BTW I❤️+ promote learning from data & quantitative insights. But I haven't found anything that stacks up to qualitative feedback when sincerely aiming to figure out why someone won't use or buy a product, decided to cancel their subscription, become inactive, or is using it in new ways.

"People don't know what they want until you show it to them." – Steve Jobs. At first, I thought Steve meant that Apple doesn't value consumer feedback. But I realized that wasn't the case.

Business Week. Steve, Did you do consumer research on the iMac when developing it? Steve: No. We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base. We also watch industry trends pretty carefully.

But in the end, for something this complicated, it's tough to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why ppl at Apple get paid a lot of $$$ bc they're supposed to be on top of things.

My interpretation of Jobs' comment evolved two years into my 12 years in tech as a non-technical leader (alongside my CoFounder and CTO). A key takeaway from Jobs' comment was that he didn't always believe that customer suggestions were the best way to solve a problem.

Apple's process:

1. monitor trends, perform research, and speak with customers to spot fundamental problems, and

2. hire the best available talent to come up with a solution.

Jobs (or, more specifically, Jony Ive, the head of product design at the time) still influences the way my team and I not only leverage NEGATIVE USER feedback. We look for NEGATIVE USER feedback and make it an integral part of our product evolution at every stage.