Ask HN: how do you store and organize product feedback?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6790685

by cl42 • 13 years ago

5 9 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi all,

We're getting to the point where we have tons of businesses giving us feedback -- sometimes it's directly to me, sometimes to our two sales reps, sometimes to others. We're storing a lot of the feedback as a mix of support tickets + notes in Excel.

Does anyone have advice on frameworks/software/processes they use for storing product feedback to determine what is important, what to build next, etc.?

Thank you!

jkchang• 13 years ago

I'd reccomend Trello. I think it's abstract enough to be applied to most of the stuff you're looking for. Out of the box collaboration also makes it better than other tools.

cl424• 13 years ago

Thank you! I'll see how it works with the methods we use and those described in the other comment.

petervandijck3• 13 years ago

You need to go beyond just storing input, you have to process things as a team. That's hard to do well.

Try something like this:

1. Store feedback in a ticket system (or some other system). Try to store the detailed feedback/data, not your interpretation of it. In other words, don't write: "We need feature X for client Y", but write: "Client Y told me usecase Q and Z." Get the data. This is a different format than most bugs require. Try to get the story.

2. Plan roadmap sessions. They could last multiple days. Get multi-disciplinary teams in them. During the sessions, first, go over ALL feedback you got, write it down on sticky notes, and put things on the wall. (The wall part is important.) Then, discuss, review, prioritize, organize, and discuss some more.

Out of this, a roadmap will gell that's based on actual customer needs.

(Note: you will gather a mountain of data. That's good. Then use the process to go through it and make decisions based on data.)

(P.S.: look up "grounded theory" and "contextual inquiry" (the analysis part of it) for more ideas.)

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_inquiry

cl424• 13 years ago

Thanks for this, Peter. One question: as we scale and grow our team, having a team-wide meeting is not possible. Is this something that eventually gets coordinated with a product manager + core team of "product people"? Wondering how you would scale this process across a team of 20-25 people, or more.

petervandijck3• 13 years ago

You don't need the entire company there, but you should have a multi-disciplinary group there, aka developers, designers, customer support, sales etc. So get perhaps the product design team (whatever that is), at least 1 senior developer, at least 1 customer support person etc.

petervandijck3• 13 years ago

Additionally, your product might have separate areas that could have their separate product-design teams and meetings (the backend, the sales site, ...).

(Feel free to email me at peter@craftinc.co if you'd like to discuss further.)

logicman• 13 years ago

Use the kanban view in Brightpod to store all of this. You can move things around and start conversations. See www.brightpod.com

Good luck!

cl424• 13 years ago

This looks like a great tool -- thank you!

Ask HN: how do you store and organize product feedback?

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