Many product teams face the following challenges when it comes to customer feedback and acting upon ideas: it’s hard to capture all ideas and suggestions in meetings or product sessions with your customer, prioritization is full of bias (the most vocal customers or CSMs are heard) and the long term product vision makes it hard to add smaller improvements to the roadmap. Sounds familiar? You are not alone.
This series of articles outlines guidance and best practices for Product teams who want to use inSided ideation to capture user feedback, ideas and feature suggestions from their customers to build better products.
This is the first chapter in the series and explains questions you may have as a product team on how to benefit and use ideation.
The series covers the following topics:
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Chapter 1 - What is ideation (you are here)
After you’ve finished reading the chapters you should view the inSided blog, another great resource on building better products.
What is ideation
Ideation is the process of collecting user feedback, ideas and insights that will help you to improve your products and feed the product roadmap.
Use ideation to get insights on the most popular requests and unexpected use of your product. Identify trends and parts of your product that need to be improved.
Ideation helps product teams to keep the product feedback loop flowing: collect insights and feedback → build the right product together with your users → increase product adoption as your improved products meet the needs of your users.
Limitations of classic ideation
You are probably collecting user feedback in one way or the other already: by talking to your CSM and sales team, by looking at analytics and by sending out surveys or performing focus groups and interviews.
Although these forms of ideation are a good starting point, they also come with some limitations. Receiving user feedback from your CSM and sales team can be incomplete and biased. Looking at analytics will only tell you quantitative data that is not always sufficient to draw conclusions. Sending out surveys and talking to customers is hard to set up and time consuming.
A new way to look at user feedback
The new way of customer-driven product management is with a centralized product feedback solution for customers to share ideas and engage with release updates: One central place where stakeholders like customers, partners, csm, sales, support can view and submit feedback and directly engage with the product team.
Product teams can get more product feedback by leveraging the existing community. Directly view the feedback from the source, ask questions and collaborate with customers to discover the true needs and problems to solve.
Capture user feedback with inSided ideation
The inSided ideation module is a centralized module in the inSided platform that allows your product team to gather and co-create on user feedback from your community. Here’s a brief overview of the ideation capabilities:
Collect ideas
Capture all user feedback, product ideas, requests and feedback from your stakeholders. Configure which stakeholders are allowed to view, submit and reply to ideas. Collect user feedback in one central place.
Manage ideas
Have a complete overview of all the user feedback that is submitted. Organize ideas with idea statuses and automatically notify users when the status of their idea changes. Categorize ideas and feedback with product area’s. Assign ideas to the right product team.
Get qualitative insights
Jump in on ideas and ask for qualitative feedback, collaborate directly with the author of the idea to understand their true needs and wants. Invite other users to share their feedback and suggestions.
Analyze ideas
See which ideas are hot and most often voted for. Understand how well you’re meeting user expectations by measuring the % of votes you’ve delivered from community ideas. Push ideas to Salesforce to rank them against accounts and ARR value.
Integrate into the product feedback tech stack
Use one of the many integrations to empower your product teams to make their product development workflow even stronger:
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Push insights into CS and CRM tools to connect them to customer data for data-driven prioritization.
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Push ideas to Jira and Productboard to fuel your product backlog.
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Get ideas directly in front of your product teams by pushing them into communication tools.
In the next chapter we’ll take a look at finding the right flow to work with ideas and how you can close the feedback loop to your users.
Read Chapter 2
