Vyoma Kapur and Deanna Scott, Product Marketing at SurveyMonkey, are answering your questions after their #PMMfest presentation, "Take Products to Market with Confidence." 👇

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Depending on the indirect feedback there are several sources across the organization. For usage, I have reports that track who have installed our apps and what features they use and how often - this guides us on what is being used or not at both a user and aggregated level. 

If it is a product I am selling, you can work with sales to see what customers as saying and what deals they are part of.  And when those deals come through (or not), you can do a win/loss survey or interview to find out more about a customer's experience with your product and what worked well for them depending on the outcome. As you continue to enhance your product, work with your customer success team or reach out to customers who are or are not using your product to do interviews to dig into the details and their experiences.  

While technology can go a long way in gathering data in an automated way, it's important to gather data from multiple sources to get a more holistic picture by bringing it all together.

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With the results of our pilot survey, I noted all the issues and prioritized them as must haves, nice to haves and not required.  Not everything they suggest is required to do an initial release especially if you are focused on an MVP (Most Valuable Product!).  I also used engineering effort as a factor in this prioritization. If your goal is to get the feature out as soon as possible,  knowing the effort on each request can change how you prioritize.   This enabled me to build a new roadmap based the low hanging fruit to ensure the next pilot had selected key enhancements and larger items would be further evaluated once I got additional data points from the pilots.

Also, as part of your requirements, you should have already identified what is the minimum functionality you can release with and these requests should still fit within these parameters. 

I have also used the prioritization method call Moscow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoSCoW_method), which helps easily identify a priority for each item.

In deciding whether or not to release as originally planned, that is often a tough call.  I look at how many people would use the new feature and how complex is the feature, e.g. is it a segment of your customer base, is it an org vs. individuals, is it a staple feature that many will need to use, how complex is the feature, etc.  In my case, this was a new concept that was fairly complex and would be used by the entire org.  While people are forgiving of new and innovative features, I only had a couple data points to work with and decided to hold off a couple months to gather more data - i decided the risk based on the audience was worth it cause if they used it once and it didn't work as expected or had the minimum features, it  would be hard to get them to keep using it.

Let me know if there anything more I can help with!

Thanks for joining our webinar. The format and structure of the interview would depend on the objective and purpose of the interview. In general, it's good to start broad and narrow down based on the interviewee's use cases and "jobs to be done", so you can dive deeper into what they are looking for in a product, and how best to message to them. If an interview is focused on messaging and positioning, it is good to show that in context of the product and ask them to comment on and assess their effectiveness. If the interview is more focused on features and functionality, one thing you could do it have the interview see screenshots or test the product as part of the interview to get candid feedback.

In my experience, we have leaned towards 1:1 interviews more that group interviews so that we can ensure feedback is as authentic and candid as possible. However, focus groups have their place in taking products to market too, especially if the purpose is to get ideas and build off one another's responses rather than focus on individual experience / sentiments. 

Hope this answers your question and feel free to email me at vkapur@surveymonkey.com if you'd like to discuss further!

Yes, it's really important to be cognizant about survey fatigue. And that is why it's important to focus on the top objectives of the survey, and prioritize the questions that map to those. Additionally, that is why we rely on the market and go beyond just our customer base to get feedback, especially when direct experience with the product may not be needed. 

Collaborating across teams is key to make sure we're being mindful of the requests we're reaching out to customers with. As far as lists go, we keep consent to email centralized in our marketing automation system, and also work closely with our customer success partners to assess willingness to provide feedback. 

Lastly, we have a "customer advisory board", a group of customers who are committed to providing advice that can help us continually innovate and improve our products and experiences.