Continuous Improvisation
Why should you become a feedback magnet?
Continuously improving your methods and processes and scaling alongside the product is a very important skill for individuals on the product team. I believe if you can’t keep up with the pace at which your product is evolving and growing, then you don’t deserve to “manage” it.
An easy way to know your blind spots is *shamelessly* asking for feedback. This blog doesn't talk about the best ways to ask for feedback. This blog talks about what made me actively seek feedback at SurveySparrow and why I’m aspiring to become a feedback magnet. Read on!
Here are two anecdotes that made me actively seek feedback. One is a theory and the other is a real-life incident:
Jobs-to-be-done framework
The jobs-to-be-done framework was popularized by Late HBS professor, Clayton Christensen. It focuses on identifying outcomes that customers seek, as opposed to products they want (no one cares about your product anyway).
If you do some digging on that, you will fully understand the reason why we hire products or services. You will also understand why we “fire” some products if they are not doing the job we hired them for.
When you imbibe the JTBD framework fully, you’ll inculcate product thinking and begin to see the level of craftsmanship in good (and bad) products everywhere. One day, you might even think of yourself as a product with features, benefits, assets (read strengths) and liabilities (read weaknesses) - all waiting to be improved upon quarter over quarter (or even faster), like software updates. This is when you’ve completely internalized the JTBD framework!
Reading or listening to the JTBD framework is one of the most high-leverage things you can do as a product person. This brings us to the end of this anecdote.
Insight from the above anecdote: Everything is a product and everyone is a product.
A slack channel named #feedbacks
The second anecdote is from SurveySparrow, the company I work at.
We have a slack channel named #feedbacks for receiving feedback about the product from everyone across the org. Everyone can share feedback to improve the product continuously. It ranges from the product’s bugs, usability, feature requests and so on. Folks from the customer-facing teams also share feedback that they hear from prospects and customers.
Just think about the compounding effects of that. Every message on the channel is an opportunity for the product to improve itself. IMO, that channel is one of the primary reasons why the product has achieved scale and maturity. That brings us to the end of this anecdote.
Insight from the above anecdote: For a product to achieve scale and maturity, it needs to have a tight feedback loop integrated into it.
Now combine insights from the two anecdotes and this is what you get:
To achieve scale and maturity, YOU need to have a tight feedback loop.
This is the reason why I aspire to become a feedback magnet. Thank you for reaching the end of this post. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment!
Post scriptum:
Of course, not every feedback is constructive but every feedback is worth listening to. If the feedback is constructive, take the necessary steps to improve. But if it's not constructive, you will know a lot about the person who gives that feedback. So, it’s a learning opportunity anyway. You will either learn about your blind spots or you will learn something about the person who gives you feedback. So, actively listen to - don’t just hear - feedback from everyone.
Super lucky to have an awesome manager who practices radical candor. The product team (the team I’m part of) gets feedback then and there. We don’t wait for it during the appraisal and review cycles (that happen every 6 months). Feedback is given when we need it the most.