User feedback is the key to ensuring continuous product improvement. However, maintaining the correct balance between your product vision and the feedback you receive from users can be a challenge. You might feel torn between sticking to your vision for your product and implementing what your users expect you to deliver. Building a product that aligns with both your vision and users’ expectations is not easy.
Your vision for your product is your North Star. It’s the reason you began your entrepreneurial journey and kept going against all odds. Then you started receiving feedback from users, making you consider changing the path you’ve walked thus far. But it would be unwise to choose one of these approaches over the other. You need both vision and user feedback to create a successful product. However, balancing the two won’t ever be easy. That’s why this article recommends a few practical ways of integrating these approaches that could be helpful to your team.
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What Is Product Vision?
Some people think that having a product vision is nothing but a claim that product companies make. On the contrary, it is the code you live by as a product owner. It’s what excites you and makes you keep pushing forward even when the odds stack up against you. Envisioning a strong product is like a following a dream. But, for your dream to come to fruition, your vision must be clear and compelling. It must answer the following questions:
What makes your solution different from the countless alternatives out there in the marketplace?
Your product vision should inspire you, but it must also be specific enough to guide the decisions you make. Take Airbnb’s vision as an example: Their tagline “Belong Anywhere” is simple, yet compelling and inspirational at the same time.
As a product owner, you’re both the creator and the guardian of your vision. It’s your responsibility to communicate the vision clearly to your team and make sure that business operations align with it. It would be unwise to be a product owner who treats the vision like a museum piece—something nice to look at, but never touched again.
Your product vision isn’t about what you’re doing now. It’s about your product’s future. It can help you choose the right path—the path that leads to the fulfillment of your goals. The product vision informs your content-marketing strategy, ensuring that every piece of content aligns with your long-term objectives. The vision enables your team to make smart decisions, guides product development whenever you’re at a crossroads, and keeps you laser-focused on your goals when things get tough.
Your product vision sets your product apart from others in the marketplace and helps you build a respectable brand. It showcases your values and creates an emotional connection with the audience segments you’ve chosen to serve.
This vision is like your product’s DNA. Every feature your product offers and each interaction that users have with your product should reflect your vision. The vision gives your product team a purpose. It’s the reason you exist.
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What Is User Feedback?
User feedback encompasses all the opinions that users share with you after using your product. Users can provide feedback in many ways. They might fill out your survey forms, participate in user interviews that you conduct, email you, or reach out to you via chat.
Through their feedback, users convey their expectations of your product. They tell you how the product could better meet their requirements. While user feedback might be valuable, you can’t always accept what your users say at face value. There are times when you gather useful insights by monitoring how people are using your product. Therefore, usability testing is a popular approach when you’re conducting Web-design research to improve your product.
Data from usability testing can also help you validate user feedback. For example, while your users might claim that they want a particular feature, usage data might show that they barely use similar features that your solution already offers. Such insights are golden because they can help you pinpoint the discrepancies in your user-feedback data. While your users might tell you what they want, it’s your responsibility to figure out what they actually need.
Why Should You Listen to Users?
User feedback can be humbling. You might think you’ve created a flawless solution—until you hear from the people you’re intending to serve. User feedback can transform your product when you implement it properly. User feedback can help you to identify your product’s flaws and discover opportunities that you might have missed. No matter how visionary you are, you can’t possibly think of all the potential uses of your product. You’ll always miss a few things. So, if you think about it that way, gathering user feedback could be the way to realize your product’s true potential.
Why Do You Need to Balance the Scales?
No matter how significant user feedback might be, there must be a point where you draw the line. This is not just about making your product better, but making it better in the right way. While you should make some tweaks to your product’s functionalities based on user feedback, if you do too much, this might change your product from what you envisioned it to be.
But having tunnel-vision in regard to user feedback is just as dangerous as ignoring it completely. You could lose your way in trying to please everyone. Your product could lose its identity, and you could end up creating a bloated, confusing product. A product might be able to do many things, but do all of them poorly, compromising your ability to offer an enhanced user experience.
Your users might sometimes go overboard with their feedback. Their doing so is normal. However, it’s your responsibility to listen actively and filter their feedback strategically. User feedback should help you make well-informed decisions, not dictate them entirely.
Navigating the Right Balance
Both your vision and user feedback are significant if you want to create a successful product. While maintaining balance between the two can be tricky, it’s doable. Let’s consider a few things that can help you make effective product decisions.
Evaluating User Feedback
Do not implement all the feedback you get from your users. This would be impractical. So you need a system for evaluating user feedback and prioritizing the changes that you should make. You should never just rely on your gut feelings.
Figure 3—Prioritization based on frequency and impact
Whenever you receive feedback from users, ask yourself whether it aligns with your core product vision. Would their feedback address the painpoints of a broad user base or just a tiny segment of your audience? If you plan to introduce a feature based on user feedback, ask yourself whether it would solve a real user problem or just provide nice-to-have functionality.
You need a filtering process for evaluating user feedback. Every piece of feedback that you receive should pass through your vision filter before its adoption. But this doesn’t mean you should reject everything that doesn’t align perfectly with your vision. However, you do need to assess how user feedback fits into the bigger picture of your product vision.
Designing and Implementing the Procedures
You need to have certain procedures in place to collect and process user feedback. You could consider conducting surveys, user interviews, or usability tests, and gathering feedback through sales or support channels. However, without having a clear process for evaluating this feedback, you won’t be able to make well-informed product decisions.
Involve your product team in the decision-making process. Ask them to assess how user feedback aligns with your product vision. Based on these discussions, come up with team workflows that guide you in evaluating and addressing insights from user feedback. Your goal is to understand users’ needs and intent in providing feedback while also staying true to your product vision. Your decisions must strengthen rather than dilute your overall product vision.
Standing Your Ground
Even though you must be open to user feedback, you must also know when to hold your ground. Usually, this involves making decisions that could impact your product’s core value. Certain things make your product unique. Never compromise your core product vision.
For example, imagine if Slack were to become an email-service provider. The brand originally positioned itself as a replacement for email. So it would become the very thing that the company has asked people not to use over the years.
Some users might demand absurd things. Because of your deep understanding of the product vision, you can perceive things that users can’t. You must remember what makes your product valuable and filter out user feedback that doesn’t fit well with your product’s value proposition or your brand values.
Thinking Long Term
Of course, there’s no denying that you should act upon user feedback. If users ask you to introduce certain features, you should consider doing so. Your users have hands-on experience with your product. If they’ve identified ways of using your product that you haven’t anticipated, these are valuable insights.
However, you must recognize whether user feedback represents genuine needs versus transient wants. Products can evolve beautifully when teams embrace user feedback while staying true to the product’s essence. You must ensure that making modifications to your product would benefit users in the long run while sustaining your product vision.
It’s a Wrap
User feedback enables you to ensure continuous improvement to your product. However, an overreliance user feedback could cause your product to lose its core identity. You should give users what they want, but your product vision should always be your North Star.
No magic formula exists for maintaining the right balance between your product vision and user feedback. You’ll perfect your product through trial and error. Think of your vision as the foundation for your product and user feedback as building blocks. You need both to build a desirable product.
You must believe in your vision, but without letting it blind you. Similarly, you should let user feedback enhance your product vision and guide you toward your destination, not completely change your course. When your product vision and user feedback are in harmony, you can build a product that stands out in the competitive marketplace.
As the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site, Syed is one of the leading WordPress experts in the industry, with over ten years of experience,. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social-media networks. Read More
