A founder’s guide to understanding users

Great read and bang-on (I'm running product on the fourth software business I've started - the first three were sold). But there's a missing piece to the puzzle though. The author talks about using data so that you don't fall victim to bias, but he doesn't talk about how to do that.

In my experience to ensure data-driven product decisions you need both a system and process to:

1. Collect feedback

2. Organize it to be useful

3. Analyze and prioritize customer problems

4. Use your feedback to validate problems and solutions directly with customers

5. Communicate status to your team

6. Close the loop with customers when you build their requests

At the early stages you can do this with a spreadsheet or Trello board. Eventually you'll graduate to a tool or in-house solution.

Here's a piece that dives into the details about how to build your own system to collect and organize feedback so you can eliminate bias and drive product decisions based on data:

https://www.savio.io/blog/product-leaders-guide-customer-fee...

Great read for any founder of a company from the early stages to beyond.

I like how the subtle repetition of using the word "gain" programs the mind to associate to grain.

We did concierge onboarding and set up shared slack channels with many of our early teams. This made it really easy and expected to ask for more feedback and to have users give it proactively.

Community channels are key as you grow. Frankly this is an area where we've underinvested as we've been heads down building/shipping product and is going to be a huge area of focus for us in 2021. The job of the founder is to really to give people who love your product a venue to share their ideas, questions with other users. Customer advisory boards work well too.

Advice like this is fantastic, but I hate when it's positioned as the one-true-way to do product development.

Consider some of the greatest inventions of all time: the printing press, the telephone, the airplane, the Internet, and the web. Considering the notion that they would have been conceived of this way is absurd, so clearly there's more than one way to make something people want.

Mix in the fact that contrarians often disrupt things the most, and when you see a process like this that itself has become considered the consensus approach, it seems like a high point of potential leverage to just try a different method, especially if that one has also been proven to work or is more in tune with your own talents, experience, and intuition.