The Most Powerful Policy Your Software Organization Is Missing

By Hannah Chaplin, Receptive.io

After many years founding and working with software companies, one of the most effective pieces of paper (or company policies) I have ever seen is the Product Feedback Policy.

Product feedback, ideas, feature requests, and improvements are all part of the daily life of building and scaling a software product. This data is incredible for your product team and it’s a huge opportunity for you to understand the pain points of your market and build something incredible if — and it’s a big if — you embrace product feedback instead of running away from it.

What Is A Product Feedback Policy?

It’s a short policy which explains to your customers and colleagues exactly how you collect, manage, and use the product feedback and feature requests you receive. Just imagine having to give your customers support with no SLAs, manage employee holidays with no idea how many days off they should have, or being responsible for running infrastructure with no documented expectations around zone availability, uptime, and data processing. Your teams and customers would quickly become frustrated and reactive, and things would get out of control pretty fast.

Following are the top benefits to a Product Feedback Policy and a guide to what you should include in it.

It Sets Expectations And Takes The Pressure Off Your Product Teams

Things have changed; your customers and peers demand more and one area of software that is a cause of constant struggle is product feedback and feature requests. If you don’t have a Product Feedback Policy in place, you don’t have a consistent and simply way to set expectations. Without a policy, all the pressure is pushed onto your product and customer-facing teams.

If your customers and teams understand the feedback process, then they know what to expect from you. This helps to build trust and to convince them that it's worth spending their time to submit feedback. It also means they won't keep emailing you about how much progress you've made.

Transparency and honesty can go a long way to improving your relationship with your customers and, in the long run, that means more data for your product team to work with.

It Provides A Process

A lot of different teams will be involved with product feedback and feature requests. The sales team will hear from prospects, the support and success teams from customers, and then the product team needs to access that data.

Having a policy in place means that your employees have a step-by-step guide on how your organization manages product feedback. If they're unsure what to do with it, they have a reference point to work from, much like having an employees' handbook.

By making your teams aware of the plan, they understand how important feedback is to your organization and this will prompt them to submit feedback of their own too.

It Provides Your Product Team With The Best Data

Your product team needs the right sort of data coming in if they want to use it to help them make decisions. A good Product Feedback Policy clearly sets out the type of product feedback that the product team is looking for. This vastly improves the quality of the information they receive, allowing them to make better decisions with data they can thoroughly analyze and trust.

Now that we've covered why you need a Product Feedback Policy, let's delve into how you can write one.

What Should Be Included?

There are three main components of a Product Feedback Policy:

• Why feedback is important to you.
• How you'll manage feedback.
• How you'll communicate updates.

Why Feedback Is Important To You

Starting with why product feedback is important to you sets the stage for the whole process. The idea behind this section is to show customers and your teams how much you care about what they have to say.

Explain that you want to constantly improve and refine your product with the best possible features and that finding out what customers need is a crucial part of that. Try to sell the benefits of product feedback as much as you can. The better the job you do here, the better the data you'll receive.

How You'll Manage Feedback

Next you need to outline your process. Obviously this will look different for each organization. In terms of structure, it's best to think of it like this:

COLLECTING --> PROCESSING --> REVIEWING

In other words, explain how customers can submit their feedback to you, whether that's an email address, shared document, etc.

Then lay out what happens next. Do you triage feedback as it comes in and filter out the most relevant? Where is it stored? Who looks at it? Anything you feel is important to know about the process.

Finally how often do you review the feedback? Maybe you have a regular meeting, maybe it's ongoing. Make sure to include timescales as it will help set expectations.

How You'll Communicate

The final part of your PFP will tell your customers how they'll be kept in the loop. It's vital you keep in touch with customers who have provided feedback so that they don't feel ignored or that their feedback has fallen into a black hole.

It might be that can constantly check the status of their feedback at their own convenience. It might be you will send regular updates. Or it might be you will notify them when something changes regarding their feedback.

This is one of the most important parts of the PFP as it shows you're taking your customers’ product feedback seriously.

Where Should You Post Your PFP?

Your PFP needs to be somewhere easily accessible by your customers and employees alike.

Internally, a shared document is the easiest way to share it around. Externally, your help docs or knowledge base are good locations to put it as this is where your customers will be going with any queries they have.

You should also consider writing a blog post or announcement about it and share this on social media and through email marketing as this will help to drum up interest. Also remember to link to your policy whenever you send out a request for feedback.

Summary

To recap, a Product Feedback Policy is a comprehensive document explaining your approach to product feedback. It helps to keep your employees on the same page, puts a process in place to increase efficiency between your teams, and convinces your customers to provide you with the right sort of product feedback.

Ultimately, it helps you gather the product feedback your product teams need to help them build products that support the goals of your software organization.

About The Author

Hannah Chaplin is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO & co-founder or Receptive.io. She is a prolific public speaker & writer on the strategy and focus needed to grow a software business.