How to Leverage the Customer Feedback Loop for Your Product’s Roadmap

00:00:02 Zack Katz
You have no shortage of ideas for your product, and neither do your customers.
00:00:07 Zack Katz
Every day brings a new request, a new must have feature, a new opinion of what you should build next.
00:00:14 Zack Katz
But building the wrong thing can cost you time, money, and trust.
00:00:18 Zack Katz
But the right feedback loop can turn that chaos into clarity, guiding your roadmap, strengthening your product, and keeping your customers coming back.
00:00:27 Zack Katz
In this episode, we're digging into how to capture the right feedback, make sense of it, and turn it into a better product.

00:00:34 Zack Katz
This is WP Product Talk.

00:00:40 Intro
This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more.
00:00:53 Intro
It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners.
00:00:59 Intro
And now enjoy the show.

00:01:06 Zack Katz
Hello, everybody.
00:01:07 Zack Katz
Welcome to WP Product Talk.
00:01:10 Zack Katz
I'm Zach Katz with Gravity Kit.

00:01:12 Amber Hinds
And I'm Amber Hinds with Equalize Digital.

00:01:15 Zack Katz
And today, we're talking about developing and paying attention to product feedback loops.

00:01:22 Amber Hinds
And that is why we have invited our guest, Elena Karashinka, today to join us on the show and talk about customer feedback.
00:01:33 Amber Hinds
Welcome, Elena.
00:01:37 Amber Hinds
How are you?
00:01:38 Amber Hinds
Hello.

00:01:41 Zack Katz
Please introduce yourself and let me do.

00:01:46 Amber Hinds
Nope.
00:01:47 Amber Hinds
I'm

00:01:47 Elena Kartoshkina
so sorry.
00:01:47 Elena Kartoshkina
I think I have the some issue with the with the audio because I I hear you twice.

00:01:55 Zack Katz
Okay.
00:01:55 Zack Katz
Not a problem.
00:01:56 Zack Katz
Well, while you figure that out, we're going to be talking about, a product feedback loop where, where we listen to customers and take their feedback and enhance our products.
00:02:08 Zack Katz
Why is this important, Amber?

00:02:12 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:02:12 Amber Hinds
I mean, I think as someone who is working on building software, you really have to be careful about where you put your time because time is money.
00:02:25 Amber Hinds
And it's really easy to say, oh, if I build this feature, more people will buy.
00:02:32 Amber Hinds
And I will say that we have definitely done that before.
00:02:36 Amber Hinds
Our multisite add on is 100%.

00:02:39 Amber Hinds
Like, we had a bunch of universities.
00:02:42 Amber Hinds
Like, we wanna buy a 500 site license, but what's stopping us is that we don't have an easy way to roll it out.
00:02:50 Amber Hinds
And so we built this feature, and how many of them actually bought?

00:02:54 Zack Katz
How many?

00:02:55 Amber Hinds
Not not a lot.
00:02:58 Amber Hinds
And and so I think, like, it's really important to be thoughtful about how you take customer feedback and how you roll that out to your products, and how you decide to let it shape your road map.
00:03:16 Amber Hinds
Because if you put too much emphasis on the wrong things or not enough on the right things, then it could definitely not have a great business impact.
00:03:25 Amber Hinds
So Alright.
00:03:26 Amber Hinds
Great.

00:03:27 Amber Hinds
Why I think this is important.
00:03:28 Amber Hinds
What what do you think, Zach?

00:03:30 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:03:30 Zack Katz
And on on my side, one of the struggles that we've had for eleven years of GravityView is that we've had a lot of customers asking a lot of questions for for enhancements for for us to prioritize certain features.
00:03:45 Zack Katz
And customer support gets, I don't know, thirty, forty tickets a day, and that's a lot of customers with a lot of different things.
00:03:53 Zack Katz
And a lot of those customer, a lot of those customer tickets are also kind of, an enhancement request for our documentation as well.
00:04:03 Zack Katz
So how do you prioritize that?

00:04:06 Zack Katz
Like, what no customer is going to say, forget all the features.
00:04:11 Zack Katz
I want you to focus a 100% on off on optimizing your documentation even though maybe that's the most important thing.

00:04:20 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:04:20 Amber Hinds
I have a big giant backlog right now that, my partners would probably have right to complain about on things I need to update in our documentation.
00:04:29 Amber Hinds
But it is hard.
00:04:30 Amber Hinds
It's balancing all of that.
00:04:32 Amber Hinds
You know?

00:04:33 Amber Hinds
How do you

00:04:33 Zack Katz
weigh that?
00:04:34 Zack Katz
We're we're working on getting Elena back.
00:04:37 Zack Katz
But how in the meantime, Amber, how do you, take in feedback and, from from your customers about your products?

00:04:46 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:04:47 Amber Hinds
So, feedback for us can come in through a variety of different channels.
00:04:53 Amber Hinds
Obviously, support tickets are a big one, which can either be support tickets submitted for our pro customers or, the, like, wordpress.org things.
00:05:04 Amber Hinds
We also have a Facebook group, and we also do, office hours, which are Zoom calls with me that paid customers at certain, plan levels can join.
00:05:17 Amber Hinds
And so we can get feature requests through those as well.

00:05:21 Amber Hinds
So that's how those come in.
00:05:22 Amber Hinds
It looks like Elena is back.
00:05:24 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:05:25 Amber Hinds
We're we're happy to have you on now that you're back.
00:05:28 Amber Hinds
Thanks, Claudia.

00:05:29 Amber Hinds
Introduce yourself for everyone, and then we can circle back to this concept of how we get feedback.

00:05:33 Elena Kartoshkina
Absolutely.
00:05:35 Elena Kartoshkina
My name is Lina.
00:05:36 Elena Kartoshkina
I'm product marketing manager at CrocoBlock.
00:05:39 Elena Kartoshkina
We are building solution for the dynamic, websites, in WordPress, and I'm happy to be here.

00:05:47 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:05:47 Zack Katz
And CrocoBlock has a lot of different functionality.
00:05:50 Zack Katz
A lot of Yeah.
00:05:52 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:05:52 Zack Katz
So that of

00:05:53 Elena Kartoshkina
your feedback.

00:05:54 Zack Katz
That's a lot of feedback.
00:05:56 Zack Katz
Yeah.

00:05:56 Amber Hinds
Could you describe it for anyone who's not familiar with CrocoBlock?
00:06:00 Amber Hinds
Like, what, what does it do, and how big is your customer base?

00:06:06 Elena Kartoshkina
Well, we have, 85,000 customers, and we build in solution for the dynamic, as I said, for creating the CPT, CCT, how how you can have control in the WordPress, how you display the your custom post types.
00:06:31 Elena Kartoshkina
So it's basically expand the the basic functionality of the WordPress if you need something custom.
00:06:40 Elena Kartoshkina
You can build any type of query, how you can display to whom you display with with the conditional logic in it.
00:06:49 Elena Kartoshkina
So you can build very, very complicated things like, job boards or multi vendor marketplaces.
00:06:57 Elena Kartoshkina
All this was just three plugins, basically, not 20, just three of them.

00:07:05 Elena Kartoshkina
That is why there is a lot of functionality inside.
00:07:09 Elena Kartoshkina
So can you imagine build so many things with just three plugins?
00:07:13 Elena Kartoshkina
So you can you should put together a lot a lot of things and make it really flexible.
00:07:17 Elena Kartoshkina
So that is why it's not easy.
00:07:19 Elena Kartoshkina
It's not like straightforward way.

00:07:21 Elena Kartoshkina
You You have to figure out how to do this.
00:07:22 Elena Kartoshkina
It's, it could be complicated, but it worsened because, it's about the performance.
00:07:33 Elena Kartoshkina
So your website, it's not it's half better speed in terms of its code.
00:07:43 Elena Kartoshkina
It's not over overloaded with the different plugins.
00:07:46 Elena Kartoshkina
So as a lot of pros and cons, and that is why we have a lot of feedback.

00:07:51 Elena Kartoshkina
And a lot of How

00:07:52 Zack Katz
do you manage that feedback?
00:07:53 Zack Katz
Like, across all one of the problems we have at GravityKit or one of the opportunities, one of the struggles that we have is we have so many different plugins and each plugin has its own, GitHub repository with a list of issues where we track the the items that people want, or, like, potential enhancements.
00:08:12 Zack Katz
And then we have, for each ticket that comes in on Help Scout, we add a GitHub, we add a comment to the GitHub issue, and those comments represent upvotes for the features that people want.
00:08:25 Zack Katz
That's a really short summary of what we do.
00:08:29 Zack Katz
How do you track all the different feature requests that are coming into CrocoBlock?

00:08:34 Elena Kartoshkina
Well, it's really the the worst amount of feedback that we are receiving from not only from GitHub GitHub.
00:08:45 Elena Kartoshkina
We also have this, system with collecting the feature required there with the comments and upload, but we also have the Facebook community with 35,000 people there.
00:08:57 Elena Kartoshkina
So they are posting every day something, and we keep tracking it.
00:09:04 Elena Kartoshkina
We also What

00:09:05 Amber Hinds
can I

00:09:05 Zack Katz
do about it?
00:09:05 Zack Katz
Like, how what's that process like?

00:09:08 Elena Kartoshkina
Well, we have a community manager.
00:09:12 Elena Kartoshkina
She's answering the question there.
00:09:14 Elena Kartoshkina
If she see that this particular feedback could be really valuable for us in terms of because we're using this feedback for many different things, but not only for for for the backlog, actually, but also for the content creation, for the tutorials.
00:09:33 Elena Kartoshkina
So it's really, you know, use it for for marketing, for ads.
00:09:39 Elena Kartoshkina
So she keep tracking it, and if she see something interesting, she put it into the spreadsheet.

00:09:45 Elena Kartoshkina
So we use the spreadsheet there.
00:09:48 Elena Kartoshkina
But works for us.
00:09:49 Elena Kartoshkina
We have the categories and we have the importance.
00:09:53 Elena Kartoshkina
If she sees something, for example, that could be posted like the bug there, and she immediately send it to the developer team to fix it because the bug feedback has the highest priority.
00:10:06 Elena Kartoshkina
We should fix all that and keep tracking it.

00:10:09 Elena Kartoshkina
She also collected feedback from the from the YouTube comments.
00:10:14 Elena Kartoshkina
Actually, we had a lot from Reddit, from Google reviews, from Trustpilot.
00:10:20 Elena Kartoshkina
She's to do she do a pretty, you know, pretty hard work.
00:10:25 Elena Kartoshkina
Sounds like a

00:10:26 Zack Katz
lot of different sources.

00:10:28 Elena Kartoshkina
Yeah.
00:10:28 Elena Kartoshkina
To

00:10:28 Amber Hinds
to whole time job to monitor all of your different channels.
00:10:33 Amber Hinds
So

00:10:34 Elena Kartoshkina
Yeah.
00:10:34 Elena Kartoshkina
Yeah.
00:10:34 Elena Kartoshkina
But she do she do a really good job.
00:10:36 Elena Kartoshkina
She also answering the questions, so she's not only collecting the feedback.
00:10:41 Elena Kartoshkina
She's the community manager, so she helping, our clients to solve the problem because they came here to ask some questions what they can do, for example.

00:10:52 Elena Kartoshkina
And if she see that this is a this is a feature request or this is something we cannot do or there is no solution, she, she take this and put it into our, chat with all the all the feature requests from all the sources that we collect there and after monitoring the developer dedicated developer monitoring if this is really feature request, so this is really what we can do.
00:11:17 Elena Kartoshkina
If he see that, for example, there is some solution, but the community manager or, support agent didn't see the solution.
00:11:27 Elena Kartoshkina
So he's writing down that it's it's possible, so you can do this and and that.
00:11:32 Elena Kartoshkina
So it's not the feature request.
00:11:35 Elena Kartoshkina
And if it's really is and we don't have such functionalities, so it passed to the internal system.

00:11:41 Elena Kartoshkina
We have, like, our custom developed platform for collecting the all feature requests for all the sources.
00:11:49 Elena Kartoshkina
That's why we don't use only GitHub because we have another sources for for that.
00:11:55 Elena Kartoshkina
So in this custom in this custom system, we are categorizing the feedback and tracking dimensions, so how many times this feedback comes in.
00:12:04 Elena Kartoshkina
So if if it's got some 10 plus votes, we we will, transfer it to the to the biweekly report for our CTO to be reviewed and to potentially, go into the road map.
00:12:18 Elena Kartoshkina
So it's like really the the structure, the funnel, how from from the Big West among the feedback, we get into something really valuable and trying to, filter out that and put it into consider consideration.

00:12:36 Elena Kartoshkina
That's something that is really important, not only for one user, but, you know, for for many of them because we have the big user base.

00:12:45 Zack Katz
Right.
00:12:45 Zack Katz
And how do you, like and I'd like to hear from you as well, Amber, on this.
00:12:49 Zack Katz
How do you decide, how to categorize?
00:12:52 Zack Katz
Because at GravityKit, we have different metrics that we use for, prioritizing.
00:12:58 Zack Katz
One of them is how important it is to the product itself, but the product is only one piece of our bigger suite of add ons.

00:13:05 Zack Katz
So if the product is less revenue driving than some other product, then we might not wanna prioritize development on that considering that we have, limited development ability.
00:13:15 Zack Katz
So how we have, importance to the product.
00:13:19 Zack Katz
We have, importance, like priority for the business in terms of business priority for, like, how much money this enhancement or this bug or whatever will will, how directly correlated it is to revenue.
00:13:33 Zack Katz
And then we also have a scope, for how much time it takes to develop, like, how big is what we're talking about.
00:13:39 Zack Katz
And that way we can understand in the priority system, okay, we really wanna do this, but it's gonna take a couple of months to to implement as opposed to this equally important for the product feature might just take a few hours.

00:13:52 Zack Katz
So, like, knocking that out could have as much of a impact for the customer.
00:13:56 Zack Katz
Like, how how do y'all, handle handle that?
00:14:02 Zack Katz
Do you

00:14:02 Amber Hinds
wanna go first, Selena?

00:14:05 Elena Kartoshkina
Well, I think this is the most complicated part,

00:14:09 Zack Katz
I guess.

00:14:14 Elena Kartoshkina
This is where our CTO step in.
00:14:16 Elena Kartoshkina
So he have, like, fourteen years of experience and he had a lot of intuition on what what to build and he know the code and everything and how every plugin is built.
00:14:30 Elena Kartoshkina
We have not only one.
00:14:31 Elena Kartoshkina
I I explained how the detention works, but we have 21 of them.
00:14:35 Elena Kartoshkina
So and we collect some feedback from for all of the plugin.

00:14:39 Elena Kartoshkina
And, also, he have this, we have first of all, we have the the product strategy.
00:14:47 Elena Kartoshkina
So our our goals for this year.
00:14:51 Elena Kartoshkina
And he's deciding how this how this particular feature is fitting into strategy or not.
00:14:59 Elena Kartoshkina
And sometimes or many times, I don't know exactly, feature request is it's just feature request, but you should really understand what what is inside.
00:15:11 Elena Kartoshkina
Go deeper.

00:15:12 Elena Kartoshkina
I mean, understand the problem, where it comes from.
00:15:16 Elena Kartoshkina
So sometimes, I don't know, two five to three feature requests, They say, I want this built in this way, but you see that, all these feature requests, it's, united by one one problem.
00:15:33 Elena Kartoshkina
It could be solved in a completely different way, but it still be solved for all of them.
00:15:38 Elena Kartoshkina
So you should understand what is really, the you should understand the difference between the feature request and the problem that we want to solve.
00:15:50 Elena Kartoshkina
So and we really focus on on the problems to be solved not only for one particular case, but for, for as as many users as as we can.

00:16:04 Elena Kartoshkina
So it's and what he do, in, biweekly basis.
00:16:10 Elena Kartoshkina
So he put the notes.
00:16:11 Elena Kartoshkina
Sometimes there is some request that is just impossible to do, I mean, in terms of our resources.
00:16:18 Elena Kartoshkina
We should we should stop everything and just build that for another six months.
00:16:24 Elena Kartoshkina
You know, it's not really not not really in focus.

00:16:28 Elena Kartoshkina
So it really depends.
00:16:30 Elena Kartoshkina
Some some sometimes it just, this request could be, the solution to this could be really well documented tutorial, not really feature built, so or video or something like this.
00:16:45 Elena Kartoshkina
So, yeah, it's every time every time very specific because there is no one way for all the feature requests that we can.

00:16:55 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:16:56 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:16:56 Amber Hinds
We have, I it really resonates with me when you're, like, talking about how sometimes you get something where it's like, well, we could work on this for six months

00:17:05 Zack Katz
Yeah.

00:17:06 Amber Hinds
And and do nothing else, and then it might not even be totally done, because we literally had this conversation earlier this year with accessibility checker.
00:17:16 Amber Hinds
We were focusing a lot on building what's essentially like a SaaS integration for outside of WordPress that was driven by a lot of things.
00:17:27 Amber Hinds
And we got, you know, some decent progress, but it was really hindering development in the plugin and some other features that people were asking about, things that we wanted to do.
00:17:39 Amber Hinds
So we ended up back burnering that and shifting back and and sort of saying, one of the things that we're doing right now is we're doing two week sprints.
00:17:49 Amber Hinds
So everything has to be able to fit in a two week sprint.

00:17:54 Amber Hinds
And and so any feature request that we get, it has to be able to be broken down even if it's not like we know that the final thing is not gonna happen in two weeks, but it's like, what is the small concrete piece that can happen and get launched in two weeks?
00:18:13 Amber Hinds
And then maybe the next two weeks, we could build upon that.
00:18:17 Amber Hinds
But that is a big thing that we've been trying to do because what some feedback that we got was really that it's better for us to have more frequent smaller releases than very spread out huge releases.

00:18:34 Zack Katz
And those big releases also cause more headaches for the customer support and documentation side of things as well and quality assurance.

00:18:42 Amber Hinds
100%.
00:18:43 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:18:43 Amber Hinds
So so that's a way that we've been trying to measure some of this.
00:18:48 Amber Hinds
I mentioned earlier in the episode when you got kicked off, Elena, but before you came back, that we had built something at the end of last year that we thought we had a lot of prepurchase customers requesting, and they were saying it was a blocker to buying.
00:19:05 Amber Hinds
And then we put time and effort into building the thing, and then they had other excuses about why they couldn't buy.

00:19:13 Amber Hinds
And and so that's a big thing that we have right now, which is that we are definitely prioritizing any features that come from someone who is already purchasing, not a free user.
00:19:24 Amber Hinds
If they are a free user, then, you know, if it's a bug, of course, we fix that.
00:19:31 Amber Hinds
But future requests from free users are very low priority for us because what we have learned is that they're not there's no guarantee.
00:19:40 Amber Hinds
Even if someone says, if it had this, I will buy.
00:19:43 Amber Hinds
No.

00:19:44 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:19:44 Zack Katz
Unless they're signing a contract that says that, don't believe them.

00:19:50 Amber Hinds
Yes.
00:19:50 Amber Hinds
Yes.

00:19:50 Zack Katz
Alright.
00:19:51 Zack Katz
Ian with Kestrel WP, leads, shared reach impact confidence scoring metric, confidence slash effort scoring metric that Intercom uses.
00:20:02 Zack Katz
There are so many different frameworks out there that you can use to evaluate, how important and how to prioritize, issues.
00:20:12 Zack Katz
And this is one that I've also looked at it before as well, from Intercom.
00:20:16 Zack Katz
So check out intercom.com slash, that whole link where

00:20:21 Elena Kartoshkina
because it's a must, like, simple and, really working framework.

00:20:27 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:20:27 Zack Katz
And Mhmm.
00:20:28 Zack Katz
I I I loved what you were saying, Elena, about future requests as part of a user story.
00:20:33 Zack Katz
And that so often customers don't understand what they're asking for, or they don't understand why they're asking for a specific feature, even though they should be asking for something else.
00:20:45 Zack Katz
There's the famous Henry Ford quote that said, like, if I did what the customers asked for, they would have had a faster horse.

00:20:52 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:20:54 Zack Katz
And I think we're all kind of trying to translate user feedback into the actual functionality that fits into the user, user stories and the personas that we've developed.
00:21:05 Zack Katz
How how does your support team take it from from one to another?
00:21:09 Zack Katz
Like, you talked about a call where you go over stuff, but, like, is it one person that reviews all these different things?
00:21:15 Zack Katz
Or, like, how what's your process for that?

00:21:17 Zack Katz
And I'd love to hear from how about Amber first to to, hear from how how you do that?

00:21:23 Amber Hinds
How we map requests to user stories?
00:21:28 Amber Hinds
Well, so I would say we have a pretty solid understanding of, like, three customers that or customer avatars, I guess, maybe would be a good way of putting it, that are our typical users or our best users, like, people who purchase multiple licenses.
00:21:48 Amber Hinds
And so we can usually try and map requests to certain user groups in that way where we know, okay.
00:21:55 Amber Hinds
This would benefit, that group or potentially multiple groups.
00:21:59 Amber Hinds
So something that we're working towards right now is being able to have email notifications of issues as as the accessibility status of a website changes.

00:22:11 Amber Hinds
And and this is a request that's come from our agencies because they wanna be able to not have to log in to all their client sites.

00:22:19 Zack Katz
And just Right.

00:22:21 Amber Hinds
It's it's also a request that has come from some of our, like, in house more institutional, users because they're saying, hey.
00:22:31 Amber Hinds
I'm in the site all the time, but this stakeholder at my organization is not, and they just wanna get an email that tells them I'm doing my job.
00:22:40 Amber Hinds
Right?
00:22:41 Amber Hinds
It's not getting worse.
00:22:42 Amber Hinds
That kind of thing.

00:22:44 Amber Hinds
So, like, that's a request that we were able to map it to multiple people and sort of understanding, well, what so then we take that, okay, I want an email, and we have to say, okay.
00:22:54 Amber Hinds
But what information do they want in the email?
00:22:57 Amber Hinds
And that's where we kind of say, what are these stories?
00:23:00 Amber Hinds
Who are they?
00:23:00 Amber Hinds
What do they need the email to tell or do?

00:23:03 Amber Hinds
Or, like, what's the story?
00:23:05 Amber Hinds
Because it's never as simple as I need an email.

00:23:09 Zack Katz
Right.

00:23:09 Amber Hinds
Automated email every week.
00:23:10 Amber Hinds
Right?
00:23:10 Amber Hinds
Because then we're like, well, do they need to be able to set it to be weekly or monthly or quarterly?
00:23:16 Amber Hinds
Or do they need to be able to

00:23:17 Zack Katz
for the different data is the the data that's being shown.
00:23:21 Zack Katz
It's not Yeah.

00:23:21 Amber Hinds
What data do they want in it?
00:23:24 Amber Hinds
Do they need it just sent to people who have user accounts on the website?
00:23:27 Amber Hinds
Because that's pretty easy.
00:23:29 Amber Hinds
Or do we need to also add a field where they can then say, like, any email address can get this.
00:23:35 Amber Hinds
They don't actually have to be a user on the WordPress website.

00:23:38 Amber Hinds
And what does that mean?
00:23:39 Amber Hinds
Right?
00:23:40 Amber Hinds
So I think that's where we start to figure out, like, who are the cost who's the specific customer, and, like, what are they trying to achieve with it?
00:23:48 Amber Hinds
And then that allows us to shape, which I know we'll circle back to this in a minute, but, better, like, shape the idea into something that a developer can build.
00:23:59 Amber Hinds
But what about you?

00:24:01 Zack Katz
I love to hear what you're gonna say, Elena, but I I wanna focus I wanna highlight first Ian's follow-up that says that they have their support team at Kestrel fill out reach impact confidence, submissions before we even look at it to reassess and add effort on our own.
00:24:15 Zack Katz
So, they're having the support team do that themselves, which

00:24:20 Amber Hinds
You know, I'll I'll say too, and I didn't mean to interrupt you, but, I'll say too, like, what is a little different about my company from maybe Kestrel or even, like, CrocoBlock.
00:24:33 Amber Hinds
CrocoBlock has a very big team and 85,000 customers.
00:24:37 Amber Hinds
Right?
00:24:39 Amber Hinds
My company the people who actively shape the plug in are me, our CTO, Steve, our plug in developer, William.

00:24:52 Elena Kartoshkina
Right?
00:24:53 Elena Kartoshkina
Like

00:24:53 Zack Katz
That's what that's a limited two.

00:24:55 Amber Hinds
Three people who are actively working on the plug in.
00:24:58 Amber Hinds
Now we have an accessibility specialist who tests it if we have stuff that need be tested.
00:25:03 Amber Hinds
We have but, like, the people who are actually doing this and then our our, COO partner, Chris, does support.
00:25:11 Amber Hinds
So he sometimes passes things along.
00:25:14 Amber Hinds
But a lot of these processes, like, even that, Well, if I see a support request, I'm not gonna go fill out some form.

00:25:20 Zack Katz
Do you

00:25:21 Amber Hinds
know what I mean?
00:25:21 Amber Hinds
Like, there's it's such a small team that some of those processes don't make sense.
00:25:27 Amber Hinds
And if you're a single plugin developer or just a partnership, you you maybe don't need all these processes in the same way that a large company does.

00:25:38 Zack Katz
How about you, Elena?
00:25:40 Zack Katz
How how about, how do you transfer the like, do you do the how do you take the the customer support into, action?
00:25:50 Zack Katz
Like, what how do you shape what is being built and prioritizing?

00:25:54 Elena Kartoshkina
Well, the customer support is the huge amount the the huge source for for for this, for the feedback and bug reports, and, requests, the feature requests.
00:26:09 Elena Kartoshkina
Our support team is publishing the feature request to the chat, and the developer review it.
00:26:19 Elena Kartoshkina
And if it's really a feature request, it goes to, I said it before, to the internal system.
00:26:25 Elena Kartoshkina
And what we do, we rely mostly on the volume.
00:26:29 Elena Kartoshkina
So if it's because we have really a lot of, a lot a lot of feature requests.

00:26:40 Elena Kartoshkina
So and we need to understand if if we will be, like, reviewing every each feedback, it could take a really, you know, long time to do this.
00:26:52 Elena Kartoshkina
So we're reviewing the feedback that gets, 10 plus mentions.

00:26:58 Zack Katz
Mhmm.

00:26:58 Elena Kartoshkina
And this this feedback goes to the prioritizing, framework, whatever, what the CTO do in terms of deciding how what to ship next.

00:27:12 Zack Katz
And how do you how do you determine the value of a future?

00:27:17 Elena Kartoshkina
Oh, well, not value, Well, we should ask about this this our CTO that do these things.

00:27:30 Zack Katz
As a marketer, like, how do you see your perspective differently than the perspective of development or support?
00:27:39 Zack Katz
Like, do you often have different, opinions on what needs to be done next?

00:27:46 Elena Kartoshkina
Oh, well, what I can do from my perspective, request if we are in if we are fitting into market, if we are okay in terms of, must have features or the competitor research, so this is what I do, and suggesting something that could be done.
00:28:09 Elena Kartoshkina
And the product team has decided if it's if it's really will be done or or or not and when.
00:28:15 Elena Kartoshkina
So that's how exactly the strategy is built.
00:28:20 Elena Kartoshkina
For example, when the goal is first expanding, and growing, and we should grow year after year, and we should find a way how to grow.
00:28:33 Elena Kartoshkina
One of the strategy to grow is to expand, like, horizontally, and we decided to build the integration into another page builder, for example, the first, first page builder that we will we built for is what was Elementor.

00:28:50 Elena Kartoshkina
After that, we decided to expand to the bricks builder.
00:28:55 Elena Kartoshkina
Now we're building for Divi.
00:28:56 Elena Kartoshkina
So this is how the development marketing how marketing shaped the the development strategy.
00:29:04 Elena Kartoshkina
Also, that's what we can bring to the table.
00:29:08 Elena Kartoshkina
But internal prioritization from the feedback is what what the product team actually actually

00:29:16 Zack Katz
do.
00:29:17 Zack Katz
Mhmm.
00:29:18 Zack Katz
That's all.
00:29:19 Zack Katz
I ran across, Trello has a road map functionality that they have based on votes on, different features.
00:29:29 Zack Katz
And they have it's kind of like a crowdfunding campaign where they have different, levels of features that were going to be added based on, number of users that actually use the feature that already exists.

00:29:44 Zack Katz
And I think that's really clever.

00:29:46 Elena Kartoshkina
This is the problem in WordPress.
00:29:48 Elena Kartoshkina
We don't have the statistics.

00:29:49 Zack Katz
We don't.
00:29:51 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:29:52 Zack Katz
And but, like, they have, okay.
00:29:54 Zack Katz
So we have tables and spreadsheets as a functionality that Trello has.
00:29:58 Zack Katz
A thousand users, started using it, so they added new column types.

00:30:02 Zack Katz
5,000 started using it, so they added manual and automatic copy.
00:30:07 Zack Katz
Coming soon when 10,000 people use it, they're have they'll have table import slash export.
00:30:11 Zack Katz
They have they have said what the roadmap is for a a kind of category of feature and then and promised enhancements based on usage, which I think is really clever.
00:30:21 Zack Katz
And you're right, Elena, that as WordPress companies, we lack that type of metric.

00:30:26 Elena Kartoshkina
So that's why we are relying on the Yeah.
00:30:29 Elena Kartoshkina
On the volume.
00:30:30 Elena Kartoshkina
So the votes, how how many time this particular feature came up from our clients feature request, I mean.

00:30:38 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:30:39 Amber Hinds
I I'm not sure if I remember what it's called, and I don't know if either of you do.
00:30:43 Amber Hinds
But there is a, like, a plugin that's intended for product owners in WordPress to be able to take feature requests and get quotes.

00:30:52 Zack Katz
It's simple feature requests, and I believe you can do the same functionality using Crocodile block or GravityView.
00:31:00 Zack Katz
Mhmm.

00:31:00 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:31:00 Amber Hinds
Really, any custom post type, right, that allows people to do a front end submission and then other people to, like, talk about it.
00:31:07 Amber Hinds
Other plus one it.

00:31:09 Elena Kartoshkina
Yes.
00:31:10 Elena Kartoshkina
In our plug in, actually.

00:31:11 Zack Katz
Well, that's great.

00:31:13 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:31:14 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:31:15 Amber Hinds
I I do think that the the voting is useful, but I would say the the thing that we always keep in mind too is just what is what is our end goal for our product?
00:31:28 Amber Hinds
Obviously, it is really important to to keep your customers in mind, but sometimes people don't know what they don't know what they're missing.
00:31:41 Amber Hinds
Right?

00:31:42 Amber Hinds
And there may be really important features that you know your product has to have in order to maybe compete with a an alternative solution or, or to fill a gap at the marketplace that you have I already identified.
00:31:59 Amber Hinds
And and so I think you have to balance a little bit out with what customers are asking for, but also what is this end goal that you have in mind for your product.

00:32:10 Zack Katz
As an example, I think we're all probably looking at the world of AI.
00:32:14 Zack Katz
And customers we've done surveys to try to understand how our customers are using it currently, what their what their clients and their customers are saying about what, the expectations are, that they have about their tools that they use and whether those tools integrate with AI.
00:32:29 Zack Katz
Currently, they're saying we we use it internally, we might use it for research, but customers clients aren't asking for it.
00:32:37 Zack Katz
Our customers our clients are not asking for it.
00:32:40 Zack Katz
That doesn't mean we don't need to prioritize thinking about it.

00:32:43 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:32:44 Zack Katz
And so integrating customer feedback with product roadmaps, honestly at GravityKit I do a bad job of road map planning.
00:32:52 Zack Katz
I I like to go with the flow, I like to see, you know, where the energy is and the energy currently is in a couple of different products than we had planned on initially at the beginning of the year, and that's fine.
00:33:07 Zack Katz
But I'd love to hear how y'all integrate with what your plans have been and how you integrate new functionality and new features and news and, like, upcoming technologies and stuff into your existing road maps.

00:33:24 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:33:24 Amber Hinds
I mean, I can talk about that a little bit.
00:33:26 Amber Hinds
We are really intentional.
00:33:29 Amber Hinds
Every December, we sit down and we have kind of, like, strategic road mapping workshops where we talk about this and we create what our plan is gonna be for the next calendar year.
00:33:42 Amber Hinds
And then every July, we have another really in-depth like, are we still on track?

00:33:50 Elena Kartoshkina
Do we

00:33:50 Amber Hinds
need to

00:33:50 Zack Katz
You got one more day, I think.
00:33:51 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:33:52 Zack Katz
Yeah.

00:33:55 Amber Hinds
But in between then, we also have monthly planning meetings.
00:33:59 Amber Hinds
And, I mean, I will say one of the benefits of having a small team is you can pivot

00:34:05 Zack Katz
Right.

00:34:05 Amber Hinds
Really fast.
00:34:07 Amber Hinds
And so for us, we have been able to say, hey.
00:34:10 Amber Hinds
You know, something's happening in the WordPress ecosystem.
00:34:13 Amber Hinds
We need to pivot in this way.
00:34:15 Amber Hinds
Or, or to say, hey.

00:34:17 Amber Hinds
We've been noticing a big growth on this side.
00:34:23 Amber Hinds
We do with our pro customers when they were able to get more information about their sites because their sites have to call back for a license activation, and so we know what their URLs are.
00:34:34 Amber Hinds
So, and we can also get, like, some basic data.
00:34:39 Amber Hinds
So that is helpful because it could help us to be like, hey.
00:34:42 Amber Hinds
Maybe there's a builder or something that we need to have better integration with because we noticed there's a lot of sites built with Beaver Builder or something.

00:34:49 Amber Hinds
Right?
00:34:51 Amber Hinds
Or just, like, people buying, coming to office hours, and we we hear more and more questions about this specific thing coming up.
00:34:59 Amber Hinds
So, you know, I don't know if we always follow what our road map was or stay tightly on it because we try to be more flexible and to pivot, as needed, you know, when new things come out.
00:35:15 Amber Hinds
But that said, we also the downside of being small is you don't have a huge dev team that you could just be like, hey.
00:35:23 Amber Hinds
Go explore this idea.

00:35:25 Amber Hinds
You know, so we talked about the AI stuff kind of early, and are there places where we could integrate AI into the plug in?
00:35:33 Amber Hinds
And then we had this whole conversation about, well, are we gonna be selling people credits?
00:35:37 Amber Hinds
Are we gonna are we gonna have them put their own key in?
00:35:40 Amber Hinds
How is this gonna work financially?
00:35:42 Amber Hinds
And for us, that ended up being a little bit of a roadblock because we're like, we weren't we couldn't decide how we wanted to handle that.

00:35:49 Amber Hinds
And then and now it's like, oh, well, WordPress might build this in.
00:35:52 Amber Hinds
So then we were like, you know what?
00:35:54 Amber Hinds
We don't need to jump on the AI bandwagon and be like, we have AI doing this thing for you, like, all these other plug ins, because it felt a little bit like a distraction from the other things we'd already planned.
00:36:05 Amber Hinds
So maybe if we had a huge dev team and we had developers that we could just be like, you, why don't you go create an MVP this month?
00:36:14 Amber Hinds
That would be different.

00:36:15 Amber Hinds
But because we are, you know, smaller, we sometimes don't deviate from them.
00:36:21 Amber Hinds
I don't know.
00:36:21 Amber Hinds
It's weird.
00:36:22 Amber Hinds
Like, we can pivot really fast, but we also sometimes can't explore as much as maybe some of the bigger companies can.
00:36:29 Amber Hinds
What about you, Elena?

00:36:30 Amber Hinds
How does Crockobot handle all of that and the road mapping and sticking to the

00:36:33 Zack Katz
plan or not?

00:36:35 Elena Kartoshkina
Well, I feel that we cannot ignore this type of technology that come up and make this boom.
00:36:42 Elena Kartoshkina
I mean, the AI, It's like, you don't know what what will be next, but this is you feel like this really big deal.
00:36:50 Elena Kartoshkina
This will really drive a lot of changes.
00:36:54 Elena Kartoshkina
We don't know what changes exactly will be there, but still, we cannot say that it it won't make any impact any impact on the on the business, and on the industry, on the WordPress if we will not step in.
00:37:10 Elena Kartoshkina
So and we decided to go actually there and to build start to explore this, the thing and, start to step by step implementing some features into our plugins.

00:37:26 Elena Kartoshkina
The first one we did, it was the AI, form, form builder creation form creation.
00:37:33 Elena Kartoshkina
So you can, put the prompt, inside, inside the editor, and it will make the old forms and all structure layout for you with the content there.
00:37:48 Elena Kartoshkina
So you and, this is really useful, and our, users do it, but it's not like users came to us and said, you know, build the things because we want it.
00:38:00 Elena Kartoshkina
So, like you said, it's not it's not that something that, it's so it's okay.
00:38:08 Elena Kartoshkina
It's, two years already, but still, it's new, and we are exploring and figuring out how to how to work with that.

00:38:15 Elena Kartoshkina
After that, we built the, website structure builder.
00:38:20 Elena Kartoshkina
So when you can type the prompt, and it will create the back end structure and relationship between your posts, build filter that you need to create the custom post type that you you explained in your prompt.
00:38:40 Elena Kartoshkina
So and you will see all the structure of your website before before it will be created, like, in the, like, in the database view with the connections and things.
00:38:51 Elena Kartoshkina
So, and it's really cool cool feature.
00:38:55 Elena Kartoshkina
As for me, you can start building the websites really, really fast.

00:39:02 Elena Kartoshkina
So you don't you don't have to do this manually, creating all, all CPTs and, all meta fields and filling this out.
00:39:11 Elena Kartoshkina
So AI will do this all for you.
00:39:16 Elena Kartoshkina
And, we're exploring this, and now the MCP come up and the WordPress are building into the MCP.
00:39:24 Elena Kartoshkina
And we try to figure out what can we do there.
00:39:28 Elena Kartoshkina
Because, yeah, it's it's just the intuition and feeling that we should follow the trend.

00:39:34 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:39:34 Zack Katz
I mean, so much of what we do as product makers is intuitive in part because, there's the survivor problem with people who contact support, are the people who either really need something or, have something that's really broken and they it's not working for them.
00:39:53 Zack Katz
So the people who are contacting support are the edge cases.
00:39:56 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:39:57 Zack Katz
And everybody else might be properly served by our documentation, might have an excellent time with their plug and have like, love it to pieces, and we don't know what or why they're having that experience sometimes.

00:40:08 Zack Katz
So in the past to address this, at GravityKit, we've sent out surveys to get feedback.
00:40:13 Zack Katz
And we've tried to customer have customer calls with people who are happy and not just people who aren't happy with, and contacting support.
00:40:21 Zack Katz
How do you both Amber, how do you how do you hear from customers that aren't contacting support?

00:40:29 Amber Hinds
So our office hours is really helpful for that.

00:40:33 Zack Katz
But that's people who are available at a specific

00:40:35 Amber Hinds
time online.
00:40:36 Amber Hinds
Like a support.

00:40:37 Zack Katz
What's that?

00:40:38 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:40:39 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:40:39 Amber Hinds
How do we hear from people that don't contact support and don't?
00:40:42 Amber Hinds
Who aren't engaged.
00:40:44 Amber Hinds
Yeah.

00:40:45 Amber Hinds
I have tried to send out surveys, but I I have the same thing, which is where, we so we did do a survey.
00:40:55 Amber Hinds
I'm trying to think.
00:40:56 Amber Hinds
At the end of last year, when we were working on our road map, we did do a survey.
00:41:00 Amber Hinds
We sent it out to our email list.
00:41:02 Amber Hinds
I think we got 80 to a 100 responses, which is not bad, but off a 7,000 plus people email list.

00:41:15 Amber Hinds
It's it's like nothing.
00:41:16 Amber Hinds
Right?
00:41:17 Amber Hinds
So so it's it's kind of interesting.
00:41:20 Amber Hinds
We did, I mean, we did use that to help us shape our road map.
00:41:24 Amber Hinds
But for all I know, like, some of those people are people that we knew already, and they would've we they just validated what we already knew that they had previously told us.

00:41:37 Amber Hinds
I don't know.
00:41:38 Amber Hinds
I mean, I think the people that are really quiet and that you never hear from, they don't take a survey, they don't contact support, maybe they're happy and they're fine and you don't have to worry about them.
00:41:50 Amber Hinds
Because if they had a problem or they were thinking about canceling, then they would be contacting support in theory.
00:41:57 Amber Hinds
We do have a cancellation survey now that's required.
00:42:02 Amber Hinds
It's like a single well, maybe maybe two questions depending on what you answer in the first question, before when you cancel.

00:42:11 Amber Hinds
And depending upon what they say, they do sometimes get follow-up, like a personal email or phone call if we have their phone number.
00:42:20 Amber Hinds
And so we can use that sometimes to shape our road map.
00:42:23 Amber Hinds
I mean, obviously, we try to win them back, but sometimes you just can't.
00:42:27 Amber Hinds
And so it might be, hey.
00:42:30 Amber Hinds
X number of people have said this thing, and so, therefore, we need to adjust this in our road map or make this feature a higher priority because it is a cancellation reason.

00:42:42 Amber Hinds
But sometimes you don't hear from those people until they've canceled.

00:42:45 Zack Katz
Right.

00:42:46 Elena Kartoshkina
So Yeah.
00:42:47 Elena Kartoshkina
True.

00:42:49 Zack Katz
I

00:42:49 Elena Kartoshkina
don't know, how to spoke to someone who is not contented contact the customer support, because I don't know.
00:42:59 Elena Kartoshkina
I never did this kind of investigation.
00:43:03 Elena Kartoshkina
Will we launched a survey, this year and, and previous year also, we do this kind of regularly.
00:43:13 Elena Kartoshkina
And, but I see that, only 1% of the, of the users, like, answering them.
00:43:23 Elena Kartoshkina
For a little bit, like, increase the level of the response, what I did, I put the first question into the email and, put the, you know, the links with with the answers and people, like, click it and go to the to the actual survey.

00:43:42 Elena Kartoshkina
And this first question will be filled, like, automatically from the URL.
00:43:49 Elena Kartoshkina
And it works really well.
00:43:53 Elena Kartoshkina
So yeah.
00:43:53 Elena Kartoshkina
But I don't know if these people are, like, never contact the support or not.
00:43:59 Elena Kartoshkina
So never never ask questions.

00:44:02 Zack Katz
One of the things that we're planning on doing eventually, I ideally sooner rather than later, but it's not a business priority, but it kind of is.
00:44:10 Zack Katz
We haven't really figured out how, how to prioritize it yet, Elena and Amber.
00:44:15 Zack Katz
That's, something we need to work on.
00:44:18 Zack Katz
Is adding, some additional metrics in terms of how people are using the plugin.
00:44:23 Zack Katz
We wanna do this in a privacy preserving way that isn't invasive, but we also wanna know, hey, how many p like, do people actually use this setting that we have enabled?

00:44:36 Zack Katz
And, or do they are they not using it?
00:44:38 Zack Katz
Can we strip it out?
00:44:40 Zack Katz
Is this feat a feature not something we need to support moving forward?
00:44:44 Zack Katz
Or are people using our tools in ways that we don't expect them to and that we can better, better improve that functionality for them in the future?
00:44:52 Zack Katz
So we're gonna be adding post hog, which, in order to track things like the fields that people add to a view that are configured, like understanding how many fields and what what what type of functionality people are actively using because we're we're flying blind in so many different ways.

00:45:13 Zack Katz
We do surveys.
00:45:14 Zack Katz
I love your, tip, Elena, about auto filling, the first question.
00:45:19 Zack Katz
I also suggest auto filling their email.
00:45:22 Zack Katz
Like Yeah.
00:45:24 Zack Katz
Yeah.

00:45:24 Zack Katz
And we do that in customer support as well where when, we have it HelpScout allows you to prefill information in the link using a merge tag type of thing.
00:45:33 Zack Katz
And so we often have, merge tags that click into a form that prefilled data, so we can associate with a customer ticket, for example, and not have to have them say, like, well, here's your ticket ID.
00:45:44 Zack Katz
Please put this in the in the form.
00:45:46 Zack Katz
So Yeah.
00:45:47 Zack Katz
Automations are a great thing, and I I want more metrics.

00:45:51 Zack Katz
And I think post hoc is gonna help us get there.

00:45:54 Amber Hinds
So our survey, we we did not connect with customer accounts or require them to tell us who they are.
00:46:02 Amber Hinds
That was optional.

00:46:03 Zack Katz
Neither did we I think it's kind of helpful because

00:46:06 Amber Hinds
I think

00:46:06 Zack Katz
you Yeah.

00:46:07 Amber Hinds
You can get better feedback sometimes if people feel like they can be anonymous.

00:46:13 Zack Katz
Yep.

00:46:14 Amber Hinds
So it was optional.
00:46:16 Amber Hinds
They could tell us who they were.
00:46:18 Amber Hinds
We had a required field to ask them if they were a free or a paid user because we wanted to be able to filter their, responses based on that.

00:46:27 Zack Katz
Right.

00:46:27 Amber Hinds
But we had no way of validating it.
00:46:29 Amber Hinds
So somebody could have said, I use the pro plug in even though they don't.
00:46:33 Amber Hinds
Right?
00:46:34 Amber Hinds
But in theory, they were honest about that.
00:46:37 Amber Hinds
I don't know.

00:46:38 Zack Katz
And one of the problems that we have as plug in companies is that our pricing is very different than enterprise SaaS companies that have, you know, contact us for an enterprise plan like WordPress plugins we have, you know, you could you just buy the number of sites.
00:46:52 Zack Katz
Congratulations.
00:46:56 Zack Katz
But I think that like, one of the surveys that we've we have been running recently that have, we have it as an automatic follow-up, to our customer support ticket, process now that like an auto responder says, you know, click here to fill out this survey.
00:47:10 Zack Katz
We're incentivizing that survey, with a $10 survey, Amazon gift card.

00:47:17 Elena Kartoshkina
Because work for you?

00:47:19 Zack Katz
Yeah.
00:47:19 Zack Katz
So because it's, you know, valuable information for us to know, and we're gonna be one of the one of the things we're asking is, are you an existing customer?
00:47:30 Zack Katz
Do you have the amount like, what's the size of your company?
00:47:34 Zack Katz
How many new websites do you create per year?
00:47:37 Zack Katz
What's your role?

00:47:38 Zack Katz
Like, we're trying to get more information about our customers and our potential customers in order to shape, our products, and the the shifting needs of the clients that we serve because our clients have evolved to be bigger, than they were ten years ago.
00:47:55 Zack Katz
So I think paying attention to what's that?

00:47:59 Amber Hinds
Does at did adding the incentive of getting an Amazon gift card get you more responses?

00:48:04 Zack Katz
It's gotten me more, things that I need to do every week to pay out the surveys.
00:48:12 Zack Katz
I don't know.
00:48:12 Zack Katz
I we haven't split test the survey with and without the incentive, but that's a good question, Amber.

00:48:18 Elena Kartoshkina
Yeah.
00:48:19 Elena Kartoshkina
And and in terms of the survey, what I, what I see that, with this 1%, it's not really representative sometimes, and you don't know if you can act on this, information or or not or just, you know, biased.
00:48:35 Elena Kartoshkina
Or because we came up receiving the, the answer from the same people, you know.

00:48:44 Zack Katz
Right.

00:48:45 Elena Kartoshkina
Yeah.
00:48:45 Elena Kartoshkina
Some are very active and really, we are really, proud and thankful to our clients to be that active.
00:48:53 Elena Kartoshkina
But sometimes, we don't know if it's really representative for all of the clients or not.

00:48:59 Zack Katz
Does Crocoblock have an advocate program?
00:49:02 Zack Katz
Not just an affiliate program, but, like, a way to to give your most active users, your most enthusiastic users a bigger platform for sharing what you do?

00:49:12 Elena Kartoshkina
Oh, we have, blog posts.
00:49:17 Elena Kartoshkina
We have the acknowledgment of the made with Croco.
00:49:20 Elena Kartoshkina
So the, parts of, our website where our clients can post the the website where they did with croco block and periodically launch, the competition, like, what are the best, website of the month, for example.
00:49:40 Elena Kartoshkina
And so kind of these things, and we also yeah.
00:49:45 Elena Kartoshkina
I think this is what we do.

00:49:51 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:49:51 Amber Hinds
Do we wanna talk a little bit about because we're talking about shaping features and things like that.
00:49:57 Amber Hinds
We had had a a slightly pre live conversation about base camp shape up methodology, which I think you have the book hanging out there, Zach.
00:50:09 Amber Hinds
And and it is really interesting.
00:50:11 Amber Hinds
I I recommend that book to people, shape up.

00:50:14 Amber Hinds
You don't have to have the regular book.
00:50:16 Amber Hinds
You can find it just, like, as a on a website and read it free.
00:50:21 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:50:22 Amber Hinds
There's a free PDF.
00:50:23 Amber Hinds
Also, I found an audiobook that someone not associated with Basecamp, but it's a free PDF, so you could listen to it also.

00:50:32 Amber Hinds
And we tried to do that a little bit, and then we realized we thought our team was too small.
00:50:39 Amber Hinds
Mhmm.
00:50:40 Amber Hinds
What we've been doing to shape things actually, pretty recently is it's almost like creating a mini MVP.
00:50:52 Amber Hinds
It's so weird when we're small.
00:50:55 Amber Hinds
And so a thing we recently launched in the plug in just, like, last week was a something that put more information about different issues and what web content accessibility guidelines success criterion they violated, like, a bunch of this stuff, which a lot of customers have been saying we really need more information about this and how to prioritize it.

00:51:20 Amber Hinds
And I had started to be like, well, I could get all this information in the spreadsheet, then I could hand it over to our dev team with maybe, like, some wireframes or something about where I go.
00:51:31 Amber Hinds
And then I started to realize, well, one, we're trying to get these into two week sprints.
00:51:36 Amber Hinds
And and we're just such a small team that for me, like, doing all that just felt like extra work.
00:51:42 Amber Hinds
So how I started doing it and I wonder if I can share this actually.
00:51:49 Amber Hinds
Let me see if I can pull this up because I think it's kind of interesting.

00:51:55 Amber Hinds
But I had started doing this thing where I was like, well, you know what?
00:52:00 Amber Hinds
It probably makes more sense for me to just create a branch and and started getting because I had to get all this data.
00:52:06 Amber Hinds
And I was like, well, I could put it in a spreadsheet, and then I could make them have to turn it into JSON or whatever.
00:52:11 Amber Hinds
So I ended up, like, just going in on a branch, creating some data, and then putting it out into the table that already existed.
00:52:20 Amber Hinds
So I just started shaping it in the plug in instead of creating designs first, like, doing all that stuff.

00:52:29 Amber Hinds
I had issues creating getting the Sass to compile.
00:52:33 Amber Hinds
So the way I styled all this was I got the data in the table, and then I just opened my browser inspector.
00:52:40 Amber Hinds
I, like, put CSS on it in the browser inspector, and then I screenshot it.
00:52:43 Amber Hinds
And I was like, here's your design.
00:52:45 Amber Hinds
Go figure out how to make this actually work.

00:52:47 Amber Hinds
But so so I kind of, like, output this was a thing that I was changing.
00:52:52 Amber Hinds
But I I just started building it, in the plug in, and then I created this Basecamp message because this is primarily where we talk to each other as in Basecamp.
00:53:02 Amber Hinds
We use linear also for, like, road mapping and planning now.
00:53:07 Amber Hinds
But I kinda said this was a thing I hadn't touched.
00:53:10 Amber Hinds
It still needed to be done.

00:53:12 Amber Hinds
And then we just started having this conversation about, like, what are the questions?
00:53:16 Amber Hinds
What do what do they need to do?
00:53:18 Amber Hinds
Right?
00:53:18 Amber Hinds
And Steve's like, well, hey.
00:53:20 Amber Hinds
I don't understand what this means.

00:53:22 Amber Hinds
So then I explained it, and I was and and what came out of it was we were like, oh, maybe we actually need to use the built in WordPress feature for help and put these explanations on the screen because Steve wasn't gonna be the only one who had questions about what do they need.
00:53:37 Amber Hinds
So this is kind of how that

00:53:39 Zack Katz
he uses that so, like, determining whether that's it is the right place.
00:53:42 Zack Katz
I don't yeah.

00:53:43 Amber Hinds
I don't know.
00:53:43 Amber Hinds
It's interesting.
00:53:44 Amber Hinds
That's where we landed.
00:53:45 Amber Hinds
That's where we put it.
00:53:46 Amber Hinds
Yeah.

00:53:46 Zack Katz
That makes sense.

00:53:47 Amber Hinds
He might have a screenshot on here somewhere.
00:53:49 Amber Hinds
But yeah.
00:53:50 Amber Hinds
So, like like that.
00:53:53 Amber Hinds
But but it's kind of interesting.
00:53:55 Amber Hinds
Like, I almost started shaping by just doing because I felt like with us, we're it just slowed me down to, like, put things in a dock or create a wireframe or a Figma file or whatever that might be.

00:54:11 Amber Hinds
And I just kind of was like, here's my idea.
00:54:14 Amber Hinds
Can you finish it?
00:54:15 Amber Hinds
And I've kind of started putting the code in already.
00:54:18 Amber Hinds
And I'm curious.
00:54:18 Amber Hinds
How are you all handling that with your different team sizes?

00:54:23 Amber Hinds
Are you doing this kind of, like, kind of start to build it as an MVP, or are you actually shaping them out somewhere else?
00:54:35 Amber Hinds
What do you what does this look like for your two companies?

00:54:38 Zack Katz
For for my team, I often we we kinda do a mixed thing where, for for issues that come in for support, based enhancements that customers are asking for, we take that customer support ticket.
00:54:53 Zack Katz
And currently, the the initiative that I've been trying to propose and push is to have to make sure that everything is scoped is is presented in a way on on the GitHub issue that it's clear enough that a human can read it, but it's also clear enough so that an AI can read it.
00:55:09 Zack Katz
The goal is to be able to have all of our tickets be enhanced enough and scoped out enough so that an AI can look at it and actually implement it in the future.
00:55:19 Zack Katz
That would be really cool.
00:55:20 Zack Katz
Right?

00:55:21 Zack Katz
But then I and the rest of the the dev team, as far as I know, does this as well.
00:55:28 Zack Katz
I sometimes am inspired, and I like to take that inspiration and just try something out and see, okay, how hard is this?
00:55:34 Zack Katz
Can I just whip this up and get an MVP ready for a customer that has requested this and send it to them and get their feedback because that's always super helpful?
00:55:44 Zack Katz
I think that's probably not the best way to do it, but I also I mean, part of business is, is fulfilling our own inspiration, so I I do like to do it that way as well.
00:55:57 Zack Katz
How about Prokabolic, Elena?

00:55:59 Elena Kartoshkina
Interesting.
00:56:00 Elena Kartoshkina
Well, every every issue, every feature that we are building that are in our road map is in the GitHub.
00:56:10 Elena Kartoshkina
It should be there.
00:56:12 Elena Kartoshkina
We have public GitHub, GitHub, and now a private GitHub.
00:56:17 Elena Kartoshkina
And, everything is should everything should be there.

00:56:21 Elena Kartoshkina
So, in in in issues, it should be documented, and the dev team actually work on the the documents and, on the description of the feature that will be built.
00:56:35 Elena Kartoshkina
Or sometimes, the client issue goes to our roadmap because it's really good documented.
00:56:43 Elena Kartoshkina
So

00:56:44 Zack Katz
And do you know if the dev team just, like, randomly build stuff that they wanna build, or do they are they are are you more,

00:56:53 Elena Kartoshkina
structural?
00:56:55 Elena Kartoshkina
The CTO decides the priority what should we build, and, he formed the road map.
00:57:03 Elena Kartoshkina
But everything should be documented on the GitHub, what goes through the road map or not.

00:57:09 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:57:10 Amber Hinds
Does he does he shape things like this is what we're gonna build, and here's the design, and here's your instructions?
00:57:17 Amber Hinds
Or does he say this is what we're gonna build and then hand it off to, like, a designer or a developer to come up with the more detailed idea and instructions for what needs to be built.

00:57:28 Elena Kartoshkina
Well, actually, not really aware of the process inside of of the product team, so I cannot tell.
00:57:37 Elena Kartoshkina
It's okay.
00:57:37 Elena Kartoshkina
I'll let him know.

00:57:38 Amber Hinds
It's totally fair.

00:57:42 Zack Katz
Well, we've gotten to the point in our conversation where it's time for us to give the best advice that we have for customers who are trying to leverage the customer feedback loop.
00:57:52 Zack Katz
And mine I'm gonna start.
00:57:54 Zack Katz
My best advice is have a system outside of your customer support help desk for tracking features and then try to go through and figure out how valuable they are and how much time it will take.
00:58:07 Zack Katz
Use, you know, the the intercom, use a way to structure things, that makes sense to you and follow it.
00:58:16 Zack Katz
I think having a process is the first step and the most important step.

00:58:22 Zack Katz
So that's my best advice.
00:58:26 Zack Katz
How about you, Elena?

00:58:27 Elena Kartoshkina
From my from, my perspective, you should really learn how to listen to your customers.
00:58:34 Elena Kartoshkina
And, yeah, the system is one way to be able to really listen and not be into this boss and house of the incoming feedback.
00:58:44 Elena Kartoshkina
You should have this really structure in terms of being able to act after that.
00:58:51 Elena Kartoshkina
And, yeah, you should you should really follow your your customers because, I think this is the way.
00:59:00 Elena Kartoshkina
This is how we do the cracker block, and I think it's working.

00:59:07 Amber Hinds
Yeah.
00:59:09 Amber Hinds
So my advice and kind of following on that, using your customers is, we really have gotten a lot of success with, like I was saying, our office hours calls.
00:59:23 Amber Hinds
Like, we sometimes they're not just support.
00:59:25 Amber Hinds
Like, we'll float ideas.
00:59:26 Amber Hinds
We'll say this is what we're gonna work on next.

00:59:29 Amber Hinds
And I do I think take advantage of those people who are advocates, who show up, who tell you things.
00:59:36 Amber Hinds
So the the thing that I showed, we went back and forth on the design of that table a little bit, and I actually ended up sending some screenshots out to a couple of our users and saying, what do you like better?
00:59:47 Amber Hinds
You're someone who've asked for this.
00:59:49 Amber Hinds
What do you like better?
00:59:51 Amber Hinds
And that was really helpful because since we are small, like, going out and getting that feedback, I'll say I've also noticed, there's a couple of other plug in companies.

01:00:01 Amber Hinds
Like, the events calendar is one where they have, like, an events calendar friend Slack, and and that's where people can just give them feedback, like, special people that, you know, are, like, their advocates, just users that they know use a lot or have a lot of licenses.
01:00:15 Amber Hinds
So I think when you don't have a big team, if you set up that process for getting feedback as you're building something, you're it's going to release better because it's not just you or you and two other people at your company looking at it.

01:00:32 Zack Katz
So That's that's good advice, everybody.
01:00:34 Zack Katz
And, that's a wrap for our episode.
01:00:37 Zack Katz
Elena, thank you so much for joining us.
01:00:39 Zack Katz
And, where can people find you online?

01:00:42 Elena Kartoshkina
Oh, I have the LinkedIn.
01:00:44 Elena Kartoshkina
I think this is the best way to find me online or post status.
01:00:50 Elena Kartoshkina
I have Slack.
01:00:51 Elena Kartoshkina
If someone is there, I will be happy to chat.

01:00:56 Amber Hinds
Well, thank you so much for joining us.
01:00:58 Amber Hinds
Everyone who tuned in, thank you so much.
01:01:01 Amber Hinds
Next week, our cohost, Matt, will be back with Zach, and they'll be talking with Brian Gardner from WP Engine about the current state state of the WordPress block theme market.
01:01:13 Amber Hinds
So put that on your calendar now if you're interested in WordPress block themes.

01:01:18 Zack Katz
Yeah.
01:01:19 Zack Katz
And special thanks to Post Status for being our green room where we coordinate these, these episodes.
01:01:25 Zack Katz
If you're enjoying our show, please do us a favor.
01:01:27 Zack Katz
Hit like subscribe.
01:01:28 Zack Katz
Share it with your friends.

01:01:29 Zack Katz
Reference this show on your newsletters.
01:01:32 Zack Katz
And don't forget to tune in next week.
01:01:34 Zack Katz
Thanks.
01:01:35 Zack Katz
Bye.

01:01:35 Elena Kartoshkina
Thank you.
01:01:36 Elena Kartoshkina
Bye bye.

01:01:37 Amber Hinds
Bye.