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[Music]
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thank you
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hey everyone this is WP product talk the place where every single week we
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interview an experienced WordPress product owner on the strategies and tips and experiences failures even successes
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of running successful WordPress product businesses I'm Matt Cromwell co-founder of give WP and senior director of
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customer experience at Stellar WP and I'm Amber Hines I'm the CEO of
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equalized digital and the maker of the WordPress accessibility Checker plugin and today's topic is how customer
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feedback loops benefit your bottom line and how to implement them I am very excited about this topic Matt
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let me tell you because a lot of product owners myself included I'm gonna put myself in this list probably don't
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listen to our customers enough um or we don't know how to get feedback or we're too busy building the features
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that we think we need without you know asking so I think that this is going to be a
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great show today absolutely when I reached out to our guest about this one
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um it was her suggestion and I was like yes uh I'm excited myself too and our
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guest uh is somebody who I've recently gotten to know a little bit better and excited to have here Miriam Schwab
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Miriam thanks so much for being here thanks for having me yeah can you tell
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the world a little bit about who you are what you do okay so uh I'm named Schwab I'm head of
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Wordpress relations at Elementor prior to that I was the co-founder and CEO of
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a new way of Hosting WordPress sites called stratic we were acquired by Elementor a bit over a year ago and
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um yeah previous to that I had a WordPress development Agency for many years like 13 years
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um that's me awesome well thanks so much for being welcome
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thank you so everyone before we get started I want to just remind you to use
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the chat to ask your questions uh we will if we get some pop them in here
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into the video and answer them as we go so feel free to do that um I do we always like to start off a
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little bit with a conversation about why this is important uh and I do want
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to throw it over first to you Miriam because you suggested that we should talk about customer feedback loops and
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I'm wondering if you could start a little bit with what you mean by that for product owners maybe who aren't
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familiar and why you think they're important okay so I'm actually quite passionate
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about this aspect of product development and that's I guess why I suggested it
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um all of us who have created a product we created it at first to solve our own
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needs right and we probably were experiencing some kind of painful pain points usually this is the story uh for
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ourselves maybe within whatever position we were holding or for our own clients and we felt like the market needed the
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solution so we started working on something a product for me that was stratic
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so at first what drives our product development is a lot of our own experience but in the end we are not our customer
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it's hard to separate ourselves from that but we are not creating the product for ourselves we are creating it for
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many people who might be like us and might have a lot of overlap in terms of their needs or the pain points they're
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experiencing but in the end we're creating it to add value to other people so
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in the beginning it's okay to a little this is all my opinion yes obviously everyone is free to disagree with me but
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from in my opinion it's uh in the beginning it um is very legitimate to
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plan the initial stage of the product based on your own experience and your own needs but pretty quickly you and
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especially once customers start coming in the door and that's a very important milestone in the product development
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when people will actually use your product and then even more significantly when they'll actually open up their
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wallets and pay you for your product that's when you really need to start listening to them and asking them good questions about why
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are they using your product why aren't they using something else what pain points are they coming to solve things
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like that so that's that's in the beginning and then as you go along you start asking them different types of questions but by having them in this
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type of feedback loop it helps ensure that you're creating a product that adds
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value not not just to that particular customer but to many customers and also that you're prioritizing well so that's
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that's how I see it of it absolutely that's good feedback and I love I love personally hearing
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folks who are really passionate about anything related to customers um that's kind of been my uh thing for a
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long time as well and I'm excited to talk about it today too um I'll I'll jump in real quick uh in
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terms of like why I see it as super important uh personally um I really feel like
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um the best way to uh enhance your product is always based on customer
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feedback um and I I do think that we as product owners we have really good intuition
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um and we usually are building out of a pain point that we personally have experienced um but lots of people experience these
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problems or these these pain points and everyone has their own unique perspective on it so there's not always
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one way to solve a problem and sometimes if you solve it in a certain way it's
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based on your your bias or your perspective uh more than um a
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representative aspect of of everyone who is experiencing that same pain Point
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um and generally speaking I also find that that it's not only
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um oh my goodness excuse me
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someone is calling to give you feedback yeah yeah and I'm just like ignore
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um um yeah I just I I I in terms of it I
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totally lost my thought my train of thought I think customers are great no no I got it uh
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in terms of feedback it's of course a great way to impact the product but I
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actually really firmly believed that everything about a WordPress product business has to be customer Centric has
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to be oriented specifically around the needs of the customers uh as much as humanly possible not just your roadmap
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not just your product development but the way in which you do account services the way in which you do all of your marketing
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um the whole concept of like they are the hero of the story not you and your product all that kind of mentality of
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things um I think it's really important significant so and truthfully honestly
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in the WordPress space I think there's some growing to do on that department in terms of being truly perfectly more
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customer-centric um I got challenged just the other day internally like I've been talking about refund policies and I'm like I'd really
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like to make it like a like we don't do like pull as a policy we don't do refunds on on renewals like we're giving
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you a heads up blah blah blah blah this was my pitch and folks were like that's not very customer-centric I was like oh
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ouch you might be right um so um I think we all have a little bit of
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growth to do on this front so yeah that's me Amber
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I think I think your point about it's sometimes more about product features is a really good one that we don't think
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about as much I know when we did some customer interviews maybe a year and a
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half ago there were customers that mentioned they really liked an accessibility Checker
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that the data didn't go anywhere and they were like it's a security feature and like I didn't even think about that
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right and now we we it's like so many people mentioned that as a reason why they like it then now we talk about it
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in our marketing and so it and and we're like oh this could be something we could use to sell but if I hadn't done
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customer interviews or talked to customers about what do you like what do you don't like I would never know that and then it's possible that I wouldn't
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ever promote that differ as a differentiator or a benefit so I think um there's a lot that when you start
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talking to your customers and and actioning upon the things they tell you that you didn't really realize Beyond
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just what feature should we add totally I would love to add to that um so first of all yes customer interviews give you
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ideas for product development new features and things like that but we literally would quote take quotes from
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our customers and use them in marketing they would often say something about our product in a way that was way better than the way that we were expressing it
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and we'd be like that's beautiful that's amazing it's okay if we just quote that like we didn't put their name on it but we we would then use the way that
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sentence that they said as part of our marketing material because we end up being you know embedded so much that we
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see our product from our perspective and then speaking to customers really can give you amazing marketing material also
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just show you different value add that um it's bringing I'll give an example from stratic so the way that stratic is
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structured is that your WordPress site is in a kind of contained environment that only people with permission can
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access and they can spin up the site and edit it um and then we also added certain layers
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of permissions in terms of who can publish to the static site so on static everyone had two static sites
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has two side sites a staging site and a production site and so let's say a lower level of permission can only publish to
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the staging and a higher level to the production and what we found with like large organizations was that they loved the
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greater control that that gave their teams in terms of content management and
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deployments of content so that accidentally someone wouldn't you know push to production something that didn't
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pass the review of some kind of manager we even had customers who use that around compliance like creating Pages
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showing it to people on the staging static and then pushing into production so there was like a whole workflow thing
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that was creative with static which we created not for that purpose which ended up really helping large organizations in
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terms of workflow management around content so we wouldn't have known that also if we
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hadn't been talking customers they'd be like by the way we really love that um so you can help your customers by
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talking them by taking their feedback and then potentially creating new features but also they can help you totally by giving you ideas on how to
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further explain the value around your product absolutely yeah actually we have
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a co-host in the wings here uh Zach Katz is commenting over here this is a good one which speaks a little bit to what
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you were saying um the the way customers ask questions and give feedback is also perfect for SEO it's it's like how how
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do they articulate the the thing that you are solving um because that's what they're going to
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be looking for on Google um you know we are always like we want to make sure that
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um we always rank for on give WP we say we want to rank for how do I accept donations in WordPress
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um like that that's a really big one for us um but other folks say how do I fundraise
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um and so over the years we've had to start adjusting some things also in the US it's always like non-profits but in
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the UK okay it's always Charities so there's lots of different ways in which
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folks articulate what they want or what they need or what their problem is that
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should definitely impact the way you do your marketing as well um yeah it's a good one Zach yeah I I I'm
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curious on a follow-up on that if you um are
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when you said like you're taking exact quotes um are you just kind of like putting
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putting that in like anonymously and because it's one thing to write like a article or a blog post about it right
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and it's another thing to be like we're gonna use this to actually create
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a testimonial almost so actually I didn't mean it as a testimonial I meant just as marketing messaging so like you
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know how do we explain the security value let's say we had a conversation with a ciso from a fintech company and
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they would you know articulate it in a way because secure so let's say at static
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we're very aware of the security benefits of running a fully static site and we try to articulate it as well as possible but here having a security
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professional from a company where the security is like critical for them say
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it to us you know we didn't like necessarily literally quote it but we would take the spirit of what they said
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or sometimes even like parts of what they said and then use it in their messaging and say you know our security is blah blah blah because you know that
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kind of thing so um so that's that's what I mean I mean we also did a lot of case studies which by the way totally worth investing in
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um and we made sure with their permission to record we would we would have a like an in-depth interview with
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the customer record it not for publication for internal use it's really good also for your own team to hear how
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customers talk about your product so we would encourage even our developers to watch these interviews and hear what our
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customers were saying because sometimes developers are disconnected from the um not not because the company
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necessarily structures it like this but you know developers are kind of like in the weeds and like oh we are creating this feature not necessarily involved in
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the context and hearing the customer talk about the value and um you know why it helps them so much
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then that can also be motivating for your team and also uh can help them understand why they're doing what they're doing and also actually help the
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team come up with ideas about how to solve that right so an engineer's head or way of thinking is different than
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let's say a marketer or someone let's say more involved in strategy and so hearing that can help them say well you
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know what there's actually this AWS functionality that we can add pretty easily that will solve you know that
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also and then that's like win-win all around so so we would record that and then we
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would write a case study uh based on that always obviously running it by the customer for their approval but I highly
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highly recommend doing that as much as you can we put together a nice pool of case studies uh around that activity
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yeah absolutely case studies are marketing gold for sure yeah totally
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awesome um I'd love to jump into story time if we can
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um nice personal experiences we keep calling these different things story time is kind of cutesy personal
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experiences is kind of like we're professionals we got professional experience
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um and then we'll edit it live our professional expertise in this specific
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area um online is like I'd love to hear some some specific details of like when did
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you implement a customer feedback loop um what was the the pain point that
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started it or what was the thing that initiated it as much detail as we can get I mean not like elaborate but like a
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specific story as what we're looking for um so uh who's first who's up
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I can go go go go okay okay
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um so to get uh good feedback that you can
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Implement generally you don't want to ask direct questions just I'm just gonna practice it with that you don't want to
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say would this feature help you right you want to really delve into what the customer is experiencing you know and
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where they they think the product could be improved in general but like not feeding them
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um so so that's I just want to say that but aside from that so something that we implemented pretty early on
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um is data driven customer feedback loop so we
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set types of activation goals with the product to track how customers are using
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the product to try to encourage them to move along kind of a process um that's less interactive feedback loop in
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terms of like talking to the customer but it's it's tracking how customers are using your products so
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um in the case of stratic for example would be okay how many people actually like opened an account how many people
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then installed their first WordPress site how many people published their first WordPress sites aesthetic doesn't
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matter what stage things like that and once we could see that type of funnel
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we could also see where customers were dropping off and not continuing to the next stage and obviously the farther
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along customer gets in their Journey the higher level of success for them and for
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you in terms of converting them to an actual paid customer like for us I'm talking about in the free trial stage
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um and so then that's the point where you want to get more involved with customers on that particular stage so it
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can be also through calls and interviews um even just chat and saying like hey so
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we had some automation around this we was so and this actually helped improve the the move getting them to move to the
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next stage we you know someone didn't do X within let's say three days we
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would send them an email that says hey you know we see you didn't do this yet so by the way this is how you can do it and here's why it's good for you to do
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that you know and playing with the texter on that email but um and we used intercom
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um a lot intercom's amazing expensive but uh May zing in terms of kind of
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ongoing communication with a customer and also being triggered based on certain activities like uh did they log
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in again it's just it was so easy to set up it didn't demand a lot of developer interaction like time or resources so I
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just I recommend it a lot but it is expensive for people who aren't familiar intercom is like live chat right
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so it's live chat but it's so much more it's super powerful yeah it's so much more once you have it in your platform
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so we had it in our platform and on the site then you can really understand
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where a user is in their Journey and you can trigger conversations with
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them or share information with them based on certain things they did or did not do it's amazing I'm totally in love
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with the Instagram if I could hug it it's a little it is specifically designed for SAS platforms it is I will
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say that but I have seen a couple of WordPress products play with it and give has been like almost like almost wanting
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to do it a hundred times because it is really powerful oh my gosh it's so powerful it gave us it just it really
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helped us understand our customers more communicate with them better and help move them along in their journey I uh
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I think it's an amazing product um so that was another way that we also were getting a kind of feedback loop
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because then we can also engage with them see how they're engaging back with us intercom even gives you reports about
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customers that are slipping away that we use tubspot as well so you can get some of that information yeah it is so
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expensive at a certain point it gets like almost prohibitively expensive you can keep the cost down to a certain extent
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um but but the value for us as a team it saved us on developer time and it also helped us uh you know
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increase conversion rates so you know cost benefit but yes it is very
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expensive and have you ever done um customer interviews I think you talked
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about that a little bit yes I'm curious how you initiated those I know when you get to my my turn to do some story time
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I'll probably talk about how we did ours but I'm curious how did you find customers to interview and um how did
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you decide what questions to ask your customers so
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we have always had a really good relationship with our customers a lot of our customers were larger so they were
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higher touch so we actually had relationships with them um and they tended to love meaning they
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have like account managers yeah like we were in touch with them especially during onboarding often there was like
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an onboarding process and you know we would wow them with that process and uh
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you they loved us and they would tell us that and then we would basically be like okay so that went really well and you
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seem really happy can we do a case study with you or can we do an interview with you what I've learned along the way in
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general is that uh it's always worth asking people for something
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whether it's your customer or someone you want to get some feedback from or some insights from like not necessarily
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a customer or even someone on your team um a lot like most of the time people say yes they're happy to help and
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especially if they're a customer and they like your product um they want to share that with you and
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they also want to try to ensure that they're helping you stay around and continue to provide value for them
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especially an early stage company so it's always been fine we're always like yeah can we do it and they're like no
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problem they would give us an hour of their time and we like I said we would report it
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um and uh it was always fine
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yeah so I feel like we're we're definitely earlier in the journey
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than both of you we're sitting at 2 000 plus but I keep crossing my fingers any
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day now that maybe we'll go 3000 Plus on our free installs that's amazing that's really amazing yeah so yeah we'll see
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much Applause for you so thank you we'll see it's hard to know we don't have
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those numbers anymore oh but a whole another rabbit hole we could go down oh yes but um but so we've still been
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trying to figure out you know what what does that look like like building customer feedbacks in
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um we we we have one thing that is ongoing and
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consistent which is that um if someone so we also have the free
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plugin available on our website and we use Easy Digital downloads to get that as well I mean it pulls off the repo
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we're not hosting it but um but then if they download it that way we get their information so we have a whole um
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the thing where we've set up when they just download free there's an automated email sequence right that goes out with
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the goal of one getting them using it knowing how to use it and then also hopefully try and get them to upgrade
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but then we have for both the free and the uh paid users we have like six
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months I think it's around six months after they download they get an automated email which I get responses to
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so I don't it's good enough that it doesn't look automated that looks like it comes from me that's asking them to
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either a review or if they wouldn't give it five stars tell us why like reply
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back and let me know why like what would you want so that's an initial way that we've set up to kind of automate
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Gathering some feedback on a regular basis um and then the one bigger initiative
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that we did it was it was about a year and a half ago so it was about when the plugin was about a year old we sent out
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just to our whole email list and a survey and it wasn't necessarily
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everyone who was using the plugin because at that time like we had a very small user base so we asked a whole
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bunch of questions about other like accessibility testing tools and software trying to figure out what
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do people use that are on our email list what features do they like what features they don't like and then they could say
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if they did use accessibility Checker and then we asked them some other questions and then we had like a check box which is like would you be willing
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to have a call with us um and I think out of that I feel like
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we got like maybe 150 survey responses now we we
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incentivized it we said we're going to do a random drawing and give someone a hundred dollar amazon gift card okay so
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I think we've kind of motivated people to take the survey but I was like okay um but then out of that I think we ended
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up having like not quite 20 but almost 20 phone calls with people for like an
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hour where they just like gave us feedback um and they weren't all like some of
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them were like oh they they weren't using our plugin but they agreed to do a call so then they like tried it right
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before so they aren't technically customers in the same way but because we had you know we're so new when we did it
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we were just like we want to have as many conversations as we can have yeah um and some of them were customers and I
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do think we like we used that to shape as I mentioned before some of our marketing and then we used it to shape
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some of our like how we were going to do products I think now we're having more
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customer conversations my partner Chris does most of those and and that is definitely shaping our like we had a
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whole conversation about how we were going to prioritize features based on what we think what we want what we think
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people will pay for and also what Chris is hearing about asked about the most
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either via support requests or um just like a sales comp conversation yeah so so that's kind of
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been our approach but it's it's a little harder I feel like when you don't have a huge customer base but I do think there
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are things you can do um even if so I don't want a product owner you know to listen to you talking
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Miriam or Uma from stellar and think oh well if I don't have thousands and thousands of customers I can't do this
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no because I have thousands by the way because our customers were bigger we did not yeah we're talking about um less
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than that and that's okay I think that is an important message yeah there's a there's an issue here or
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it's kind of like finding the balance between individual customer retention and scale
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right so you have a larger user base and you have to try to kind of gather
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information across you know a broader scale and try to gain insights from it
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but at the same time it's continuously important to talk to the individuals so
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um both are important and it doesn't matter how it almost doesn't matter how big your user base is even if you have
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100 customers you want to talk to five or ten of them because those five or ten will give you insights or help you see
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problems that you may be not aware of that will improve the product and help you get your next hundred you know what I mean especially in the beginning every
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every 10 50 100 matters and then you know it's hundreds and then it's thousands but
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um can I just give you some feedback on that process that you shared yeah so yes I love feedback the first of all
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I wouldn't wait six months um you people at that point may have changed their email or they might Market
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a Spam because they might not even remember that they were touched with you so I would recommend like making that closer to when they first installed it
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it could even be within a month it gives them enough time to test it in but it's also enough time for them to remember
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who you are so they are still getting emails because I think they get a seven email sequence
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and they get one a week okay so would you move the ask for review earlier in the sequence is what you're saying or so
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first of all and I'd be like okay make that my eight week email as opposed to waiting and we had a really long
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sequence going on as well and we learned that that was not great so so I would make it shorter and like very
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um like uh functional meaning uh let's say three four emails that give tells them
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about something that they might not have noticed that like is really cool that you guys do whatever or by the way you
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can do this by the way you can do that and then um at the forest ask them how it's going
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and something like you could even it could come from you supposedly but it could
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look like that and you can say you know I'm a founder and I would love to hear how it's going with you if you want to
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have a call please schedule with me here [Music] um and if they responded anyway either
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schedule them or send them a survey but like you'll hopefully get responses from that and it will again it'll be closer
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to the time when they first signed up that they'll remember who you are it's just there is a concern that six months down they
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they don't remember yeah like are they yeah they plug in their
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email saying they're not using it or they think you're spamming them and then that can be a problem uh for your email
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sendability so that's another reason to you know yeah that's really good
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feedback really actionable yeah Matt what's your what's your personal
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story um I'll go really really brass tacks actually Zach also in the wings here uh
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asked uh the question um which is how do you take feedback from support tickets and convert them
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into actionable items especially when the feedback is implicitly stated not explicitly requested that's basically
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exactly what what we have been honing for a long period of time so for a lot
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of folks who are building product and doing that for a long time you'll have conversations where it's like let's
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prepare our next release okay what are folks uh worried about the most right now or what are folks not liking the
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most or what are folks needing the most you ask your support team and they're like um
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I think it's like they want to do more on the front end they want to do they want to make the form look nicer
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um and that's just it becomes anecdotal um or it's like oh every single day I get a ticket about X
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do you really get a ticket like that every single day like you might or you might be getting 10 a day and you're
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thinking about it just like as daily um the thing is you can take all of that information and make it make it actually
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quantifiable um and so we went from those types of like subjective conversations of like
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well support says X support Says theme compatibility is a big deal um that might be somewhat of a big deal
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but it's actually probably something else that's a much bigger deal especially because the way Zach asks
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this question sometimes folks are saying things a little bit more implicitly so well
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um the other issue that we had was that we were trying to track this feedback in support and it ended up just becoming
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GitHub issues um but then what happens is then you're flooding your GitHub repo with a whole
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bunch of feedback and the devs just need to know what code they need to do so you
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don't really want to use GitHub issues as feedback areas so much I I just think it's really noisy and cluttered
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um so you need a filter and ideally that filter could be populated by your customers themselves
31:39
but it would probably mostly be populated by your support team putting stuff there in the first place so
31:46
earlier today I posted on Twitter I retweeted uh Miriam's I'm going to keep calling it tweets
31:53
um you know what else are we going to call it um
31:59
yeah it's super weird um who is using looped in or candy and
32:07
these are the tools that we use at seller WP and these are specifically designed to be Public public private
32:12
feedback boards who also often have roadmap type of functionality and things
32:19
like this so we've been training our support team for a long period of time to any time they
32:24
get feedback about the product um to log it on our feedback board and
32:30
we can do that by by making making a post on behalf of a customer or we can point them to the feedback themselves
32:37
and they can go and submit it themselves and then when we get more feedback that's essentially the same exact item
32:44
we can add them as private notes in there so that and then and add it as a vote essentially
32:50
um so that when the time comes to say well what are folks really bothered by at the moment
32:55
we actually have actual hard data that says um we have a feature in give WP that's
33:01
called Farm grid everyone wants to do a lot more with the form grid like there's so many people who are just like better
33:08
form grid better form grid better form grid um and the question isn't like well is
33:13
that really the feedback it's like look at it it's like killing all the other feedback items
33:18
um so with that being able to do that say that with um with actual uh data and
33:25
actual real feedback uh in a in a serious way has been crucial for us
33:31
um we've done a lot of different releases actually we have an add-on called funds and designations that was
33:36
completely driven by a bunch of people saying I need to be able to designate a fund on my farm in a way that matters
33:44
um and that was something that we would have never come to on our own in the first place
33:50
um so yeah so so um just to add to that the
33:55
way that we tracked uh to see if there was recurring issue I what you described is something that um
34:01
we also see a lot and I also try to avoid as much as possible it like uh
34:07
taking it seriously which is the feeling I feel like I got I'm getting support
34:12
tickets every day I feel like I'm getting 10. you know people often exaggerate I'm getting so many every day
34:18
and then but if you don't have actual data you're not really sure what's going on right so exactly so I always wanted
34:23
specific numbers so what we implemented with our support team was uh also thanks
34:29
to intercom but probably other systems allow this is that we had a tagging system if a support ticket was about some kind
34:36
of topic it got tagged by that and then we could run reports and see if any particular something was coming up more
34:42
and more a really useful uh way of using that input is around usability actually
34:48
so if you know 10 people say I'm not sure how to back up my site it's not
34:55
that the functionality doesn't work right it's not that it's not there it's that for some reason they can't find it then we internally will go and we'll be
35:01
like how can we improve visibility around it and then that will actually be something that will deploy it's not
35:06
always a new feature it's sometimes just helping people go on their Journey easier which is better for everyone and
35:12
makes it them happy and also reduce a support request which is better for us and so anyway so we would we would tag
35:18
things to get actual data look at the reports and be like okay like we're getting a lot of this it's taking up our
35:24
time let's figure out a way to improve usability or or even easier sometimes it's just documentation
35:30
like yeah and then having any like a place to point people and then you can save internal resources
35:36
um like developer resources just like have documentation Point utilization and that can also solve it absolutely yeah
35:42
I'll put on my tech support hat a little bit too because sometimes I get feedback from folks when I talk about this
35:48
feedback loop system that we've put together they say but it takes so much time for the support technicians to do
35:54
it um and I say absolutely and that's why you should do it like the the you need
36:01
your team to be contributing to the product not just once a quarter like daily every single day there's so much
36:08
like like you said earlier Miriam you you might have like 200 users but you're
36:14
going to get like at least several dozen tickets a week with 200 users uh with a
36:19
couple thousand you you're probably getting 100 uh tickets a week uh that's all feedback it's all feedback and if
36:25
you're not processing it then it's just being wasted um I always try to talk about how you need to make sure that you're funding
36:31
your support team correctly and Staffing correctly so that they have the capacity to do this really highly valuable work
36:39
you don't just want folks who just can send emails essentially
36:45
um you want folks who actually contribute to your business objectives as a whole um so yeah
36:52
I'm curious how both of you approach um like building in the processes for
36:59
this when in the early days so because that's that's a conversation that we're
37:04
continually having inside our organization um we have one full-time plug-in
37:11
developer we have a a support Dev and my partner Chris who like manages support
37:18
and like points it in the different directions that it needs to go um and I do all of our documentation
37:25
writing still on top of like everything else that I do right because that's being a founder and you do have a lot of
37:31
hats and there are some times where they're like like you were saying Miriam where it's like oh it's not that this feature isn't there or or it's not that
37:39
you know this is actually a bug it's just people don't know and so they'll say oh okay Amber and they'll assign me
37:46
like go and prove the documentation on this or go write more documentation on this and it'll sit there in my to-do
37:54
list for like weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks right even though I know this is important but there's a lot
37:59
of stuff in it everything's about team and a lot of people wearing a lot of hats and so then you're like trying to
38:04
be like okay what are the priorities you know and I'm like well the support rep knows what to copy and paste in the
38:10
response eventually I'll get this public in our FAQs but like I I'm curious what
38:15
advice you all have for smaller product owners and maybe this is a a good um
38:21
transition to our best advice section that we like to wrap up on on like how to
38:27
prioritize building these feedback loops and and also how to you know spend time
38:33
making them more actionable when you know I mean we might even have people who watch this video that they're a solo
38:39
Dev with a product and they're also doing client work at the same time yeah that's very overwhelming to me
38:47
that's Jason I asked you a very big question um
38:52
so one of the biggest challenges is always prioritizing right it almost doesn't matter what size company or
38:59
organization you are you will always have to prioritize and you will never have enough resources that's just how it is
39:05
so okay so first of all the problems just get bigger yeah basically yeah
39:11
um but the importance of focus also gets more important or it's equally important even when you're a bigger because when
39:17
you're bigger you're more resources and you can easily like be like well do this we'll do that but like you need to stay laser focused so get distracted yeah
39:24
um but and everything's important but um so first of all in the beginning I would like to quick and dirty what do I mean
39:30
I'm going to come back to answer com I'm sorry but for example with intercom once it's installed you can easily add like a
39:36
banner at the top of every page now if something is coming up you can be like did you know we have X click here to
39:44
find out more and like leave it up there for like a week or leave it up there for particular types of users it like it
39:50
Loops into their use case or how they've been using your product I could also have something that pops up in the side that seems to be full
39:56
documentation create like a quick video like at this stage really of you clicking on a bunch of things it doesn't
40:02
have to be polished or edited and just put it on a YouTube channel and share it again also like on intercom
40:09
intercom is a really good tool for quick and dirty you can probably like and are they in our day with that long ago but
40:15
there was a startup uh discount um and so it might be worth looking into
40:20
that to to get that or maybe there's another tool that like offers you this type of thing but it was really great
40:26
because it was it allowed quick injury so I would do that and the other thing if you can have you ever
40:31
on on the intercoming have you ever seen I know it's targeted more towards sasses
40:36
where people are logging into your platform but do you think it would be possible because I'm sure it's just like a JavaScript snippet right yeah to
40:43
include that in your admin pages in your WordPress plugin yeah absolutely not everyone can workers admin like in your
40:50
yeah yeah and that's we like I said we thought about it a lot but we thought about in the end maybe probably only
40:56
with our paid plugins um because um the costs for intercom are related to
41:03
the number of contacts you get so if you put that widget out to all of your
41:10
active installs um your costs would go up very quickly yeah would you get but
41:16
would you be able to use that um so this is interesting right like there's freemius which people use to get
41:22
people's email addresses out of their free installs would you also be able to do that with intercom
41:28
you won't be able to pull their email out unless they offer to you so maybe instead of that you can have like a link
41:34
like contact us and it takes them out of their site to your site to like a form or even to let the intercom there and
41:42
then they can ask a question and you can send intercom up so that they ask the question and it says okay but before we continue can you share your email
41:48
address and then it goes straight into your system then you've got it we had intercom syncing with HubSpot we had a
41:53
whole thing so but even just there you've got it um the other thing that I wanted to say
42:00
uh wait what was it what was it that you were talking about sorry oh yeah sorry I distracted you on like can we use
42:05
intercom in WordPress plugins but yeah so so yeah how how small are product
42:10
owners that are just oh started can figure out how to balance this kind of stuff so I would if you can have a
42:18
weekly meeting with your team and be like oh what do you think are the top
42:25
three priorities for this week meaning what's like burning what's causing the most pain it's possible to do that and
42:31
yeah it's going to be hard to say no we're not doing any of that other stuff the other 20 30 things on our list we're
42:36
only focusing on these three things but you guys together you know you understand your product you understand
42:41
your customers needs you understand your goals and you can probably agree on three things that you're going to focus
42:48
on this week and then at least you're getting three things done and three things another three things other things like your you know what I mean it's or
42:54
two things but like prioritize and um you know and and just if you can
43:00
like try try to do that I know it's hard no absolutely yeah Miriam what would you say
43:08
um if you wanted to do a nutshell what's your best advice for somebody a WordPress product owner who's just
43:13
jumping into customer feedback loops what's your best advice elevator pitch
43:20
um gathered data as fast as possible it will help you make better decisions
43:25
it's hard with a plug-in that's in the repository but try to find ways to engage with them outside of that try to
43:32
have their information not to spam them but to be in touch with them to add value so and and once and also tracking
43:40
activity if you can't through the plug-in then on your site see where people are most spending time whatever
43:45
any kind of data that you can gather really it's like it's going to help you going forward you'll see Trends on a big
43:51
fan of data so I would say implement the Data Tracking whatever as early as
43:57
possible absolutely Amber what about you best advice
44:04
well I think my best advice on mine is that don't be afraid to ask people to
44:09
get on a call with you totally because I think we talked about that and we're like oh people won't want to do that and there will always be somebody
44:16
who will be willing to do that for free and they'll be pretty nice yeah basically and if they can't it's just
44:22
because they can't so they don't have time it's not because they don't like you or anything and it's always worth asking
44:28
yes what about you Matt what's your best advice my best advice is because this is a loop
44:34
it's not just about the getting the feedback it's about making it actionable for your product my best advice is to uh
44:42
decide that your next release is going to be a hundred percent customer driven in one way or another like you're only
44:49
going to ship stuff that you know customers want from your plugin so and
44:54
then work backwards from there all right that's what I'm gonna do that's what like whatever your methodology is shape
45:00
up or agile or whatnot uh six week eight week cycle whatever you got for your releases and just be like all right how
45:07
am I going to get the info to inform this release um and then how am I going to keep
45:13
getting the info how am I going to verify the info uh this is going to make you go into your Facebook groups this is
45:18
going to make you go into your help Scout account this is going to make you ask questions out on social to get input
45:24
from folks it's going to make you actually do the customer first work that
45:29
you should be doing all the time and uh because once you make that
45:35
decision it's like well now how do I actually go about it it's for me that's because that's the whole goal like I'm
45:41
not just asking just for the sake of it to go into like some random hole somewhere uh into a Google drive or into
45:47
a feedback board or something I'm asking an order for my product to get better
45:53
um so start with the product Circle back come over to the customer side and that will start to help you to prioritize and
46:01
focus on the ways to get the customer feedback that you can um in the first place
46:07
um eventually level up into something like candy or looped in or things like that
46:13
um but um any kind of making sure that you are listening and documenting and
46:19
acting on feedback I think is a great start so well I think that is a great note to end
46:27
on so thank you so much for Miriam for joining us uh next week Matt and Zach
46:33
will be our host and they're going to be discussing the trials and tribulations of Hosting your plugin on wordpress.org
46:40
with special guest Nika Epstein Mika Epstein I'm excited to kind of bring her
46:46
out of retirement she uh is doing us a favor coming out and talking about plug-in directory stuff more
46:51
um special thanks to post status for being our Green Room we continue to uh coordinate with everybody there which
46:57
has been super helpful if you haven't seen it yet go to WP producttalk.com we have a new website which is fun and
47:04
useful uh I'm trying to get episodes posted there the Monday after we go live
47:09
as much as I can uh if you're enjoying this stuff please subscribe that does absolutely help us
47:16
um and share it with your friends and add us to your newsletters and all the good stuff and thank you all so much
47:21
we'll see you next time thank you