How to Handle Customer Feature Requests
How do you respond to a customer making a feature request? Erik Skurka creates a customer centric culture from day one where all employees consistently start with why and seek to understand a customer's true problem rather than just transcribe their feature requests.
“I really ingrain in our culture...to get comfortable with the five Why’s and keep digging, and digging, and digging to find the problem”
Transcript
Jim Morris:
Hi there, fellow product leaders. How do you respond to a customer making a feature request? Erik Skurka creates a customer centric culture from day one where all employees consistently start with why and seek to understand a customer's true problem rather than just transcribe their feature requests. Enjoy.
Don't your clients just tell you what they want? I mean, don't you get into this, like... People always ask me, well, can I ask clients what they want? Of course, as good product people, we don't do that. You've got to get feedback from folks without asking them, what do you want? How do you navigate that when people just want to tell you stuff about what they want.
Erik Skurka:
Yeah, no, for sure. It's a good question and I don't think you can avoid that reality. That's how we're all ingrained and trained is, "Hey, I've got this problem. It's a big enough problem that I've thought about a solution, and here, here's the feature that I'm going to present to you." Very early on, actually like day two of being an employee at Review Trackers, you meet with every department head and get a lay of the land for their different departments. When they come talk to me in products, my third slide in the new hire presentation always has a start with why, or a feature is often just a solution in search of a problem.
And so, I really ingrain in our culture, not just on the product and engineering team, but on sales and on CS, to get comfortable with the five why's and keep digging, and digging, and digging as to the problem. When the problem presented itself, and when was the first time? What were they doing? Almost like a jobs to be done discovery. Because, oftentimes the solution that the customers come up with is a solution. But, there's probably a thousand better ways to solve that with software. One of which might be no software at all, and they can get their solution today as soon as we walk out of the room via a custom report, versus hijacking the roadmap for a quarter or two quarters just to solve that one problem.
Jim Morris:
Thanks for watching. You can find more product discovery resources at productdiscoverygroup.com.
Jim Morris, Product Discovery Group
Jim coaches Product teams to collaborate with each other and seek customer input early and often during the design and ideation phase.
