Tighten Your Feedback Cycle
Photo by Alex Holyoake on Unsplash
In 2008, Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe gave an interview on how to run a company. The conversation was wide-ranging, and lucky for us, in it, he shared his perspective on building products anew. In product circles, this challenge of figuring out what people want has a shorthand — product/market fit.
Marc Andreessen explained the original notion of product/market fit in his famous blog post, the only thing that matters. In it, he describes the life of a product as having two distinct stages — the time before you have something people want, and after.
“You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.”
“And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.” — Marc Andreessen
Ok, so it’s clear we are shooting for product/market fit. But how do you get there? This is where we return to Patrick’s interview. He provides some simple advice.
“If you have some kind of meaningful, albeit small initial set of users and you’re rapidly iterating in response to their feedback and observed behavior and so on, then I think that’s like a, a really good spot to be in.” He continues, “You should be doing everything you can to tighten that feedback cycle.” (emphasis mine)
It sounds simple, and many product teams would agree with the sentiment, but are they actually doing it? Making this feedback loop a reality, especially as a team grows, is very challenging. It changes everything about how you work, but if you’re building something new, creating this virtuous cycle is job one.
Some ideas on how to bring feedback into your product development process:
Observe your users in the wild.
Answer support calls, chats, and emails.
Use the product every day.
Ok, let’s assume you’ve got the above items in place — you’re learning. Awesome, but while understanding your customer’s reality is a great step, but it’s not enough. The insights gleaned must make their way back into the product, and ultimately, to your users.
“To know and not to do, it to not know.” — Stephen R. Covey
The necessity to convert insight into action is one of the reasons startups don’t often have long release cycles. You want your shipping cadence to be fast, but more importantly, it should be aligned with your pace of learning.
“It really is about time from observed, sort of necessity or deficiency, characteristic of your users’ behavior to executed, fix or improvement, and whatever it is that minimizes that.” — Patrick Collison
Meeting daily with customers, but only updating the product twice a year is a failure mode for a pre-market fit team. Learning and doing efforts must work in tandem. This metabolism impacts everything — design, product, engineering, support — everything.
Don’t just move fast, move in unison and tighten your feedback cycle.
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