Six steps to get great customer feedback

Staying close to your customers and routinely obtaining quality, actionable feedback is essential oxygen for your business. Everyone in the organization is responsible for constantly listening to customers, and no one group has a monopoly on the process. The Developer Relations and Marketing teams can participate in the feedback process by being a combination of facilitator, interviewer, and aggregator.

As I've written, I ask both Developer Advocates and Product Marketing to include obtaining and synthesizing customer feedback as core pillars of their respective roles.

Let's dive in and see some practical ways your Developer Relations team can contribute immediately to customer connection.

Step 1: Gauge reaction to content and events

Developer Advocates routinely engage with customers through all their activities. To recap, I ask Developer Advocates to do four things: build great content, speak at and attend events, engage with the community, and synthesize feedback for the product team.

When Developer Advocates create content, they need to monitor social media reaction, conversations in online forums, and any comments on the content itself. While this type of feedback may not be a representative sample of all developers, it does provide a glimpse into the most passionate viewpoints on your product, industry, and what you have to say about them.

Developer Advocates should surface interesting points and engage in (respectful) conversation with customers to learn more about their points of view.

When Developer Advocates attend events, they'll spark many conversations with current and potential customers at your booth, after a talk, or in between sessions. Unlike online conversations, where the entire company can see customer reactions, event attendees are the only ones who bear witness to customer viewpoints. It is very important that everyone who attends an event participate in the post-mortem and trip report soon after the conclusion of the event so that all interactions are summarized and recorded while they are top of mind. Developer Advocates should model this behavior for everyone.

When Developer Advocates engage with the community, they'll be spending quality time listening to your best customers and meeting influential developers in your segment of the industry. During these moments, Developer Advocates can engage in dialogue about features, products, and general trends in the industry. This perspective from your best customers and prospects can be invaluable in defining product direction and positioning.

It is the role of Developer Advocacy to synthesize all of this feedback, both good and bad, and highlight the most salient points.

But their work does not end there!

Developer Advocates cannot be folks who take a work item, throw it over the wall, and then forget about it. In this particular case, Developer Advocates must follow up on whether or not action will be taken on customer feedback. If a customer requests a certain feature, and that feature is implemented later, the Developer Advocate should reach out to the customer and inform them that their input has been received and acted upon.

Be an organization that is constantly listening and demonstrates that to customers through your everyday actions.

Step 2: Conduct 1:1 interviews

There's no substitute for meeting with customers. Getting "out of the office" and seeing how customers approach problems and seek solutions has an immeasurable impact on your business. Encourage 1:1 interviews at all times of the year, always keeping an ear to the ground.

When conducting 1:1 interviews, I like to follow a loose script. By all means, let the conversation flow and take you wherever the customer wants, but by having a basic background Q&A flow, you can compare notes between customers and identify common themes or trends. With the customer's permission, record the conversations for internal use only.

One of my themes as a manager is to eliminate information asymmetry in the organization. While Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers will conduct customer interviews all year round, everyone in the organization can benefit. Recording conversations and sharing detailed notes broadly is a very, very good thing to do. Create a dedicated Slack channel for customer feedback so that you can capture it all in one place. Everyone in your company can chime in and invariably, someone will ask for clarification ("What did Jane Doe mean by this?"). These internal conversations about customer interviews will improve your question guide and conversation skills for each subsequent meeting.

Here's my starting question guide ("The Company" is your company):

• Who are you? What is your title? How long have you been with the company?
• Describe your role and your purview within the company?
• What kinds of things keep you up at night?
• What projects are you working on right now?
• How and when did you learn about The Company?

Now we start to dive into the problem the customer is trying to solve (I talk about this more in my post on the Customer Behavior Map):

• What problem were you trying to solve that led you to The Company?
• When did you realize you had the problem?
• What sparked that realization?
• How often did you encounter the problem before you decided to address it?
• Can you describe the severity, importance, and visibility internally of the problem?
• If you were already solving the problem internally, what deficiencies in your current solution led you to look for new solutions?
• What were the core requirements or constraints in your product selection?

From here, we want to gain understanding into how your product will be (or was) evaluated:

• Describe your evaluation process? Are there multiple teams involved? Who is the decision maker?
• How long did the evaluation process take?
• What other tools did you consider?
• Did you run benchmarks or other quantitative analyses to compare products?
• Why did you choose (or, NOT choose) The Company?
• If The Company didn't exist, what would you choose?

Lastly, I like to get insight into the customer herself:

• How would you describe The Company to a junior developer on your team?
• Is there anything The Company can improve upon?
• Apart from availability issues, what kinds of things would trigger you to reconsider using The Company?
• Generally, where in the industry do you turn to stay on top of the latest news?
• Do you attend events or meetups?
• Do you learn best from video or written tutorials?
• Are there technology companies you really admire?

The questions above give you general information about the customer and their evaluation process. It also gives you some starting points about how your customers describe you. This is important. How customers describe us is typically not how we describe ourselves!

We marketing people love our words. We love our taglines, our fancy homepages, our beautiful Apple-style animations. We fantasize about doing keynotes a la Steve Jobs to introduce world-changing products.

On the other hand, our customers are focused on solving their problems. Thus, often, when a customer visits our beautiful website with our fancy words, they either get what we're talking about and then click on "Docs" to see our documentation, or they bounce.

Don't overthink things. Let your customers guide you. If you listen well enough, they're literally telling you what to do.

Beyond these initial questions, I also like to dive into how customers perceive the problem. For example, my last three jobs at startups were VP of Marketing + DevRel roles for database/data companies. In that vein, I would ask questions like:

• How would you describe the data you're storing?
• What is unique about your data?
• Describe your data schema.
• How much data do you store? (generally, describe the scale of your problem)
• And so on...

In my teams, I ask Product Marketing to be the notetaker for every single customer meeting. I let Product Management and the execs (Founders) focus on questions and ensuring the conversation flows well. At the conclusion of the meeting, Product Marketing shares the raw notes. And, at the conclusion of each tranche of customer interviews, I ask Product Marketing to summarize all notes and identify common themes, phrases, or topics that customers have brought up.

Step 3: Maintain a customer council

One of my favorite topics in 1:1s with Product Marketing Managers is asking them what they're doing to help the Product Management team get better customer feedback. Necessarily, Product Management is constantly focused on new products and features, and obtaining input from customers at every stage of that process is critical. Our job in Product Marketing is to support and facilitate that process.

A key check I use to gauge whether or not Product Marketing is doing their jobs effectively is to see how often they meet with their counterparts in Product Management (and Sales, but that's another matter.)

A customer council is a representative sample of your customer base that you rely on throughout your product development process, from conceiving features, to wireframes, to prerelease, to final deployment. Your customer council should include customers of all sizes, across all industries, and across the spectrum of use cases for your product or service. Ideally, you are looking for opinionated people who want to provide feedback and who want to debate one another respectfully. You can learn a lot when you shut up and watch customers debate one another on a key technical point.

In the old days before remote-first work, I would convene the customer council in person twice a year. That may still be a valid exercise, particularly if you can organize the customer council meeting around a popular industry conference (and secure and provide free tickets for members of your council to attend the event.)

If you elect to host an in-person meeting, here are some tips:

1. Organize the room in a U-shape or in a large conference table so that customers can see one another.
2. People in your company should sit around the outside of the room and not at the table. This includes your CEO. I still remember Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy sitting on the outside of a room for a customer council meeting I held when I was the Director of Marketing at AWS.
3. For your day (or days) long agenda, open with a series of very quick introductions (name, company, role). Then your first presentation should be about your roadmap. Tell your customers what they can expect from you for the next 12 months. The rest of your agenda are 30-60 minute sessions that dive into each of the product/feature areas in your roadmap.
4. At lunch, I like to invite a prominent executive in my company to join the discussion and host a freeform Q&A.
5. At the end of the day, conclude with a prioritized voting exercise. Give each customer 3 real dollar bills or coins. Project a numbered list of product or feature areas where you plan to invest. Setup numbered jars where customers can put one, two, or three bills/coins to represent their vote for a given area. They can put all three coins in one jar, or they can pocket the money and keep it if they don't like anything they see. You'll get a very good idea of where your customer council would like to see your investments lie.

Still, though, these days, your customer council is probably better off meeting online and/or asynchronously. You could hold 1-2 hour Zoom sessions to present and gather feedback on your ideas, but it may be difficult to convene people. You could also create a private channel in your Slack/Discord or Forum community and present the "Feature Idea of the Week" (along with wireframes, staged mockups, or early releases) and gather feedback.

Online customer councils are great ways to stay apprised of customer feedback, especially if your budget or time constraints prevent you from hosting in-person meetings.

The broader point is that it is important to get creative about how you want to engage with your customers. Short, focused bursts of questions may sometimes even be preferable over longer hour- or day-long meetings.

Step 4: Surveys

You want to find a way to supplement your qualitative research with some modicum of quantitative data. Surveys and focus groups can be a great way to gather detailed feedback from customers about their experiences with the startup's products or services. This can help the marketing team identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to address any issues that customers may be having.

When I worked at BigCo's, we had research teams that would put expensive, but thorough, surveys in the field. These tracking surveys enabled us to see a full view of customer pain and trends over time.

But these days, much of those thorough surveys are obsolete. Companies like Stack Overflow and SlashData publish annual surveys that provide significant insight into the developer market and ongoing trends. The traditional analyst firms are certainly overkill for nearly any startup up to about $100M ARR, but if you're that size or larger, a Gartner or Forrester contract can be a helpful way to get feedback.

The vox populi of social media also enables you to see multiple viewpoints and surface trends quickly. Marketing teams can use platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to engage with customers, ask for their opinions, and respond to any questions or concerns they may have.

Finally, Stack Overflow metadata contains a wealth of knowledge. This blog post about tag clusters in Stack Overflow will help you visualize topics of interest to you and the topics related to it on Stack Overflow. One of the biggest challenges of a startup is to get noticed. By drafting off of more popular, but still related, products, you can increase the notoriety of your own business. For example, if a tag cluster showed a correlation between your type of product and a popular Javascript framework, that could be a good opportunity to write a blog post that demonstrates how a developer could use both technologies together.

Step 5: Your Customer Care team

Customer service channels, such as phone support or online chat, can also be a valuable source of feedback. Marketing teams can work closely with the customer service team to collect and analyze customer feedback and identify trends or common issues.

As the two teams with the most daily customer interaction, Developer Advocates should maintain very close contact with the Customer Care team. Invite Customer Care team members to author content as well.

It is extraordinarily helpful when Developer Advocates and Customer Care both see the same customer feedback, albeit from different vectors. One team sees it on social media and through content, the other team sees it through support tickets. When put together, that kind of feedback represents a clear product gap or deficiency that needs to be addressed. Work together to ensure that it is.

Step 6: Google Ads

Generally speaking, I am not a fan of using Google AdWords to drive adoption for a developer product. There are clear exceptions to this, which I'll cover in a future post. But I've very rarely seen high quality signups for developer products from Google AdWords.

That said, you can use Google AdWords to test customer preferences. For example, if you wanted to target customers with a certain technology preference, buying AdWords for related keywords and testing value propositions could lead to insight on which types of product messaging will most resonate with developers.

Make sure you create quality landing pages to which you will direct clicks, and make sure the landing page closely hews to the messaging in your ad creative. Over the course of a month or so, you'll begin to see some trends emerge about which ad creatives resonate best with your target customer. In and of itself, this is yet another feedback signal to accumulate.

Also, don't forget your product!

The Growth Product Managers on your team are likely running daily experiments to identify customer choices within your product. Cataloging these historical decisions and presenting them alongside your customer research can provide valuable context to your organization.

Summary

Ultimately, no single one of these ways to procure feedback is sufficient. However, put together, you can accumulate a wide and varied signal with which to drive decision-making.

The Developer Relations and Marketing team's role is to facilitate all of these types of feedback opportunities. Keep customers interested and contributing feedback. Stay close with Product Management and apprised of the product roadmap. Stand up for customers and make sure feedback is considered thoughtfully. There are many reasons why product teams may elect to move on contrary to customer feedback. Understanding the rationale behind such decisions will put you a step ahead when it comes time to build positioning and messaging and will enable you to have better interactions with customers in the future.