Introduction
These 5 steps will show you how to advance your product with user insights.
For the past three years, I’ve been immersed in building DaVinci, Syberry’s internal platform designed to boost our engineering teams’ efficiency. Every Syberry employee—spread across dozens of teams and departments—uses our product. They are in the center of our platform’s evolution, spotting rare bugs, suggesting missing features, and praising new functionalities.
Processing and prioritizing user feedback is a huge part of my job. At Syberry, we’ve cultivated a culture where every idea or issue raised by an employee can shape our processes and features. Curious about how we built this responsive system? More importantly, want to build one yourself?
Here’s how.
Embed feedback forms into software
Start by integrating feedback mechanisms right into your apps. Picture software where users can voice their thoughts through feedback buttons, in-app surveys, or suggestion boxes. These tools make it easy for employees to share their experiences without breaking their workflow.
In DaVinci, we have a “Contact support” button on every page. It’s a quick way for users to leave feedback anytime.
Conduct polls
Regular check-ins through meetings, emails, or quick polls provide a structured approach to gathering insights. Use pulse surveys via email or internal communication tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack. Ask about recent updates, feature requests, or general satisfaction.
Frequent interactions with various departments break down barriers between the engineering team and users, ensuring timely feedback on issues or improvement suggestions.
Every three months, we conduct a survey to gauge if DaVinci is improving user productivity—our primary goal. Our survey is non-anonymous, featuring 40 questions ranging from “What do DaVinci products lack?” to “How do you find out about DaVinci updates?”
Prioritize feedback
Collecting feedback is just the beginning. Acting on it is where the magic happens.
Develop a framework to prioritize the most impactful and feasible suggestions. Tools like the MoSCoW Method, Kano Model, RICE Scoring Model, Value vs. Effort Matrix, Weighted Scoring, and Eisenhower Matrix can help.
Transparency is crucial. Keep users informed about how their feedback has influenced changes. This builds trust and encourages continuous improvement.
Show updates to users early on
Involve the entire engineering team at this stage. Create interactive demos or prototypes of new features for user acceptance testing. This hands-on approach allows for early feedback and adjustments, ensuring new features align with user needs.
We conduct user testing sessions where users interact with prototypes and provide immediate feedback. This helps refine features before full-scale implementation.
Measure the impact
After implementing changes, measure their impact. Track KPIs like user satisfaction, productivity, and tool usage rates to ensure adjustments meet desired objectives. This ongoing assessment turns feedback into a continuous cycle of improvement.
On DaVinci, we constantly assess metrics like process costs, zero-support process instances, and automation coverage to measure the impact of changes.
Why it matters
Up until recently, DaVinci’s CRM system wasn’t working well. We built the system to help process leads, manage project statuses, and coordinate with engineering teams. But sales managers found it didn’t address their needs.
To us, it seemed like a data loss issue. For the sales managers, the system was impractical. They took actions outside the system, and statuses weren’t updated in time. Tracking request statuses, coordinating work, and collecting statistics became difficult.
We sat down with the sales managers and had an open, insightful discussion about their real needs. It turned out, we just needed to establish triggers for timely status updates and automate these updates based on various events. This fix led to a transparent lead pipeline, notifications and alerts for sales managers, and metrics to evaluate work effectiveness.
All these improvements started with asking for feedback.
