

Ask HN: how do you store and organize product feedback? - cl42

Hi all,<p>We&#x27;re getting to the point where we have tons of businesses giving us feedback -- sometimes it&#x27;s directly to me, sometimes to our two sales reps, sometimes to others. We&#x27;re storing a lot of the feedback as a mix of support tickets + notes in Excel.<p>Does anyone have advice on frameworks&#x2F;software&#x2F;processes they use for storing product feedback to determine what is important, what to build next, etc.?<p>Thank you!
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petervandijck
You need to go beyond just storing input, you have to process things as a
team. That's hard to do well.

Try something like this:

1\. Store feedback in a ticket system (or some other system). Try to store the
detailed feedback/data, not your interpretation of it. In other words, don't
write: "We need feature X for client Y", but write: "Client Y told me usecase
Q and Z." Get the data. This is a different format than most bugs require. Try
to get the story.

2\. Plan roadmap sessions. They could last multiple days. Get multi-
disciplinary teams in them. During the sessions, first, go over ALL feedback
you got, write it down on sticky notes, and put things on the wall. (The wall
part is important.) Then, discuss, review, prioritize, organize, and discuss
some more.

Out of this, a roadmap will gell that's based on actual customer needs.

(Note: you will gather a mountain of data. That's good. Then use the process
to go through it and make decisions based on data.)

(P.S.: look up "grounded theory" and "contextual inquiry" (the analysis part
of it) for more ideas.)

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory) * [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_inquiry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_inquiry)

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cl42
Thanks for this, Peter. One question: as we scale and grow our team, having a
team-wide meeting is not possible. Is this something that eventually gets
coordinated with a product manager + core team of "product people"? Wondering
how you would scale this process across a team of 20-25 people, or more.

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petervandijck
Additionally, your product might have separate areas that could have their
separate product-design teams and meetings (the backend, the sales site, ...).

(Feel free to email me at peter@craftinc.co if you'd like to discuss further.)

~~~
cl42
Thanks Peter. I am sending an email right now.

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jkchang
I'd reccomend Trello. I think it's abstract enough to be applied to most of
the stuff you're looking for. Out of the box collaboration also makes it
better than other tools.

~~~
cl42
Thank you! I'll see how it works with the methods we use and those described
in the other comment.

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logicman
Use the kanban view in Brightpod to store all of this. You can move things
around and start conversations. See www.brightpod.com

Good luck!

~~~
cl42
This looks like a great tool -- thank you!

