

How do you act on all that product feedback? - unfasten
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/06/how-do-you-act-on-all-that-product-feedback.html

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wensing
Brilliant. The gem for me is the statement that a ton of small decisions
creates a defensible moat perhaps even more formidable than adding features.
(Biased opinion: After 20,000+ hours of work, Stormpulse is an example of
this.)

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joshu
Yeah.

When I built delicious there were literally hundreds of competitors, many
starting as literal clones. Because they didn't understand the reasoning, they
couldn't make the same decisions that I could.

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ivanbernat
I think that every successful product requires a strong vision. Start out
small (MVP) and build on that vision. If you follow that path implementing
"small" user requested features will most of the time be straightforward and
will actually build on your initial vision of the final product.

However, sometimes you have to ignore some requests (big or small) if they
aren't in line with what you want the product to eventually be.

One last thought is pivoting - which only select companies have managed to
pull off - and have profited incredibly (Flickr, Groupon, PayPal). While it's
not necessarily on topic, it's important to listen to user feedback and look
for potential in every single idea (no matter how silly they might be).

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wensing
What if no one ever asks for the most important feature? We get a lot of
feature requests, but the number one feature we focused on: "When the map
loads, is it easy to know where the nasty weather is?" No one ever asked for
that, but it's the killer feature.

~~~
glassx
"If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse"
- Henry Ford

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jmitcheson
Chris Anderson (Wired editor) in his book "Free" had one strategy - to never
write any feedback down on paper. By never writing it down, you only remember
the things that get repeated by your customers frequently, and you just forget
everything else.

It's kind of like a high pass filter for feedback, with a very cheap
implementation cost ;)

Obviously this tip won't suit everyone all of the time so don't flame me. I
thought it was an interesting idea though. It's a really good book, btw; some
good advice and stories if you are building freemium web apps.

