Turning Salt into Gold
Friday Ship #194 | 07-Feb-2020
Parabol makes a retrospective meeting app free to use with up to 2 teams. If you like what you read, please subscribe, follow, like, or hit đź‘Ź .
At the center of any modern product-development practice is listening and integrating feedback. Feedback comes to us from many avenues: users and customers, job candidates and employees, website visitors, and even current and prospective investors. Feedback is a gift, but we also get a lot of it. Knowing which feedback to act on and how to act on it is a significant challenge of making a product. We have saying:
Take feedback with a grain of salt, but take action if you’ve heaped up a little salt mountain
Feedback Alchemy
There are 3 steps we take to turn feedback into action:
- Capture feedback as text
- Relate feedback to other feedback to discover deeper patterns
- Create solutions
Capturing is the easy part. We have plenty of notes taken during meetings and feedback to us sent to us as messages. Relating feedback together is more difficult. We use GitHub Issues to compile feedback. We’ve made it a habit to notice when we have feedback and that it belongs not in our private notes or in our inboxes but in GitHub.
When we are looking to add feedback, we’ll search GitHub Issues tagged as “discussion” for keywords topics similar to the feedback we received. If the discussion looks related, we’ll add our feedback. If not, we’ll create a new issue.
Over time this discussion grows. New dimensions are added to the topic. We even relate topics to each other by mentioning their GitHub ids. We add our own thoughts and ideas. Our understanding of the problem and opportunity deepen. We’ll begin to invite the customers who gave us feedback to join in on the discussion. Soon, we have the confidence to move forward and add the next steps to our team’s backlog.
That’s how we turn feedback into gold.
An Example
This morning we got the following feedback from a customer of our via our web support form:
I would like to suggest that in the “reflect” step of your retrospective meetings you add a feature to allow users to mark themselves as “Done” putting in input. That way we can move on once everyone is done.
When we searched our GitHub Issues, it was easy to find one that related to this feedback:
Adding this customer’s feedback, we had 4 notes pointing to the same friction in the product, 2 related discussions, and a handful of ideas to proceed — including validation on one of them — we had heaped up a little salt mountain. Now, we feel confident about how to proceed. We also have a list of users and customers we can validate our solution with or delight when we have something to share.
Metrics
Metrics are up this week — probably across the board. We say, “probably,” because we inadvertently broke our ability to count the number of completed meetings (hence the null values under “Meeting Metrics”) with an update that went out 10 days ago when we shipped a new feature. Oops. Aside from this small bug, signups remain strong and we’ve hit a new record number of MAU.
This week we…
…shipped v4.21.0 into production. This week’s release includes publishing the current meeting phase to the active meeting menu, making sure that renaming the meeting updates the name everywhere, a resynchronization of the Parabol state upon reconnection (better app reliability!), and new security features for our Enterprise customers. Plus we made many bug fixes. See the full changelog for details
…published a detailed blog post on how and why a team may run multiple meetings simultaneously on Parabol. Multi-meeting support shipped last week, now we’re telling you what it’s good for
…began a refreshment of Parabol’s brand. Exciting things are afoot with the way we show up in the world. More on this soon!
…got to the final legs of hiring some great new folks. As we approach our 14th team retreat, we’re close to announcing some new hires for a couple of the roles we’ve been hiring
Next week we’ll…
…wrap up Sprint 50. This will be our last sprint before our team gathers in person in Los Angeles, California for some time to reflect and plot out next moves
Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Leave a public response here, or write to us.
