But, it’s easy for feedback requests to become overbearing.

How do you ask for feedback without being overwhelming? And, how can you do this while still maintaining the quality of what you get in return?

We’ve already written about the different ways to gather customer feedback. Hopefully you’ve picked the ones that best suit your product and business case.

But gathering feedback is half the battle. How do you actually reach out and ask for that feedback?

Prefer a visual? Skip to the end to see these tips as an infographic. 

When you ask for customer feedback, it’s important to consider:

• How to ask for feedback
• When to ask for feedback
• Where to ask for feedback
• What to ask
• How to respond to feedback

Let’s get started.

How to ask for feedback: formatting and phrasing

How you frame your feedback request can make a huge difference. Here’s what to keep in mind when you’re setting up your request.

Don’t sound indifferent

You’re asking your users to spend their time giving you their feedback. It’s something that they absolutely do not have to do. And, if you sound like you don’t really care about it, they won’t.

Wherever you can, make sure to project gratitude as and explain how it’ll help them.

Here are the magic words:

Eric Hoppe

Marketer and aspiring dog-sport competitor Eric’s career features stints with innovative companies like Opera Software and Crowd Content. When he’s not telling the world how great Canny is, Eric's finding ways to get his dogson to be a more competitive frisbee dog.

All Posts - Website · Twitter - LinkedIn

For every piece of feedback, take the time to say how much you genuinely appreciate it.

And, highlight how they can benefit from giving you feedback. Show what’s in it for them. They’re helping you make the product better—and they’ll get to take advantage of a better product.

Keep it short and simple…but not too short and simple

There’s a delicate balance between being too wordy and not wordy enough. Make sure your questions are as short and concise as possible, without losing the meat of it.

Also, not all your customers are familiar with industry-related jargon. They might not even be familiar with your entire product. Take the extra time to explain terms or names that might be confusing.

If you’re using stars or numbers to rate, you can also add explanations, like this Skype feedback screen:

As for length, no general request for feedback should take your users more than a few minutes to complete.

It’s also good to let them know in advance how much time it requires. Throughout the survey, show them how far along they are.

Unless your customer has agreed to spend more time (e.g. for an interview), make it as fast as possible.

Allow for extra space

Always allow for extra room that isn’t pre-determined by your own questions. Customers who want to spend more time offering feedback can do so, without wondering where to put it.

You can do this by adding an “additional comments” field to any form of feedback request.

Taking away the chance to leave unrelated comments means you’re missing out on some good stuff. It can also irritate the user, since it limits them.

Don’t direct the answers

You are understandably biased about your own product and how well it works. You would, also understandably, prefer to hear good things from your customers.

Don’t let this bias affect how you ask for feedback.

Here are a few examples of biased questions:

• “On a scale of one to ten, how awesome is our product?”
• “What could we do to make it even better?”

These questions aren’t productive. They might give you what you want to hear, but not what you need to hear.

Here are some alternatives to the examples above:

• On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate our product? Why?
• Is there anything you would like to change in our set of features?

Notice the difference in tone—it’s a lot more humble, and focuses on getting real feedback instead of hot air.

Also, your customers are smarter than that. Phrasing your questions in a biased way will be obvious to them, and they won’t be happy about it. After all, you’re defeating the purpose of the survey when you try to skew the answers.

Make an effort to sound personal

With some feedback channels (such as NPS surveys), sounding impersonal is almost inevitable.

However, whenever you get the chance, try to make your outreach as personal as possible.

If you have the time, send out emails or requests manually, and personalize every one of them.

If you don’t, make sure you:

• Include their name and company
• Send automated messages out from a real person’s name
• Respond to feedback individually

For example, at Canny, we send out “trial ending” feedback requests out automatically. It makes our lives a little easier. However, we always follow up on them manually on Intercom:

Nobody likes receiving a request that sounds robotic and impersonal. It will make your users feel like you don’t care about their feedback enough to put work into it.

When to ask for feedback: Frequency and timing

Here’s how to make sure you’re not bothering your users too often.

Tailor frequency to feedback type

Different types of feedback require different types of frequency.

For example, with a customer support rating, you would ask after every conversation. However, you would only send out large surveys about the whole product once a quarter at most.

“It depends” is an annoying answer. Use your gut when deciding on the frequency of your requests for feedback.

In general, the less effort it is for the customer to engage with your interaction, the more you can ask.

Let users get to know your product

There’s nothing more annoying than getting an NPS survey when logging in for the first time. Give your users the chance to actually play with the product before you ask for feedback.

You might be tempted to embed requests for feedback in your onboarding emails. You can do it when the trial or onboarding period has ended or is about to end, but don’t push it right in the beginning.

How you set this up will depend on the complexity of your product.

But, you can make sure customers have enough time by not asking for feedback until:

1. A certain amount of time has passed
2. The user has taken certain actions
3. Certain features have been used

The more familiar with your product your users are before you ask for their feedback, the more useful it’ll be.

Allow users to give feedback at any time

If your customer would like to say something to you at a random time, they should be able to.

Make sure you have a feedback option available in your product as well as other properties.

We’re a bit biased, of course, but we think the best way to collect feedback is to use Canny. If you need more info to decide if a tool to collect customer feedback is right for you, check out this blog post about how to figure out if you need a feedback tool.

This is how ClickUp uses Canny. They have Canny set up right in their UI to give customers a chance to get in touch at any time:

Make sure you respond to all customer-initiated feedback promptly. When your customers learn that they have an easy way to express their thoughts, they’ll do it more often.

Where to ask for feedback: Placement within your product

You should also consider where in the product you place your feedback requests.

These suggestions follow a few important rules:

• Don’t hide the feedback option. If you care about feedback, find a prominent place in your app to surface it.
• Don’t be disruptive. We all hate those in-app pop-ups that ask us for ratings.
• Follow the mantra of “two clicks or less.” Ideally, it should be no more than two clicks for a user to be able to leave feedback while using your app.

With that in mind, here are some of the best practices for including feedback inside your app.

Bottom right corner

This is a great option because it’s familiar and discoverable. It is persistent without being annoying.

You can be more aggressive if your product is in its early stages or you’re beta testing a new feature.

Use a text button like “Beta Feedback” to encourage more feedback.

We don’t recommend this option for mobile because of limited screen space.

Menu

Menus are nice and out of the way but can be hard to find if labeled improperly. Some common labels are: Feedback, Help, and Support.

Feed unit

This works nicely if your product is feed-based. It’s prominent but easy to scroll away from. At most, show this every 20 feed units.

End of a flow

If you’re looking for feedback on a specific flow, this is a good option. Consider limiting the number of times feedback is prompted if this is a common flow.

The implementation on the left is disruptive; it blocks the user’s next action. The right (mock) embeds feedback into the normal flow.

Shake phone

Finally, you can add a feedback menu item that is triggered by the user shaking their phone.

It’s an interesting option because it’s completely out of the way. On the downside, this isn’t a well-known interaction so you would need to tell your users about it.

Where to ask for feedback: reaching out to ask for feedback

We just explored how you can ask for feedback within your app. Now, let’s look at proactively reaching out to get valuable client feedback. Be sure to follow our tips on phrasing your messages from earlier.

Email

Your customer email list is the first place you should start. You’ve probably seen countless emails asking you to give feedback. It’s commonplace now.

But, it’s commonplace because it’s valuable and effective. 

Your marketing automation tool should make it easy to identify customers at different stages of the customer journey. Sending a customer feedback email is quick, easy, and lets you target specific customer segments you want feedback from. We’ll touch on which questions to send at different stages of the journey later. 

Customer support

Your customer support team has the most direct contact with your customers. They hear feedback all the time. Make it easy for them to capture feedback on behalf of customers. Or, show them how to direct customers to leave feedback for you. That could be directing them to your feedback board or a customer survey. 

Whichever you decide on, just make sure you’re asking. 

Review sites and communities

Another interesting way to seek user feedback is by reaching out to people on review sites and communities. If your existing customers (or potential customers) are already talking about your product, why not join them?

You can usually jump into the conversation or directly message users. Invite them to take a customer survey, or leave feedback on your customer feedback board. 

What to ask: focusing on useful customer feedback questions

We’ve talked a lot about how to ask for feedback, when to ask for it, and where to ask. Now we get the meat of the topic — what customer feedback questions should you be asking? 

Here are some common questions you might consider:

6. What are you hoping to use our product to do? 
7. What challenges led you to trying our product?
8. How did you find our registration process? Is there anything you would change?
9. Is there anything that would prevent you from using our product? 
10. How did you hear about our product?
11. How satisfied are you with our product? This is the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) score question. You just add up all your positive responses, and divide them by the total number of responses. The higher the percent you get, the better your score.
12. How easy did we make if for you to solve your issue? This is the Customer Effort Score (CES) question. You get your customers to rate how easy solving their challenge was on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being very easy. Some companies opt to use different scales that better suit them. You average out the scores, and the higher the number, the better.
13. What aspects of our product do you like? 
14. What aspects of our product would you change? 
15. How likely are you to recommend our product to others? This is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question.
16. What improvements would you suggest to improve our product?
17. How was your overall experience with our company?
18. How responsive were our customer service representatives?
19. Is there anything else you would like to share with us that could help improve our product/service?

That’s quite a list!

Obviously you wouldn’t ask your customers all of these at once — that’s an easy way to overwhelm them. 

So, decide which questions are most important to your organization. Focus on those.

Ask the right questions at the right time

You might also design a customer feedback survey with some of these questions for different stages of their customer journey. 

For example, let’s look at a customer who is onboarding. You might want to know:

1. How did they find you?
2. What are their challenges?
3. What would make them use your product long-term? 

If a customer has been using your product for years, you might focus on feedback questions designed to assess customer loyalty. Are they recommending your product? What improvements do they suggest? Do they have any product feedback for you?

Focus on carefully crafting your customer survey with useful questions. You’ll quickly uncover valuable insight you can use to boost customer satisfaction. 

How to respond to feedback: always follow up

The last point we’ll cover is that you always want to follow up when someone leaves you feedback. 

How you follow up depends on what type of questions you asked and what type of feedback your customer left. 

If the customer left a quick feedback request on your board, or completed a quick survey, you might just send a quick note thanking them.

If they completed a longer, more involved survey, you might send them a personal note.

Often, asking for feedback uncovers negative feedback from an unhappy customer. That’s an amazing opportunity to fix the situation and boost customer retention. Make sure your customer success team is notified and follow ups to address any concerns.

Asking for reviews

Before we wrap up, there’s one more benefit to asking for feedback that’s often overlooked.

The customers that care enough to give you feedback are most likely your most engaged users.

Many businesses struggle to get reviews on online review sites like G2, Capterra, Google Reviews, etc. 

Why not ask your most engaged users to leave you a review?

You don’t want to overwhelm them, but a quick request after they’ve already left you feedback shouldn’t hurt. If you’re requesting feedback in-app, you might just add a message to the confirmation screen:

“Thanks for leaving feedback! We really value your thoughts and insights. If you have a moment, we’d love it if you left us a review on G2.”

If you asked for feedback via email, you could send a similar note via email shortly after they left you feedback.

This is a great way to drive online reviews, and you might even uncover more customer insight in those reviews!

Bottom line: Don’t overwhelm your customers

Any constructive feedback your users give you is extremely valuable for your business. The way you ask for customer feedback means the difference between getting plenty of valuable feedback, and not getting enough.

By making your feedback requests subtle, respectful, and low effort, you’ll encourage your customers to get involved.

What are your tips for making feedback requests informative yet subtle? Is there a strategy you feel works better (or worse)? Let us know in the comments—or reach out to us on Twitter.

Eric Hoppe

Marketer and aspiring dog-sport competitor Eric’s career features stints with innovative companies like Opera Software and Crowd Content. When he’s not telling the world how great Canny is, Eric's finding ways to get his dogson to be a more competitive frisbee dog.

All Posts - Website · Twitter - LinkedIn

The post How to ask for customer feedback for your SaaS product (+ useful infographic) first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How to ask for customer feedback for your SaaS product (+ useful infographic) appeared first on Canny Blog.

Paying attention to what your customers are saying is the best thing you can do for your business. Regardless of the nature of the communication, it’s all valuable.

That said, there are many different types of customer feedback.

Some are obvious, like feature requests. Others are more subtle, like questions about your product. Sometimes you reach out to get certain types of customer feedback. Sometimes, you don’t, and customers just leave their feedback.

Is one kind of feedback more important than another? And how should you address different types of feedback?

In this post we’ll be talking about the different types of customer feedback and what to do with them.

The two main types of customer feedback:

• Feedback customers give you without you asking (like bug reports)
• Feedback you reach out for (like customer surveys)

At a glance, it might seem like feedback you ask for is more important and actionable.

But there’s often a lot of value in the feedback you get without asking for it. This includes forms of communication that you might not be paying as much attention to.

Why this type of customer feedback matters

Implementing features that your customers want adds value. The more value you deliver, the more successful your business will become.

So, feedback requests are an incredibly important thing to track and monitor.

Not all feature requests will make sense for your business. But, the reasonable ones are a goldmine for building your future roadmap. You should keep track of every feature request you get, and see which fit into your roadmap.

You can use Canny to easily track and prioritize customer feedback. We’ve also written about how to prioritize customer feedback by using a roadmap – check it out.

Feature requests are some of the most valuable types of feedback that customers can give you. They give you a clear understanding of what your customers really want. Tracking feature requests keeps your roadmap organized and prioritized for more value.

Bug reports

Bugs are problems that your customers run into while using your product. They can vary from small UI issues to your entire site being down.

A buggy product will almost certainly lead to churn. And, churn is the biggest enemy of every software business. If your product doesn’t work, customers can’t access its value. If they can’t access the value, they’ll leave.

The first thing to do with a bug report is to confirm it exists:

• Ask how the user ran into the issue
• See if you can you reproduce it yourself

If you can reproduce it, consider whether you’ll fix the bug:

• Who is this affecting? All customers, or a select few?
• How severe is the bug? Are certain features unusable?
• How much time/money would it cost to fix it?

If a bug is easy to fix, you should squish it. This shows your customers that you care about their experience. It shows that you take their feedback seriously.

Try to keep ahead of bug reports by using a notification service for issues. We use Sentry for this.

Why this type of customer feedback matters

Bug reports show what is and isn’t working. But, they’re also insight into the ways your customers are using your product.

It’s good practice to consider what’s causing the issue and how you can avoid it in the future. For example, there might be a unit test you can write to ensure the problem never happens again.

This type of customer feedback comes directly from your engaged user base. Sure, it shows what you need to fix. But, it also shows how your customers are using your tool. And, you can show that you’re invested in giving customers a good experience with your product. Being proactive about technical issues drives customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Questions

At every step of the customer journey, people will have questions:

• What does your product do?
• How much does it cost?
• How do I set it up?

…and so on.

Your landing page, documentation, or product itself should answer most of these questions.

But, there will still be times when people can’t find the answer they’re looking for. That’s when they reach out to you. 

Questions aren’t “intended” to be feedback. But, if you think about it, in a way, they are.

Why this type of customer feedback matters

Receiving a question means you could make something clearer. If everything was clear, your customer wouldn’t have a question to begin with.

If you start hearing the same question over and over, it’s worth answering. This might be within your product, in a help center article, or with an FAQs page. It’ll save time for you and your customers — win-win.

Reviews on public sites

Review sites give your users the chance to talk about your company indirectly. Unfortunately, they often do this when they’re already mad about something.

You have no control over this. Unless it’s untrue or inappropriate, everyone has the right to express an opinion.

They’re not always bad, though:

Why this type of customer feedback matters

I

It’s important to keep an eye on what users are saying about your product.

You can either browse them by hand or set up mention notifications.

Monitoring this type of customer feedback matters for a few reasons. At a basic level, it shows what your customers like and don’t like. But beyond that, it gives you a chance to publicly address concerns and ask for more input.

Always record the feedback and respond with a thank you, whether it’s negative or positive. With positive reviews, you can always ask if there’s anything at all they would like changed.

With negative ones, ask to discuss it further. You may be able to resolve whatever triggered the bad review. Brownie points if you go back and let whoever complained know when you’ve fixed the issues.

Praise

This is when a customer tells you about a great experience they had with your company.

Praise is a good sign. Someone took the time to say nice things about your company. That means they must appreciate what you do a lot.

Customer complaints

While it’s always nice to be praised, there’s value in negative feedback too. Praise usually comes from happy customers that aren’t having any problems. That’s great, but on its own, doesn’t give you much direction to improve. 

An unhappy customer can highlight areas you can improve. Train your customer support team to dig in and uncover the actionable feedback behind complaints. 

That might show up as feature requests, bug reports, or problems with your customer experience.

Whatever it is, it’s gold. 

It gives you direction on how you can improve and gives you an opportunity to keep the client happy. Acting on their feedback with future product updates shows you care and can boost customer retention. 

Customer feedback type #2: Feedback you reach out for

These are the types of customer feedback you specifically ask for:

• NPS responses
• CSAT surveys
• Customer effort scores
• Ratings (in-app)
• Sales objections
• Churn reasons
• Customer surveys
• Onboarding feedback
• Feedback after a support interaction

NPS responses

The NPS (net promoter score) is a popular way to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The NPS survey is simple:

• On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?
• Why did you choose that score?

Customers are then split up into three categories:

Promoters (9-10)

These are your most loyal customers. They’re least likely to churn, and most likely to speak well about your brand to others.

There are many ways you can use this to your advantage:

• See if they’re willing to leave reviews on GetApp, G2Crowd, Capterra, or similar.
• Ask them for a testimonial or case study that you can put on your website and social media
• Point them to a referral program if you have one

And, most importantly, express your gratitude loud and clear.

Passives (7-8)

Passives are having an “okay” experience with your product. They aren’t about to churn, but they aren’t loyal, either. Promotion-wise, they aren’t likely to speak about your brand to other people at all.

Figure out how you can turn them into promoters instead of passives. Read why they chose a passive score, and see if there are any quick wins to be had.

If they didn’t give an explanation, reach out and ask what you could do to provide them with a stellar experience. There might be some ideas for improvement there!

Detractors (1-6)

Detractors are the most urgent customers to deal with. They’re most likely to churn and say negative things about your brand.

Figure out how you can turn their negative experience into a positive one by reaching out. Why did they choose that score, and what can you do to fix it?

CSAT Surveys

A customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) is a relatively simple way of gaging how satisfied your customers are. 

To do this, ask one simple question — how satisfied are you with our product or service? 

Customers answer on a scale, usually from 1 to 5. 1 being very unsatisfied, and 5 being extremely satisfied. 

Once you’ve collected survey results, you count how many results are positive. Then, you just divide that number by the total number of responses.

For example, say you asked 100 customers how satisfied you were. 75 answer with a 4 or 5 on your scale. Your calculation would look like this:

75 positives / 100 responses = 0.75

That works out to a 75% satisfaction score.

The CSAT survey is an easy-to-use method and can help you track satisfaction at different points in your customer journey. 

In terms of follow-up on these surveys — you can generally follow the same advice we gave for NPS. 

 

Customer Effort Score

Customer effort score (CES) is a customer feedback survey that looks at how easy it is for customers to accomplish their goals in your product. You could send a CES survey to measure the ease of any aspect of your business: 

1. How easy was it to sign up?
2. How easy was it to set up your account?
3. How easy was it to contact customer support?

Those are just a few examples. You likely have some unique to your business you’d like to explore. 

You ask customers to answer your questions on a likert scale from 1 to 7, 1 being strongly disagree, and 7 being strongly agree. 

Then, you just add up up the total value of all responses and divide it by the total number of responses.

For example, let’s say you ask 100 customers to answer a question. The average response is 5. That means the sum of responses is 500. 

So, your calculation would look like this:

500 / 100 = 5

That would be a good CES score. Anything equal to or greater than 5 is good. Anything less, is considered poor.

CES lets you gauge the ease of use of anything you want. This can help you identify features that are difficult to use. Your product development could then focus on making them easier to use. 

Ratings (in-app)

In-app ratings are another quick easy way to ask for feedback.

As long as we cancel their subscription immediately, they’re generally happy to elaborate. It’s also a nice way to end the customer relationship.

Collecting this type of feedback eliminates guesswork. You don’t have to wonder why a customer decided to stop using your product.

Keep track of reasons why people churn, and its consequences to your bottom line in a spreadsheet or a feedback management system. Soon, you’ll start noticing common reasons for cancelling, and eliminate them.

Customer surveys

Customer surveys are generally sent via email to existing customers. It’s a regular feedback request (usually done once or twice a year, depending on the company).

Surveying customers is one of the more obvious ways of collecting feedback. The purpose of a survey is to ask questions to assess customer satisfaction.

The downside? It’s a bigger ask. Surveys are more labor-heavy for customers than other feedback types. Especially if you compare them to something like an NPS survey, which takes a few seconds.

This means that need to format the surveys carefully:

• Ask the right questions for constructive answers
• Appreciate the effort
• Always respond with an option to talk further

As for formatting customer surveys, start with this SurveyMonkey article. It covers which customer survey questions are the most (and least) productive.

Onboarding feedback

Onboarding is one of the most crucial stages of your customers’ lifecycle.

It’s their first impression with you. They will definitely have questions, as well as valuable feedback.

During onboarding, make sure your customers:

• Are supported throughout the process (ask them if they need help before they have to reach out)
• Have the option to easily give initial feedback

Send regular (but not too regular) messages during the trial/onboarding stage:

• A getting started guide
• Not a lot of activity—why?
• Didn’t set up—why?
• Not extending trial or becoming a customer after onboarding—why?

Feedback during onboarding is valuable because it’s very raw. The customers who are just getting to know your product have no bias.

Record all valuable feedback from onboarding customers, and use it to make the experience smoother.

Feedback after a support interaction

Some companies choose to add the option to rate a support interaction after it happens.

This feedback is low-effort for your customer, but it still gives you an idea about how you’re doing.

This feedback is more related to your support interactions than your customers’ experience with the product. But, it’ll still give you valuable insight into how you can improve.

Once you have enough data, you can start calculating your customer satisfaction score.

Takeaway: Collecting many different types of customer feedback is valuable

Many companies treat customer service and feedback like a cost. Cost is generally something you should try and minimize.

Don’t be one of those companies.

Feedback is an opportunity and a gift. It’ll help you provide value and improve your business from every angle.

Your customer is taking time out of their busy day to tell you how you’re doing, and how you can do better. You should appreciate and encourage it, not disregard it.

We’ve gone into more detail on how to get feedback – check it out. Even if you’re an early-stage business and don’t yet have a super-engaged user base, collecting feedback is still extremely valuable. And, if you’re looking for a way to keep track of multiple types of feedback from different sources, you can try Canny’s free customer feedback tools.

Which types of customer feedback have been most valuable for your business? Leave us a comment and let us know, or connect with us on Twitter .

Eric Hoppe

Marketer and aspiring dog-sport competitor Eric’s career features stints with innovative companies like Opera Software and Crowd Content. When he’s not telling the world how great Canny is, Eric's finding ways to get his dogson to be a more competitive frisbee dog.

All Posts - Website · Twitter - LinkedIn

The post Different types of customer feedback (and what to do with them) first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Different types of customer feedback (and what to do with them) appeared first on Canny Blog.

Public roadmaps need to be formatted, designed, and hosted in a way that makes them easy to consume. They’re useless without proper presentation.

This means that building a public roadmap can be a daunting task.

If you’re a Canny user, you know that we offer public product roadmap software, too.

However, if you’re not a Canny user (maybe you should be?), you’re probably wondering about other options out there.

In this post, we’re going to look at three companies who solved their roadmap needs without a specialized tool—and did it well!

We’ll also show you how to manage a product roadmap using Canny (featuring our own roadmap!).

We’ll look at why they’re good, and what to learn from them.

Public product roadmap example 1: Buffer

Buffer is known for their general attitude towards being super transparent. Salaries, revenue, fundraising, etc—it’s all out there.

Naturally, they also have a public product roadmap.

Buffer’s roadmap is hosted in Trello. While it isn’t a specialized product roadmapping tool, it works well enough for basic organization.

Here’s what we like about Buffer’s solution:

Simplicity

Trello boards can get incredibly messy. Endless columns, statuses, tags, and posts make a roadmap hard to navigate and slow to load.

Regardless of Trello’s capabilities, Buffer has made their roadmap system incredibly simple. 4 statuses total, and that’s it.

Anyone browsing it can easily find what they’re looking for without having to scroll for hours.

The roadmap “key”

Buffer has added an explanation and a “key” to the roadmap in the very first column.

They key explains the color tags used in the roadmap layout, and makes finding relevant information easier by filtering.

Even though the roadmap is pretty straightforward, there’s also an explanation in the “how does this board work?” card.

This means that there won’t be any confusion with which status really means what, or what stage something is in.

Option to send feature requests

Brownie points go to the “send us a feature request” card in the first column.

Many people get inspired to submit their own ideas when looking at public roadmaps. If the option to do so isn’t in easy reach, it means extra effort for the user. Extra effort often means they’ll give up.

Trello isn’t the best place to integrate feedback forms or pop-ups into. Buffer has solved this by adding the link to a submit request form. It’s in a clearly marked card on the board.

Everyone who feels like they have an idea to talk about can get it over with right there. If you’re planning on using Trello for your roadmapping, it’s definitely a strategy to consider.

Votes and comments

The thing we love most about a good product roadmap example is the ability to have a discussion about features. Hey—it’s pretty much what we built Canny for.

Buffer isn’t using Trello to just inform their users about the roadmap. They’ve enabled comments and votes on cards, and actually engage with users in these sections.

You can start out by just having your roadmap viewable in general. However, for maximum input and extra context, we suggest that you create a place for discussion, regardless of the tool you use.

All in all, Buffer took a tool that is not specifically designed for roadmapping, and made it into a suitable solution.

If you’re thinking of using Trello for your roadmap, take notice of Buffer when it comes to simplicity, communication, and organization.

Public product roadmap example 2: Monzo

Monzo is a bank service based in the UK. In addition to offering bank accounts, they also have some really cool money managing features available. Check them out!

Monzo is one of the few companies out there who have built their own, custom-made roadmap called Making Monzo.

Building a custom public roadmap can seem like a scary task and a lot of work. However, Monzo has made their solution simple, yet effective.

Here’s what we like about it:

It’s pretty

Yes, roadmaps need to be functional and informative first and foremost. However, the cute illustrations on the roadmap items don’t exactly hurt.

It’s the little bit of extra effort and on-brand personality that the design adds that makes it unique.

Simplicity

Just like with Trello, Monzo is keeping their roadmap organization pretty straightforward. There’s three statuses—coming soon, in the future, and finished—and that’s really all you need. And, highlighting what they’re building in the future communicates their product vision.

Site flow

Every roadmap item has their own little landing page for details.

On these pages, you can see details and updates for a feature, go to the community to discuss, or view related feature requests.

Separating features into their own pages might seem like an extra thing to do. However, it gives much more room for information and details.

Having the community link separate from the roadmap means that the roadmap itself is a little less cluttered. Discussion is easy to access, but it’s not in the way of those just browsing.

All in all, Monzo has decided to make their own roadmap, but not make it a huge ordeal. It’s refreshing to see a custom built page that isn’t overdone.

If you want to build your own solution, it’s a pretty good public product roadmap example to follow.

Public product roadmap example 3: Attendify

Attendify is an event technology company (yes, event technology is a thing—learn something every day!). They also have a pretty nifty, custom-built public product roadmap.

This custom roadmap is a little more in-depth than Monzo’s version.

Here’s what we like about it:

Clear organization

Unlike many other companies, Attendify doesn’t add their “finished” batch of features into their “roadmap”.

The “roadmap” items (researching, designing, and developing) are a separate section of the page, and launched items have their own little nook. Like so:

There are always (potential) users who don’t care much for what is being worked on. They only want to see what has already been done (and vice versa).

Separating these two sections allows everyone to find the information they’re most interested in.

Feedback call to action

If you look closely, you can see a little “send feedback” button on each roadmap item.

This button allows you to send a message or question directly to the team, about that specific item.

It’s an interesting approach to allowing discussion on features (although we didn’t try it out to see if we get a response or not). Plus, it gives users the feeling that their feedback is valued.

The “how we build” section

Attendify has a cool extra section on their roadmap page that explains some of the principles behind how they build things.

From design to engineering to CX, you can gain a glimpse into how things are done in the process.

Is it strictly necessary? No. Is it a cool little detail to add some insight and personality into the roadmap? Yes.

Easy access to extra information on launched features

With every already launched feature, Attendify links a blog post about it from the roadmap.

Adding extra resources to roadmap items isn’t always easy. Sure—you want to let people know how the feature works. However, putting all the details into a Trello card or a landing page isn’t always the best option.

By creating separate content about a feature and making it accessible to those who want to see it, Attendify makes sure that the roadmap isn’t overwhelming. But, extra information is there if needed.

In conclusion, Attendify’s roadmap definitely requires some extra work to build and maintain. We think it’s worth it! The little extras and more categorization is nice to look at and easy to navigate.

Product Roadmap Example 4: Canny

We don’t like to toot our own horn too much, but we think our product roadmap is pretty good too!

One of the best aspects of our roadmap is that it’s integrated with our product management system. It’s a part of a system that includes:

1. Feedback and idea management
2. Prioritization
3. Product roadmapping
4. Changelog and release note updates

We involve our key stakeholders through the entire process. And, we can update our roadmap with just a few clicks.

What does that actually look like?

We start with feedback and idea management on our public boards:

This lets our internal team and each product owner see a list of all feature requests and ideas we’ve collected. We can also see how many votes each new feature has and some other values we pulled in.

The flip side of this is that our key stakeholders can also see all the ideas we’re considering and add their input. This goes a step further than managing a public roadmap — external stakeholders can actually help decide what makes it to our roadmap with their input.

From there, we score each idea using our weighted scoring prioritization formula. We then pick the highest scoring ideas, and move them into our public roadmap for all our users to see.

We have three statuses for our roadmap:

1. Under review – our product team is considering the idea / feature request.
2. Planned – we’ve added this feature to our current product development cycle and the feature is coming. The product manager working on the feature posts an update that alerts each stakeholder interested in the idea. We ask for further input and feedback to finalize the project.
3. In progress – our development team is working on the feature.

One of the main draws of this setup is that it encourages collaboration between our internal team and external stakeholders. We can learn more about how our users would use different product features. They can tell us why some features we’re considering are important to them (or aren’t). It helps our product roadmapping to be more user-driven, which helps us build the most impactful features.

The final step in our external roadmap process is publishing a changelog entry.

With each product release, we create detailed release notes using our changelog tool. This provides details on the new feature and how to use it. We can also share the entry with everyone who voted and commented on the original feature request.

We like to call that closing the feedback loop. It’s the last stage in what we like to call a feedback-driven product roadmap.

Go for simplicity, UX, and communication

Regardless of whether you use Trello, Canny, or a custom solution for your public roadmap, there are some principles to keep in mind:

• Keep it simple: overwhelming roadmaps are… well, overwhelming. Avoid adding too much detail and information in one place. If you think extra resources are needed, make them findable, but separate.
• Think about user experience: roadmaps should be easy to navigate, understand, and filter. Information is more important than design, but that doesn’t mean your roadmap should be hard to use.
• Allow communication both ways: it’s fine to start out with just making your roadmap public. However, adding a communication point, whether it’s comments, a forum, or a form, will allow you to get better context and feedback for your roadmap items.

Did we miss out on any great examples of public roadmaps? Let us know!

Eric Hoppe

Marketer and aspiring dog-sport competitor Eric’s career features stints with innovative companies like Opera Software and Crowd Content. When he’s not telling the world how great Canny is, Eric's finding ways to get his dogson to be a more competitive frisbee dog.

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The post Evaluating the best public product roadmap examples (with screenshots!) first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Evaluating the best public product roadmap examples (with screenshots!) appeared first on Canny Blog.

It informs and sets expectations for everyone in and around an organization. However, communicating product roadmaps and the information in them can be tricky.

Every company has many groups of “stakeholders”. These are people or organizations that care about how you’re doing. There are both internal and external stakeholders

Different stakeholders have different interests, values, and concerns, depending on their commitment to your business.

Presenting the same information to these different groups generalizes it to the point where it’s not useful. That’s why you should pick and choose the main points based on the stakeholder group.

You don’t necessarily need several physical versions of your roadmap. However, there are times when you have the power to choose which information to highlight. It could be in meetings, presentations, Q&A rounds, etc.

In these situations, you should focus on different aspects depending on who you’re talking to. This way, every group gets the most valuable information for them.

Personalizing roadmap presentations to different groups avoids a lot of miscommunication, confusion and unnecessary back and forth.

This post is going to dive into building your roadmap presentation. We’re also going to talk about the most common things different stakeholders care (and don’t care) about.

PS: the following points are generalizations to guide you in your presentations. There will always be exceptions when it comes to what someone cares about. Make sure to leave room for discussion and questions for these cases.

Elements of the presentation

Let’s start by looking at what goes into your presentation.

What you include in your presentation depends on a few things: the purpose, which stakeholder you’re presenting to, and how your team works. Your role might also influence how you present. Product managers will likely present very differently than a founder or a CEO.

Here are some common elements that a product manager can include in the presentation:

1. Introduction — give a brief overview of your product and the goal of your presentation
2. Product vision — explain the vision product management has and how this roadmap supports it
3. Market analysis — discuss market trends, what your competition is building, and any present opportunities 
4. Current status — look at the current status of your product development process
5. Priorities — list your product priorities and highlight important features that you will work on. You might also explore your prioritization formula.
6. Roadmap timeline — include a visual timeline showing when features will be worked on, completed, and how long they’ll take. A Gantt chart can be helpful here. 
7. Budget/resources — include a breakdown of the expected costs to fulfill this roadmap. That can include staff time and money. 
8. Risk assessment — identify any risks that could get in the way of completing the roadmap, and how you’ll prevent them.
9. Q&A — give your stakeholders a chance to learn more, provide feedback, and resolve concerns.

 Now that we know what you’ll want to include, let’s look at different stakeholders and how you can tailor your presentation for them.

Stakeholders

Let’s take a look at the most common types of stakeholders the product team would present to. 

Executives/Investors

Their main objective: to see whether the company is moving in the right direction in general, whether the company is focused on the right things.
What they care about: high level goals, plans and progress, validation of plans.
What they don’t care about: technical details, complicated data, detailed timelines.

How to present:

• Start with high level goals and when they are expected to be met
• Use simple data that validates why these goals exist (customer requests, etc)
• Explain the expected outcome of these goals (in simple words and numbers)
• Briefly describe the progress towards these goals

Investors and executives aren’t intensely involved in your company’s everyday operations. They probably have tons of other ventures on the side. This means that they can’t spend time on details that don’t matter to them.

Focus on the general direction and high-level goals—and keep it short and sweet.

Customers/users

Their main objective: making sure their business can operate or keep operating using the software, and seeking added value for their use case.
What they care about: when things will be done, exactly what will be done, and how it changes things for their business.
What they don’t care about: who’s responsible, technical details, detailed timelines.

How to present:

• Customers don’t care about details of a roadmap item; they want to know when they can start using it
• Speak about planned deadlines for product roadmap items, but remember to “under promise and over deliver”
• They also want to know what an item actually entails, so they know whether it’s valuable for them or not
• If you collect feedback in a public board and have requests or items you’re NOT going to put in your roadmap, make that very clear, too

Remember—customers are using your software to improve their own business. They care about the functionality of your product. Focus on changes in that functionality. If you’re adding features, explain how it can add value to their use case.

If you’re removing or not building certain features, be transparent about it.

Technical team members

Their main objective: getting their tasks done in a timely and efficient manner.
What they care about: technical details, detailed timeline, who’s responsible for what.
What they don’t care about: high-level information, excessive details about the reasoning behind a task (such as in-depth customer research).

How to present:

• Focus on timelines first—product and development teams need to be able to coordinate well to meet deadlines
• Then, go into the technical requirements of everything on the roadmap
• Ownership is also crucial—make sure everyone is crystal clear about which items on the product roadmap they are directly responsible for

Technical team members want to be efficient with making functionality happen. They need to know when, where, what, and who with they have to do in order to build something great. Coordination is key.

Non-technical team members

This group is pretty broad, but we’d consider customer success, human resources, marketing, and your sales team the main members. 

Their main objective: efficiently organizing their work, communication, and tasks around the product roadmap.
What they care about: general timelines, who’s responsible for what (for questions and information), details about big changes so they can prepare, benefits of items to communicate to third parties.
What they don’t care about: technical details.

Let’s look at what each of these groups’ members are interested in:

Customer success — wants to see if a feature customers are asking for is on the roadmap. This can help them communicate better with customers and set expectations.

Marketing — they need to know what features are coming so they can plan launch campaigns. They also want to know if new features change product strategy or positioning. Marketing is often interested in features that help them compete against competitors.

The sales team — they want to see if there are features planned that can help them close deals. They might have leads waiting on new features. Or, they might be able to upsell existing customers interested in a new feature. 

Human resources — usually want to know if internal tools they need are being worked on. They might also want to see if the company’s resources are being fully utilized. 

How to present:

• Focus on the timeline and what will be happening when—especially when it comes to big changes
• This gives marketing plenty of time to organize their work around external communication
• Big changes and deadlines should also be communicated to support so they can let (potential) customers know about what’s coming up
• Letting non-technical team members know who’s in the implementation team will also create a sense of security around needing extra information

Non-technical team members want to make sure their job aligns with the product goals.

These people are often left out of the loop when it comes to roadmaps and other “technical” discussions. Don’t make that mistake.

Product roadmap templates

There are several ways to build a product roadmap presentation.

You could opt to build a presentation in Powerpoint, Keynote, or Google Slides. This is a good option for more formal presentations. That could be better for executives, investors, and customers.

Pinterest is a great resource for finding a product roadmap Powerpoint template that works for you. You’ll likely want a visual roadmap, and you need a roadmap template that fits your brand. Pinterest lets you browse hundreds of visual roadmap templates quickly. You can then follow the link to download the one that works for you.

If you opt to go for a less formal presentation, you might not need a Powerpoint template at all.

Using a Public Roadmap

Your product roadmap tool likely includes a visual roadmap view that you can present. Canny’s roadmap tool can do this for you. 

Here’s a look at how we share our public roadmap:

We keep a backlog of ideas and feature requests on our Canny board. Using our roadmap prioritization feature, we score all these ideas and decide which ones to add to the roadmap.

Stakeholders can then just visit our public roadmap to see what features are coming. This is an easier way of communicating with stakeholders. It also lets them access the info whenever they want.

If you want to present a public roadmap like this, all you need to do is screen share and walk through it. 

Focus on the right product roadmap items for the right people

Having a roadmap is great. However, discussing it is only valuable if you talk to the right people the right way.

There is no universal way of presenting a roadmap. Generalizing and assuming everyone is fine with the same information will cause confusion, unnecessary questions, and coordination issues.

Choosing what to focus on when communicating a roadmap to different stakeholders will ensure everyone will get optimal information for what they need.

Eric Hoppe

Marketer and aspiring dog-sport competitor Eric’s career features stints with innovative companies like Opera Software and Crowd Content. When he’s not telling the world how great Canny is, Eric's finding ways to get his dogson to be a more competitive frisbee dog.

All Posts - Website · Twitter - LinkedIn

The post How to successfully deliver your product roadmap presentation to stakeholders first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post How to successfully deliver your product roadmap presentation to stakeholders appeared first on Canny Blog.