This week on Product Love, I sat down with Daniel Scrivner, CEO of Flow, a modern task and project management software. We picked up where our previous conversation about customer feedback left off. Daniel believes that customer feedback can be immensely helpful, but the timing of it is important. He learned from Apple that feedback shouldn’t fill a void that comes from a lack of vision, or a lack of clarity. It’s actually good to be opinionated. The best products are singular. They come from a single idea, a single voice that was united.
Daniel suggests being internally driven, and bringing in customer feedback at the earliest stages. That will help frame how you’re going to build and “gut-check” that you are approaching the product correctly.
We also talked a lot about customer interviews. When they conducted user research, they would ask questions that would elicit a broad range of feedback. They’d ask users to narrate what was going on in their heads as they used the product. This included how they felt, how they were navigating the journey, and what they were thinking through it at all. One thing that Daniel mentions as being helpful is that the product team was detached from users through this process, and they were forced to listen without reacting defensively.
In the episode, we also talked about the ideal makeup of a product team (Daniel opts for smaller teams), the importance of differentiation, and what he looks for when he hires a product manager.
You might also like
