Design is more than just the “looks.” It’s a key player in a startup’s success. It shapes how users feel and interact with your product. It can set you apart in a sea of options. That’s where a design founder comes into play.

We created Canny to be easy to use and user-focused. Our design-first approach wasn’t just for show – it guided every choice we made. It helped us win users’ hearts, turning quick visits into lasting relationships.

If you’re curious about building a design-first SaaS, keep reading. I’ll share some design principles we live by that helped us get to where we are today.

Canny’s journey and the role of design

Before starting Canny, I ‌worked on the design team for Facebook Messenger. When we started Canny, I knew I wanted to build a product centered around design.

Since building and designing Canny, we’ve received positive feedback, especially around our design.

“It just works. The UX/UI is simple, people have no questions about using it. It’s the kind of product that I really love.”

Aurélien Georget, CPO at Strapi

My focus on design extended beyond just our product. Other high-level areas I always pay special attention to include

• Landing pages (they create the first impression)
• Pricing page
• Product onboarding

Focusing on design might be tough if you don’t have a background in product design. I still believe a few simple design guidelines can go a long way. It’s all about the mindset.

Pre-design: setting the stage

It’s tempting to start working on your big idea right away, but hold on! There’s groundwork we can’t skip.

1. Know your target audience

Understanding your audience is key.

• Who are they?
• What do they need?
• What do they love?

Dive deep into who benefits most from your product. Explore their lives, wants, and dislikes. The more you know, the better you can serve them.

2. Explore different paths

Each problem often has multiple solutions. It’s tempting to go for one of them. Try to top yourself and think:

• Is the issue just a symptom of something bigger?
• Is there a smarter, simpler fix?

You might not need to do any design work in the end.

3. The power of ‘no’

Here’s a hard truth: you can’t do it all. Trying to please everyone pleases no one. You’ve got to pick your battles.

Choose the ideas that pack the most punch. Sometimes, this means turning down suggestions, even good ones. How? Show your work. Use data to explain why one feature wins over another. It’s not personal; it’s strategic.

Check out this fun video we put together about saying “no” to feature requests.

5. Balance it out

Remember: good design is a balancing act. It’s not just about how things look, but how they work. It’s the harmony between form and function, UI and UX. Keep this in mind, and you’re off to a great start.

Now that you have this foundation, let’s dive into some common design principles.

UI meets UX

Design is a dialogue. UI and UX are our key speakers. They might seem similar, but they play different roles in one crucial conversation: the user’s journey.

UI, or user interface, is all about what meets the eye. It’s the buttons you click, the paths you follow, and the visual cues that guide you. UI design needs to be clear and tell users what’s up at a glance.

UX, or user experience, is the big picture. It’s how all the parts come together to make you feel. Is it easy? Is it enjoyable? Does it make sense? UX controls all that.

When UI and UX work in harmony, they create something special: a user-holistic experience. It’s not just about a nice facade or a single fun feature. It’s about a seamless journey from start to finish.

There’s a concept called “dribbblisation of design.” Typically, “things that look great but don’t work well” fall under this category. Great design aims to fix that and help people actually use the product.

Reaching goals

Users don’t like hurdles. They want to reach their goals with no fuss. That’s why we aim to cut the clutter and keep things smooth. That means removing bumps in the road and making sure each step feels natural.

Simplicity

Ever heard of “drunk user testing“? It’s a cheeky way of saying your design should be so simple that anyone could get it, even after a few too many. It’s a funny idea, but it’s got a point. Simple is sticky. It’s what keeps users coming back.

In the end, great design crafts a journey that feels good every step of the way.

At Canny, our goal is to build a product that is a joy to use. We aim to bring users to their “aha moment” as quickly as possible, with minimal distractions. In other words, we try to make it super simple to use. Our customers seem to resonate with our design approach.

“I love the design and single sign-on solution. I also love the fact that Canny is hosted on our domain. And it’s simple. It just works. There’s no headache. It’s just easy to set up, and it saves time.”

Philippe Lehoux, founder at Missive

Design thinking: beyond the surface

When we dive into the world of design, we’re not just playing with aesthetics. We’re engaging in “design thinking” – a creative, strategic approach that starts with understanding people. It’s a philosophy that doesn’t just seek to decorate but to dive deep, explore, and solve real-world problems in intuitive ways. And this mindset is the heartbeat of everything we do at Canny.

Design as a problem-solver

This approach isn’t about impulsive fixes. It’s about useful solutions. It means stepping into the user’s shoes, feeling their pain points, and using these insights to guide our creativity. It’s not about guesswork; it’s about empathy, understanding, and smart, user-centered decision-making.

Intuition is key

An intuitive tool doesn’t just happen. It’s a result of deep understanding and anticipation of user needs. If you do it right, you can predict their needs before they voice their concerns.

It’s design thinking in action — creating experiences that feel natural, almost like the product is reading your mind.

In essence, design thinking takes us beyond superficial beauty. It’s about crafting solutions that resonate on a deeper level.

Here’s how we applied these principles at Canny.

At first, we had a set of default statuses. The options were enough for most customers. Plus, the experience remained simple. 

Years later we added custom statuses. This design process involved:

• Building a status management feature for admins
• Checking how statuses appear in different views
• Updating integrations that involved using statuses

Also, we now need to consider custom statuses for future features we build. It is very easy for complexity to snowball.

In the beginning, we limited our scope to the essentials. It was the right move. From there, we collected feedback to understand how the custom status feature needs to behave.

How can you apply this strategy?

When you’re building your next feature:

1. Strategy: think about your target persona. What goal are they trying to reach? What’s the most optimal/most obvious route to that goal?
2. Engineering: consider building things that allow you to easily expand functionality later.

Remember: adding functionality later is much easier than stripping things down.

Now that we’ve covered some common design principles, let’s talk about applying them.

Navigating design principles

Embarking on the design journey requires a compass, and that’s where solid design principles come into play. It’s not about wandering aimlessly in the creative woods; it’s about navigating with purpose, guided by user research, simplicity, and strategic thinking.

1. Tuning in to user feedback

Listening is an art, especially when it comes to user feedback. It’s not just about collecting opinions; it’s about diving deep into what clients are saying and what they’re not.

Surveys, interviews, and direct questions are your best friends here. They’re the compass needles pointing to the true North of user needs.

2. MVP: The art of essentialism

In the world of product design, MVP (Minimum Viable Product) isn’t about being minimal; it’s about being essential. It’s asking, “What’s the core value we’re delivering?” and stripping away anything that doesn’t scream “yes!”. It’s about avoiding the allure of complexity and embracing the elegance of simplicity.

3. The Pareto Principle: the 80/20 rule

Ever heard of solving 80% of problems with just 20% of effort? That’s the Pareto Principle, and it’s gold. It’s about identifying the most impactful elements of your design and really, truly honing in on them. It’s not about cutting corners; it’s about maximizing positive impact through smart, strategic choices.

4. Simplicity in navigation

Good design is invisible. It’s the silent guide that leads users where they need to go, effortlessly. It’s about sticking to what’s familiar, reducing friction, and making the journey intuitive. Your website isn’t a treasure map; users shouldn’t need clues to navigate.

5. Removing friction

Friction? That’s just a fancy word for “user annoyance,” and it’s a big no-no. Whether it’s a cluttered checkout page or a confusing sign-up form, any hiccup can turn a user’s experience sour.

The goal? Smooth out those bumps. Make the experience so seamless that users glide through without a second thought.

6. Being prescriptive

Choices are great, but too many can lead to decision paralysis. Sometimes, it’s best to guide users down the clearest, simplest path. It’s not about taking control; it’s about enhancing clarity and reducing confusion. Especially in the early days, speed and simplicity win the race.

In essence, navigating design principles isn’t about following a map, It’s about creating the map as you understand the terrain better. It’s a dynamic, responsive process that puts user experience at the heart of every decision. And remember – the journey matters just as much as the destination.

Let’s break this down further.

Simplifying user choices

Every choice is a crossroad, and too many can lead a user astray. That’s why we trim the extras and keep only what serves our journey’s purpose. It’s about presenting options not as a buffet but as a carefully curated menu, handpicked for the user’s delight.

Guiding users with intention

Our designs aren’t just layouts; they’re signposts. Each element is a subtle guide, a nudge in the right direction. We don’t leave a user alone in the dark. We illuminate their path, making the journey not just easy, but also enjoyable.

Focused simplicity

In the battle between simplicity and options, simplicity reigns supreme. Why? Because your brain is a precious resource. We don’t want to overwhelm it; we want to cater to it. Our designs don’t shout; they whisper, providing just the right amount of information at just the right time.

Prioritizing common actions

Not all actions are created equal. We prioritize based on user needs, bringing the most common actions to the forefront. The rest? They’re there, but they don’t crowd the space. They’re like backstage crew, out of sight, but ready when needed.

Intuitive navigation and discovery

Ever felt the thrill of a seamless sign-up or the ease of a hassle-free checkout? That’s prescriptive design at work.

We lay out features so naturally that users find them before they even realize they’re looking.

Prescriptive design isn’t a set of rules; it’s a philosophy. It’s clarity in the midst of chaos, a beacon for users swamped in a sea of choices. It’s how we turn overwhelming possibilities into focused, delightful experiences. Because in the end, design is not about the creator; it’s about the user – the traveler.

Collaborative design: the path to wholeness

Design isn’t a solitary journey; it’s a collaborative expedition. It thrives on diverse perspectives, thrumming in the space between creativity and practicality. Here’s how collaboration shapes our path at Canny.

1. Embracing feedback and collaboration

Great ideas aren’t born in a vacuum; they’re nurtured through collaboration. We listen — to our team, to our users, to everyone willing to share a piece of their mind. Feedback isn’t criticism; it’s the soil where our ideas grow. It challenges us, pushes us, and molds us into better creators.

Listening to feedback helps us create a community out of our users. When we engage in conversations with them, we start to understand their needs and pain points better. 

2. Creativity meets pragmatism

Creativity is the heart of design, but pragmatism is its compass. One pushes the boundaries; the other sets them. It’s a delicate dance, a give-and-take where wild ideas are tempered by real-world constraints. And in this balance we find our truest, most impactful expressions.

3. Cultivating continuous improvement

Design is never finished. It’s an evolving entity, a story that unfolds with each user interaction. We’re not just builders; we’re gardeners, tending to our creations, pruning here, nurturing there. We embrace change, celebrate adaptation, and strive for improvement.

The advantage of a design-driven co-founder

What is it like – to be a designer and a co-founder? It’s like having a secret sauce for your startup. Our design journey with Canny isn’t just about making things look snazzy. It’s about constantly getting into our users’ shoes, really feeling what they feel, and letting that shape everything we build.

This approach turned complexity on its head. We choose clear, simple, and sanity-saving options that our clients can’t get enough of.

And the collaboration? Gold. Nothing beats the buzz of bouncing ideas around and making something better than you’d imagined.

Remember: your knack for design isn’t just a cool skill; it’s your startup’s ace. It’s about creating experiences, forming real connections, and steering your business in a direction that feels right. Own that superpower, and watch it propel your startup to the stars.

If you’re a founder, but not a designer, I hope you can use these tips and principles and build a better product.

Sarah Hum

Hey there, I'm one of the co-founders of Canny. As a founder, I dabble in pretty much everything but my expertise is in product design. Outside work, I enjoy digital illustration, a cappella, and hanging out with our dog, Emmy.

All Posts · Twitter

The post How design can help your startup stand out: tips from a designer founder first appeared on Canny Blog.

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A product roadmap guides your efforts and helps you stay focused. It’s the story and plan for your product – all in one. It helps manage product teams, stakeholder expectations, and endless updates. And the best part? You don’t have to start from scratch.

We’re excited to bring these free product roadmap templates to you! That’s right — they’re ready to use, don’t cost a penny, and can be a real boost for your product strategy. 

Why these product roadmap templates are your next big win

If you’re here, you might be on the hunt for a fresh way to sculpt your roadmap. Maybe you need:

• Better organization
• Closer alignment to your goals
• Improved communication with your team

These roadmap templates can help you with all that and more!

• Strategic vision: These templates aren’t just for short-term goals. They help plan for upcoming months and even years. This way, you can always stay one step ahead.
• Efficiency: no need to start from scratch. These templates free up your time for strategic thinking instead of mundane formatting tasks.
• Organization: seamlessly juggle your objectives, deliverables, and timelines. Eliminate chaos and maintain clarity.
• Communication: designed for everyone involved – from teams to stakeholders. They visually articulate your strategy ensuring alignment.
• Flexibility: every product is distinct. Your roadmap should be too. Choose from four varied templates based on your needs.

How to use product roadmap templates

Templates are a starting point, and it’s all about how you use them. Here’s how to make these templates work for you.

• Customize wisely. Begin with your overarching goals and align your roadmap accordingly. Be concise. Prioritize clarity over clutter. And remember – different projects might require different formats. Diversify as needed.
• Collaborate. Share the vision and rationale with stakeholders. Encourage feedback and recognize different viewpoints. This collective approach enriches your roadmap and fosters a sense of ownership among team members.
• Stay updated. Market dynamics shift. Ensure your roadmap is Agile. Celebrate achievements, learn from missteps, and consistently review and refine your approach. Solicit feedback, especially from users – their insights can prove invaluable.
• Stay consistent. A new method might seem daunting initially, but persistence pays off. A tool is only as effective as its consistent application.

Try product roadmap templates today

In product management, a clear roadmap is your guiding star. That’s why our free product roadmap templates are so useful. They simplify complex strategies, save precious time, and enhance team alignment.

Ready to give them a try? Here are your next steps:

• Start now! Download your free templates and embark on a well-defined product journey.
• Share your experience. Your feedback is crucial for our continuous improvement and community learning.
• Level up! Explore our roadmap software with a free Canny account.

Your path to a streamlined product strategy is just a click away.

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

All Posts - Website · Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn

The post Master product planning with these free roadmap templates + examples first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Master product planning with these free roadmap templates + examples appeared first on Canny Blog.

Self-driving cars, text generation, fraud detection, and more – AI seems to suddenly be everywhere.

So, how can you take advantage of AI, especially in the SaaS industry?

This blog post features several AI SaaS use cases for various departments. We’ll also explore how these AI SaaS solutions can help you get ahead. Hopefully, these examples will inspire you to automate some of your tedious tasks.

Is AI new?

Before diving into examples, let’s briefly explore AI’s journey. How did we even get here?

Before ChatGPT from OpenAI blew up, AI was already prevalent in SaaS. It helped companies:

• Send automated emails
• Respond to frequently asked questions (chatbots)
• Personalize website content, offers, and recommendations
• Screen resumes
• Score leads
• Segment customers
• And much more

In 2022, AI reached a new level. Generative AI (like ChatGPT) appeared seemingly overnight. After that, many AI tools followed. Today, many AI tools are helping practically every SaaS company save time and work faster.

“AI serves as a catalyst for handling those mundane and repetitive tasks. Thanks to AI, I can focus on more strategic aspects of my work.”

Deborah Bittencourt, Product Manager and Product Designer, IBS Consulting

Deborah Bittencourt, Product Manager and Product Designer, IBS Consulting

Now, let’s break down the seven ways AI can help you outperform your competition in SaaS.

1. Product development

AI streamlines various aspects of product development, such as:

• Analyzing users
• Generating ideas
• Prototyping
• Testing
• Writing and fixing code
• Detecting anomalies
• Surfacing vulnerabilities
• Managing projects
• Optimizing design and costs

Here are some sample prompts you can use for each of these points.

1. Analyze user data to identify the most engaged customer segments over the last quarter.
2. Generate a list of the top five feature requests from user reviews on our platform.
3. Generate three prototypes for the new dashboard based on current user behavior analytics.
4. Run automated tests focusing on ‌newly deployed features and summarize the results
5. Suggest optimizations for the current code base to improve performance.
6. Scan the system logs for the last week and flag any unusual activity.
7. Perform a vulnerability assessment for the latest build.
8. Predict any potential delays in the current project timeline and suggest mitigating actions.
9. Analyze the cost-efficiency of design alternatives for the new feature set.

There are many AI tools out there that can help. Let’s explore what’s out there (beyond ChatGPT).

TL;DR: it’s now easier to manage product development, thanks to AI.

Feature development

When you’re developing features, there are three main aspects where AI can assist:

1. Predictive analysis: AI can analyze trends to help you understand what features are more likely to be successful.
2. Natural Language Processing (NLP): For text-heavy applications, NLP can help in auto-categorizing user-generated content, summarization, and more.
3. Coding: AI can suggest new lines of code, entire functions, tests, and even complex algorithms.

“GitHub Copilot is already writing 46% of code and helps developers code up to 55% faster. Our R&D team (GitHub Next) has been hard at work to bring GitHub Copilot beyond the editor. Auto-completion is just the starting point.”

Thomas Dohmke, CEO at GitHub

TL;DR: AI can help you develop products and features that your customers will love. It can also save lots of engineering time.

2. Product management

AI enables product managers to automate numerous daily tasks, including:

• Detecting trends in customer sentiments
• Analyzing user feedback
• Brainstorming and prioritizing ideas
• Writing support documentation
• Creating project plans
• Tailoring user experience
• Automating reporting
• Analyzing competition
• Detecting bias

“The integration of AI into product management has been nothing short of transformative. An advanced AI algorithm can sift through vast datasets, deciphering intricate customer behavior and preferences.”

Kamil Rejent, CEO at Survicate

Roadmapping

To create an effective product roadmap, product managers need to:

• Prioritize features
• Evaluate market demand
• Forecast development timelines
• And so much more

AI can assist with these tasks and make the roadmapping process more data-driven and efficient.

ChatGPT is an undeniable leader that can also be very useful in product development.

“I continue to rely on ChatGPT for various tasks, from shaping our product roadmap to engaging with beta test users.”

Deborah Bittencourt, Product Manager and Product Designer, IBS Consulting

Here’s how AI helps Deborah create and manage product roadmaps:

1. Market research and insights
   AI can identify emerging trends, competitor strategies, and customer pain points, which can help determine our product development priorities. I still fact-check everything and bring more data from 2022 on.
2. User feedback analysis
   Depending on the amount and form of feedback I have, I experimented with feeding ChatGPT customer feedback, surveys, or product reviews to analyze and provide more insights. It can summarize common issues, feature requests, and sentiment analysis, doing some bulk work for me.
3. Prioritization ( my personal favorite)
   AI helps me create scoring models or frameworks to objectively assess and rank potential roadmap items. I like to ask ChatGPT to consider user impact, technical feasibility, and business value.
4. Roadmap documentation
   I use it to draft and refine my product roadmap documents, ensuring they are clear, comprehensive, and well-structured for communication within the team.

TL;DR: AI can help get started with roadmapping: research the market, analyze and prioritize feedback, and draft documentation.

3. Data analysis

There are also AI tools that dive a lot deeper. They can help:

1. Analyze data 
2. Uncover customer insights
3. Predict trends and project outcomes
4. Make more informed product decisions

“Leading SaaS companies utilize various AI tools such as natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and predictive analytics. Examples include:

• Machine learning
  • TensorFlow
  • PyTorch
  • Scikit-learn
• Computer vision
  • Google Cloud Vision API
  • Amazon Rekognition“

Dennis Brown, lead software engineer, Ling Ltd.

The key is to feed AI your own unique data.

“It isn’t enough for AI to be trained on publicly available data. It must marry that data with internal enterprise data. This includes established product and service data as well as contextual customer interaction data.”

Umesh Sachdev, CEO & co-Founder of Uniphore

TL;DR: AI can assist with data analysis, but it needs unique data to be truly effective.

Looking at AI from this angle, you can’t help but get excited. Let’s explore how other teams can benefit from AI, too.

4. Customer support & success

It’s not just product managers who can benefit from AI.

AI-powered chatbots are probably already on your radar. Zendesk, HelpScout, Intercom, and others have been using AI to answer customer questions faster.

“Intercom has an AI tool that will summarize a thread in the notes. It is very helpful for longer threads. We also use Fin – their new AI chatbot that can answer complex questions and save us a lot of time.”

Jacques Reulet, head of customer support, Canny

Now, AI’s providing more accurate answers and imitates human conversations much better.

After the conversation is done, AI can process it and uncover insights.

It doesn’t end with chatbots, though. Customer service, customer support, and customer success managers can personalize their user experience through AI. For example, AI now makes individual product recommendations, tailored offers, and useful prompts possible.

TL;DR: AI chatbots have evolved to understand customer sentiment and can escalate issues to human agents when necessary.

5. Marketing

While marketing remains a creative field, AI can enhance certain aspects. For example, product marketers rely on AI to help them with copywriting and design.

“I use AI as a starting point for some tasks. It’s helpful for tasks requiring data analysis, automation, and content generation.”

Deborah Bittencourt, Product Manager and Product Designer, IBS Consulting

Many marketers are using AI to help specifically with copywriting and editing. While this is a great time saver, try to be a little critical of AI’s outputs.

Note: instead of copying and pasting what AI gives you, use it as guidance and a starting point. AI isn’t always accurate, and its writing rarely fits your style guide perfectly. But, with some human touch, you can produce valuable content. 

You can also create and read through complex documentation faster with AI.

“We’ve started transitioning some of our documentation to Notion. Their AI-powered tools have helped streamline the documentation process and save me time and effort. For design and creative inspiration tasks, I’ve experimented with Firefly by Adobe.”

Deborah Bittencourt, Product Manager and Product Designer, IBS Consulting

Beyond content, AI can help marketers:

• Research audience & competition
• Generate personas
• Evaluate and edit copy
• Create charts and graphs
• Personalize experience for your users

Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media shares some useful ChatGPT and Bing prompts for marketers here. He recommends to:

“Try everything. Never trust it completely. Once you find insights, focus on execution.”

Andy Crestodina, co-founder & CMO, Orbit Media

Similarly, Ross Simmonds from Foundation Inc is using AI to:

• Research the market
• Analyze reports and data
• Create content (written and visual)
• Save money!  

TL;DR: AI can help marketers get started with creative ideas, analyze the market, and personalize user experience.

6. Sales

Sales is another area that requires a human touch to be effective. Still, sales reps can use AI to:

• Transcribe and summarize sales recordings: tl;dv, Otter.ai, rev.com
• Find common pain points: H2O.ai, Gong.io
• Uncover feature requests: Canny
• Score leads: Hubspot
• Assess their own effectiveness: People.ai
• Write or critique email copy: ChatGPT, Collato

Technological progress has been accelerating and bringing us more and more data. More data is useful, but processing it gets complex. That’s why AI is so timely – it can help make sense of that data.

“As selling complexity grows, so does the need for documentation, approvals, and compliance reporting. Generative AI can reverse administrative creep by helping salespeople write emails, respond to proposal requests, organize notes, and automatically update CRM data.”

Prabhakant Sinha, co-founder of ZS

“The future? AI AND Humans working together for a more potent sales force.”

Collin Stewart, CEO, Predictable Revenue

TL;DR: AI can improve sales strategies through lead scoring, call recordings, and data management.

7. Growth

Most businesses need to grow and do it faster than the competition. While others are still figuring out AI, you can start using it to get ahead. For example, you can:

1. Understand how your customers use your product: Mixpanel, Amplitude
2. Find usage gaps: Looker (from Google), Tableau
3. Tie them to churn: Salesforce, Hubspot, Gainsight
4. Fill those gaps and improve retention: Marketo, Dynamic Yield

You can also analyze your own usage patterns. Maybe there are some processes you can optimize?

Growing involves using resources wisely. AI can help with smart resource optimization as well.

Some of these tools (Salesforce, Hubspot) combine a few of these features. Check them out to see if one tool can check more than one box for your teams.

All of those efforts can help your SaaS company grow faster.

“Top SaaS companies are leveraging AI to gain a competitive edge. They implement machine learning algorithms to automate tasks, improve customer experiences, and drive business growth.”

Dennis Brown, lead software engineer, Ling Ltd.

TL;DR: use AI to understand how your customers use your product.

8. Operations

Good operations = efficiency. Especially in startups, the operations department has to do a lot: legal, HR, finance, and more.

AI can automate a lot of that, for example:

• Repetitive workflows
• Insights gathering
• Scenario planning
• Resume scanning
• Budget optimization
• Fraud detection
• Risk assessment
• Compliance monitoring
• Forecasting
• Resource allocation
• Feedback loops

It’s hard to find an AI tool that can do all of that at once. Depending on your organization’s priorities, some of these may work well:

• Oracle’s Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud
• SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)
• IBM Watson

“Artificial intelligence is more than a buzzword. AI is rapidly reshaping the fabric of business operations.”

Whitney Vige, SEO Content Writer, Asana

TL;DR: AI tools can help you boost operational efficiency by eliminating repetitive tasks.

Limitations

No tool is perfect. And most AI tools are still fairly new, so they come with some limitations you should be aware of.

Many experts agree that AI raises concerns around:

• Privacy – where is the data going?
• Accuracy – can we trust this information?
• Originality – is this plagiarism?
• Humanity – will our customers get annoyed by AI and miss human interactions?

“My primary concern with AI is how personalized product insights can be. Most AI data is broad and generic information. It doesn’t always perfectly align with specific user needs. As a product manager, it’s my job to go after user research and testing. I need to ensure that AI-driven solutions are aligned with our users’ unique requirements and expectations.”

Deborah Bittencourt, Product Manager and Product Designer, IBS Consulting

Does this mean we should disregard AI and stick to what’s worked in the past? Definitely not.

Instead, we must critically assess all the information AI provides us. We must still use our critical thinking, seek a deeper understanding of our users, and improve what AI gives us.

Because these concerns are common, most AI creators are actively improving their tools.

What’s next in AI?

More and more AI trends and use cases surface every day. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are only the beginning.

Here’s an example of a conversational AI voice assistant that goes beyond services like Google Home and Amazon Alexa you might be used to.

In our recent blog post, we also highlighted top AI tools for product managers – check it out.

Experts predict AI will get more accurate, process larger amounts of data, and do it all faster.

“In essence, the marriage of AI and SaaS is not just a fleeting trend; it’s the wind beneath the wings of any SaaS firm.”

Kamil Rejent, CEO at Survicate

TL;DR: stay on top of AI trends to work faster and smarter.

AI – the future of SaaS

AI is changing our lives, especially in the SaaS industry. Every part of your organization can benefit from AI.

So, start implementing AI into your daily processes today. You can save time, get ahead of the competition, and enjoy your job more. After all, AI will handle your mundane tasks, and you’ll have more time for deep and creative work.

AI can help you boost customer satisfaction, too. When your users get help and answers faster, they’ll appreciate it.

Introducing AI into your workflow doesn’t necessarily mean spending more money. Check out your existing SaaS tools. Chances are, they’ve added AI components.

“SaaS companies today elevate customer journeys, predict market shifts, and automate tasks seamlessly through AI. We use Salesforce Einstein, Zendesk AI, and HubSpot’s AI functionalities.”

Ranee Zhang, VP at Airgram

Did we miss any cool companies or use cases? Let us know, and we’ll add them!

Want to stay up to date on the latest trends in SaaS and product management? Sign up for our newsletter here!

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

All Posts - Website · Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn

The post 8 ways SaaS companies can use AI to get ahead first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post 8 ways SaaS companies can use AI to get ahead appeared first on Canny Blog.

One of the best ways to do that is through product announcements. There are a few different types of them.

A release note is a document that outlines the changes made to a product. Release notes update your users, teammates, and stakeholders on your product development progress.

Changelogs are more technical documents that dive deeper into the changes. They’re primarily for developers to keep track of progress.

We’ll cover different types of product release notes and changelogs, their importance, and best practices. We’ll also showcase some examples and templates, discuss changelog management tools, and help you get the most out of your feature announcements.

If you’ve never published release notes or want to improve your product documentation, follow along. 

Release notes vs changelogs

First off, let’s go over some definitions.

What are release notes?

As mentioned, release notes are basically your product announcements. The target audience is users, so release notes explain changes in plain language, omitting the technical jargon and details. The main purpose is to explain the effect on the user.

A changelog is a file, an article, or a webpage that lists all notable changes to your app, site, etc. Changelogs focus on the technical aspects of the changes, such as new features, bug fixes, code refactoring, and API modifications. They often contain references to specific commits or code changes in the version control system.

Historically, changelogs were for developers. Here’s a typical changelog entry from Facebook on GitHub.

Some people refer to changelogs as release notes. And others make a distinction between these two terms.

Canny’s Changelog tool blurs the lines between release notes and changelogs.

“Coming from the product development world, we saw the need for better product announcements. Users want to know what’s new and improved in your product. And we needed an easy tool that helps us do that. So we created our own tool – for us and other SaaS companies out there. It brings customer feedback and product announcements together.”

Andrew Rasmussen, co-founder at Canny

Whatever you call your product announcements, it’s important to have them. Here’s why.

Why do you need product announcements?

Changelogs and release notes are important for:

• Documenting your work
• Educating your customers
• Keeping your products updated
• Positioning yourself as transparent

Here’s more about each of those reasons.

They document your work

At its core, release notes help your team stay organized. When you have release notes, you can quickly reference them to see what was changed in the past and how.

You’ll also minimize the back and forth with your team through release notes. 

Not every project involves all team members. So, release notes are a great way to keep uninvolved teams informed. They’ll learn about changes as soon as you publish your release notes.

They educate your users

New feature adoption is a common problem for a product manager. Many users crave efficiency but are still hesitant to try new things.

Release notes help push them in that direction. They break down the new feature, guide users through it, and remind them how your tool works. A good release note is a free teacher.

Release notes are also an opportunity to link to additional help docs and remind users where they can find support resources.

They make the product feel fresh

When people use a product, they like to see it evolve. Right now, for example, AI is all the rage. Many tools are adding AI components to their software. And at this point, users are almost expecting it.

If you decide to add AI to your tool, you’d want your users to know about it, right? There’s no point in putting in all the hard work if no one notices. You want your users to know and use these new features.

Especially if your product uses a subscription model, people want to see it updated. Consumer demands change, and your product needs to measure up.

From minor design improvements to major feature enhancements, your tool will go through many iterations. So let your users know about it. Show your progress and invite your users to join you on this journey.

Release notes are a great way to do that.

They help you be transparent

Similar to the previous point, release notes help you keep your customers around. Here’s how.

1. A user submits a feature request
2. That feature idea makes it to the product roadmap
3. They automatically subscribe to the progress of that feature
4. You build that feature and publish a release notes entry
5. They get an auto-notification about it (if you’re using Canny’s Changelog)

Bonus: they can see other updates in your release notes too.

This shows that you listen to your users. That’ll help them trust that you’re improving your product.

People love seeing the “behind the scenes” and “how it’s done” content. Release notes can shed light on your “backstage” software release processes.

Types of product announcements entries

Overall, release notes are pretty standard and straightforward. Depending on the nature of your new release, you can borrow certain parts from each release note entry (which is what we did with Canny’s Changelog).

There are a few types of posts you’d add to your release notes. Let’s discuss each one.

Major update announcements

Intended audience: users, leads, team members, shareholders

When you’re adding a major new feature, make sure to give this announcement the attention it deserves.

These release notes can be longer and include more details, such as:

• Before and after screenshots and screen recordings
• Clear explanation of the change

Note: Give users some time to get used to the change too. Many tools keep the old (legacy) version available for some time for this exact reason.

Non-major update announcement

Intended audience: current users, team members

You can keep it simple when adding or fixing something less groundbreaking. Make sure to explain why you did it( we often show how many upvotes we got on our Canny board, for example).

Explain what changed, but don’t go too deep into the technical details. Instead, link out to help guides and additional resources.

Bug fixes

Intended audience: developers, current users

Bug fixes are a great example of non-major feature enhancements. You don’t want to draw too much attention to the fact that you had bugs. But let’s be real – every software has them. And showing that you’re working on them makes you look transparent and trustworthy.

Security updates

Intended audience: current users

While very important, security updates fall under the category of non-major updates. They showcase your organization as responsible and reliable.

Very few people want to read lengthy descriptions of your security updates. So it’s even more important to keep these short. 

Changelogs

Intended audience: developers

A standard changelog is detailed and technical. It usually includes:

• Version number
• Release date
• Description of the latest release or a fixed bug
• Compatibility with previous versions
• User impact
• Manual for future use
• Screenshots and links

Developers use changelogs to schedule upgrades, troubleshoot issues, and stay updated about the latest software developments.

Version control system logs

Intended audience: developers

There are a few terms that people use interchangeably to describe these updates: 

• Version control system logs 
• Commit logs
• Revision history

These are records that keep track of changes made to a project or set of files over time in a version control system (VCS).

A common example is GitHub. Developers use it to share code, work on projects together, and manage and track code changes.

Github logs are visible to the public. This is a space where developers can collaborate and share ideas – kind of like social media for coding.

Version control system logs usually include the following information:

• Commit ID: a unique identifier for each change or commit made in the VCS. Typically, it’s a hexadecimal string, such as a SHA-1 hash.
• Author
• Date and time
• Commit message: a descriptive message that summarizes the purpose or nature of the changes made in the commit
• Changes: a detailed listing of the modified, added, or deleted files in the commit + specific changes made to each file. This may include line-by-line differences or a unified diff format.
• Branch or tag. Branches are different lines of development. Tags indicate specific points in the version history – releases or milestones for instance.
• Merge information: if the commit involves merging changes from multiple branches, the log will contain information about the branches involved.

A project’s version control logs are crucial to tracking and understanding its history.

Developers can:

• Find the record of all changes
• Review and revert to previous versions
• Figure out who made specific changes
• Understand the evolution of the codebase over time
• Coordinate work and collaborate
• Resolve conflicts when merging changes from multiple sources

If you’re looking for more inspiration and ideas, BroadInstitute provides great sample changelogs. Check them out here.

Product update formats

Different companies use different formats for their product announcements. Depending on your product and audience, you can pick a format that works best for you. It’s important to choose a format and stick with it. We’ll explain why consistency is so important later in the article. First, let’s walk through the various formats.

Text file

This is the simplest and most common format for a software release note. You can simply create a text document that lists the changes in reverse chronological order (put the newest releases at the top).

Each entry should include the version number, a brief description of the change, and any relevant details.

This format is easy to create and read for most users.

Changelog format

If you prefer a more technical approach, you can follow a typical changelog format. You can include categories like:

• Added
• Changed
• Fixed
• Removed

This format is particularly useful for developers and technical users who want a quick overview of the changes in each category.

With a changelog tool, you can also create HTML files for example.

Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that helps you format text quickly and easily. You can write release notes in Markdown and easily convert them into HTML or other formats.

If you’re hosting your updates on a platform like GitHub, you’ll likely use the Markdown format.

HTML

HTML provides a bit more flexibility with styling and layout. You can include links, images, and other multimedia elements, making your release notes more visually appealing.

PDF

PDF is a good option if you need to share your updates with external stakeholders or use them in official statements. The layout and formatting stay consistent, and it looks presentable. 

PDF is easy to read, print, and share across teams.

What to include

Depending on the format you choose, consider including the following elements to make your announcements more engaging.

Bullet-points

You can create a series of bullet points, each bullet representing a specific product change or a feature.

If you’re looking for a concise and skimmable format, this is it. It gets straight to the point.

Visuals

We recommend combining some written descriptions with visuals like screenshots and GIFs. They break up the text, help visual learners, and tell a story better than words can.

With screenshots, we recommend drawing readers’ attention to the part that you’re talking about. You can add boxes around the most important parts and/or blur the irrelevant parts of the page. Here’s an example.

Videos

Creating a quick video walkthrough can make your updates even easier to understand. Some people are visual learners, so they’d enjoy seeing rather than reading.

Generating release notes

There are a number of ways to generate release notes.

1. Version Control System (VCS) history

Version control systems like Git allow you to generate release notes based on commit histories. For instance, you can extract commit information using the git log command with specific formatting options, such as dates, authors, and changes.

2. Commit messages

Encourage your developers to write clear and informative commit messages describing each commit’s changes. Following a consistent format, such as the changelog format, can be helpful.

3. Integration with issue tracking systems

You can automatically create release notes by connecting issues and pull requests to versions or milestones in your issue tracker. You can use tools like Jira or GitHub for that.

4. Manual changelog

You can manually keep track of the changes you make to each version. You’d need to maintain a separate file where you add entries for each release, including the added features, changes, and bug fixes.

5. Automated tools

You can generate a structured and formatted changelog with these tools. They analyze your commit history, tags, and metadata. Some popular changelog generation tools include:

• Conventional commits

This tool follows the conventional commit message format and generates changelogs.

• GitHub Changelog Generator

This tool is designed to generate changelogs for GitHub repositories.

• Keep a Changelog

This project provides guidelines and a tool-agnostic format for writing changelogs. It also offers a Python library called towncrier for generating changelogs.

6. Canny’s Changelog

Canny’s Changelog is different. It’s designed so that everyone, even non-developers, can:

• Add entries
• Easily understand it
• Quickly find what they’re looking for
• Sort the entries
• Find more information

It’s much more visual and concise than most other changelogs. And it looks like a newsfeed, not a developer portal.

Canny’s Changelog is available on all plans! Here’s what our clients say about it.

[insert a GiveButter case study clip about the changelog]

Our changelog lets you easily tie your feature requests with product updates and notify your users.

Best practices for release notes

Here are a few more guidelines to make sure you publish engaging release notes. Follow these tips if you’d like your release notes to be an asset instead of a burden.

Make them clear & concise

It takes time to find the time, energy, and motivation to read long texts. It’s even more true when it comes to technical language.

If you want your release notes to be a truly useful source of information, make them as straightforward as possible. Answer the following questions:

• What was the problem?
• What changed?
• Why does it matter?
• How does it affect the user?
• Where can they learn more?

Simplify your language, keep sentences short, and break up the long paragraphs.

As a general rule, stick to only relevant information. It’s easy to get very involved and start describing the whole history of your tool. But leave that for another day.

Remember: even if your product is technical, you might have non-technical users. So try to make it interesting and valuable for them as well.

Post consistently

Some changes might be more significant than others. Still, try to publish most of your updates as release notes. People appreciate your updates – they’ll feel like they’re with you on your journey. They also get a sense that you’re constantly improving.

This will also keep you accountable. Knowing your users expect consistent updates will make you hit your deadlines more often.

Format consistently

Also, keep the format of your release notes consistent. Here’s an example from Keepachangelog:

• Added new features
• Changed for changes in existing functionality
• Deprecated for soon-to-be-removed features
• Removed for now removed features
• Fixed for any bug fixes
• Security in case of vulnerabilities

Use a variety of formatting to make your release notes entries even easier on the eye.

Headings help break down the text and logically group the changes. So does white space.

Text formatting (bold, underlined, italics) highlights the most essential parts and helps readers skim the text. Bulleted and numbered lists have a similar effect.

Follow reverse chronological order

Always publish the latest changes at the top – that’s the most relevant information for your users. They can scroll down to see your historical progress too.

Use visuals

Often, it’s easier to show than to describe something. Visuals like screenshots, GIFs, and videos can help here. Moreover, they’ll familiarize your users with the new features quicker. Next time they log in, they’ll remember the visual and know how to use the new feature.

Visuals also break up the text and make reading easier and more enjoyable.

Insert links

We keep repeating that release notes need to be short. But what if you’ve released a major change and need to explain it in detail?

That’s where you insert links to in-depth help articles and additional documentation.

You can also use your release notes to keep your users engaged. While they’re hooked, don’t let them get away. Link to related resources and keep them on your site longer!

Avoid confusion

We can’t stress this enough: make it simple. Here are some tips to help you do that:

• Stay away from confusing date formats (we recommend sticking to YYYY-MM-DD format)
• List deprecations, removals, and any breaking changes
• Document only noteworthy differences
• Don’t list commit log diffs

Involve other departments

If you’re using Canny for your product announcements, your users will get automatic notifications when a new changelog is published.

Still, you can amplify the message further. Involve your product marketing team – they can help spread the word.

Release notes and changelog examples

Now that you know what makes good release notes and changelogs, let’s illustrate it with examples.

Many of our clients use Canny’s Changelog tool. They find it easy to keep users up-to-date in one central location.

“When we built our Changelog, we wanted it to be more than your typical list of changes. We created a tool that helps you close your feedback loop.”

Sarah Hum, co-founder at Canny

When a new changelog entry is published, everyone who submitted, upvoted, or commented on this request gets an automatic notification. That includes current users and prospects. And this really makes the sales job easier.

Imagine this: a lead previously requested a feature and didn’t convert because it didn’t exist. Now they’re getting a notification that this feature is shipped. If that feature was a real dealbreaker to them, they might reconsider buying from you now.

Your current users will also find out about the new feature right away and will be able to try it out.

Canny’s changelog empowers you to follow our advice above, including custom formatting.

Here’s what it looks like.

AgencyAnalytics keeps their updates brief and to the point. When they introduce new features, they include visuals to keep it engaging and break up the text. See some examples of great release notes below.

We love ClickUp’s use of emojis and links – it keeps the readers engaged and curious to learn more. Notice how they link out to release notes and more information. They don’t clutter their changelog entry with it.

CommentSold’s changelog entries are typically longer, but they’re still easy to read and understand. It’s a great example of a more detailed but still digestible changelog. They walk you through the steps you need to take, and text styling (bold text in this instance) makes it easier to read.

Hive is great at telling a story in their changelog. Here’s what wasn’t working, how we fixed it, and how it works now. We love how they show a screenshot of a feature request that led to the development of this feature.

Respond.io is another example of a short and highly visual changelog.

GitHub’s changelog is another great example. They also have a separate Twitter account and an RSS feed for users to follow along the journey. It’s important to be where your users are!

We use our own changelog too!

Sometimes, it’s still hard to get going. That’s why we’ve prepared some templates – check out the next section.

Release notes and changelog templates

If you’re inspired to get started or amplify your changelog (and we hope you are!), check out these templates. They’ll give you prompts for your release notes, changelog entries, and some examples to spark that initial motivation.

Here is a release notes template for a bug fix.

And another release notes template to announce a new feature.

To get these + more editable templates, download our free Changelog templates right here!

Why product announcements are important

There’s no better way to keep all your stakeholders involved, engaged, and updated than through release notes.

Product update announcements don’t need to be a hassle. With a changelog tool like Canny, you can keep track of all your progress and delight your customers at the same time.

Book a free Canny demo and see how easy it is!

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

All Posts - Website · Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn

The post Why do you need release notes? (featuring great examples and templates) first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Why do you need release notes? (featuring great examples and templates) appeared first on Canny Blog.

But how do you get there? How do you move past being “another SaaS tool” and become a tool people rave about?

We’ve found that the best way is to ask our users. It sounds simple, and it is when you have the proper setup.

After you ask, make sure to listen to the response. It’s easy to skip this step!

Let’s dive into the customer feedback strategy to help you maximize this valuable resource.

What is customer feedback?

People love submitting reviews. You probably love doing it too, especially when something goes wrong. There’s something cathartic about putting your thoughts and opinions out there.

What can you do about customers’ online reviews? And especially negative feedback? Well, you can start by controlling the narrative.

Reviews are just one form of feedback, but they illustrate the point well.

Customer feedback is any commentary your users share about your product and their customer experience. Feedback can come from:

• Reviews
• Feature requests
• Bug reports
• Social posts
• Chatbot inquiries
• Sales calls
• Emails
• Customer survey responses
• And more

To make sense of all the feedback, product managers create a strategy and utilize customer feedback programs.

Customer feedback strategy

Here’s what we recommend to make sure your customer feedback strategy is sound and beneficial.

Set clear goals

Ask yourself:

• Why do you want to collect and manage feedback?
• Do you have clear intentions to act on it?
• Is everyone in your team aligned?

Collect feedback, but do it for the right reasons. That’ll set you up for success.

Choose the right channels

How do you know which feedback channel to focus on?

Think about where you currently communicate with your customers. And, more importantly, where do you tend to get the most engagement? This can vary from customer to customer. 

If your users never check their emails but are very active in a chatbot, send an invitation to leave feedback there.

If some users love talking about your tool on Twitter, join those conversations and ask for feedback there (you can make the conversation private).

Think about not just your current users, but also potential customers. And try to be where they are. It’s the best way to really connect with them and discover their needs.

For example, potential customers (or leads) can mention something during sales calls. So take note of those ideas.

You also won’t know until you try. So test out several channels to determine what’s right for your audience.

Get all data in one place

Whatever you choose, keep all the data in one place. You can start with a spreadsheet, an idea board, or a feedback board like Canny. But avoid having all feedback in different places. It’ll get too complex very quickly. Plus, you won’t be able to quantify how many people request similar features.

With a system like Canny, you can invite your users to submit ideas and add votes to existing ones. You can also vote on behalf of your users and prospects.

Pick a feedback management system

Collecting, organizing, and making sense of feedback is easy when you have a proper setup. You won’t need to scramble to get feedback into one place or struggle to understand and derive any valuable insight from it. Canny helps you do all that.

Listen, respond, and engage

One of the things people hate the most is being ignored. An unhappy customer is often the one who doesn’t receive enough attention. That’s where lots of customer churn happens!

So, when you collect feedback, don’t ghost your users. Really listen to their opinions, ask for clarification where needed, engage in a conversation, and show that you care. In other words, close that customer feedback loop.

Analyze

Take time to make sense of all the data. Here’s what you can do:

• Look for patterns and common themes
• Use qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques to gain meaningful insights
• Perform feedback analysis
• Check which ideas are the most popular
• Segment your users to understand what your priority groups want
• Develop a prioritization formula to score ideas objectively
• Determine which products will delight your customers and prospects the most

Here’s an example of how segmentation works in Canny. When you segment your users, you’ll quickly see how you can best serve your most valuable customers.

Take action

Involve other team members. Share your findings, decide what to implement, and keep everyone in the loop. Once you start building something, let the world know! Add it to a public roadmap your customers can see.

You’ll motivate your users to continue leaving feedback. They’ll see that it matters and makes a difference.

Iterate and improve

Always assess what’s working and what’s not. Don’t be afraid to rethink your strategy. That’s what this guide is for! Go back to the drawing board, try different approaches and techniques, and see what happens. You won’t know until you try.

Now that we’ve covered feedback strategy, let’s dig a little deeper and discuss customer feedback programs and systems.

Customer feedback programs

A customer feedback program comes from your overall strategy (check the previous section) for obtaining and using customer feedback. It’s sometimes called the voice of the customer (VoC) program.

Your program should include clear intentions and goals for managing user feedback. That includes how you’ll collect, organize, prioritize, and act on that feedback. You must also define where, when, and how to gather feedback.

Once you’re ready to outline precisely how to collect that feedback, you can move on to building your customer feedback systems.

Customer feedback systems

Remember how we mentioned that you need the right setup? This is what we mean.

Customer feedback will only work in your favor if you know how to manage, analyze, and make decisions based on it. Just reviewing it won’t really move the needle. And that’s why you need customer feedback systems.

These systems help you collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback and opinions.

But what are some of those systems?

Start by collecting feedback. You can do that through:

1. Customer feedback survey – asking your users for their opinions directly

• NPS (net promoter score), CES (customer effort score), CSAT (customer satisfaction score), etc. – popular ways to measure customer satisfaction

2. Feedback form – requesting feedback after a specific action or conversation
3. Social media monitoring – watching what people say about you on social media
4. Online review platform – monitoring sites like G2 and Capterra
5. Customer support and customer success interactions – answering questions and asking users to rate the conversation
6. Idea board/feedback management portal – a tool like Canny is great for that

As you can see, there are lots of sources of feedback. To analyze it all better, it’s best to bring it all in one place first. And that’s what Canny allows you to do!

Once you’ve set up a way to receive feedback, you can start digging into your users’ real feelings toward your product.

Customer insights will help you figure out what features to build next and how to increase loyalty. That’s why feedback analysis is so important.

In short, you need to look for patterns, determine your main goal with feedback, and show your customers that you care.

Why does it all matter?

Now all this may seem like a lot of work. Not just collecting, but also processing and making sense of all that feedback? That’s a handful.

The truth is, you’ll end up with more work on your hands if you don’t have a customer feedback program. That’s because people will speak up no matter what. So you, as a product manager, have to manage that feedback anyway.

And if you don’t, you mind end up building features no one cares about. 

When you set up a system to collect all that feedback in one place, managing it will become easier. You can even automate certain aspects of it!

While working with that feedback, you’ll uncover valuable insights and customer sentiment. You’ll know what to work on next, relate to your customers on a deeper level, and build a better product as a result!

Now that we’ve covered the importance of customer feedback programs, let’s explore them a little more.

How to ask for feedback

After you’ve decided to build a customer feedback management program, it’s time to collect that feedback. Rather than trying to catch all the ideas that fly at you from every direction, you can set up a system to help you manage it all.

We mentioned a few ways to collect feedback in the systems section. Our favorite, of course, is using a feedback management tool (like Canny!). It shouldn’t be the only way you gather feedback, but we recommend making it central to your system.

Your feedback management system should house all your feedback. Having all feedback in a central spot makes managing and analyzing it a snap. 

Here’s how to invite users to submit feedback in your idea portal.

Where to ask for feedback

We’re big proponents of having a feedback button prominently displayed at all times. This will minimize frustration, give users an outlet, and position you as transparent and open.

Other ways of collecting feedback include:

• Survey: NPS, CES, and CSAT are the most popular ones
• Email: distribute a survey, link to your feedback board, and more
• Social media: ask for ideas, redirect to your feedback portal
• Customer support: use chatbots or reach out to customers directly
• Customer review sites: let your customers know they can leave feedback there
• Sales calls: note any feedback or ideas that prospects bring up during sales calls

Let’s illustrate with some examples.

How tech companies collect and action user feedback

Here’s how Missive integrates Canny within their tool. Users can check out their roadmap and submit feedback without leaving Missive. It’s a very seamless experience for their users.

Similarly, Taskade embeds Canny into their site.

ClickUp has a button within their tool that redirects users to their Canny board.

Giving your users an easy way to give feedback will make them much more likely to share their opinions.

Here’s an example of a survey invite from LinkedIn. It quickly explains why this survey is important, how long it’ll take, and where the feedback data will be used.

Now let’s discuss the best time to ask for feedback.

When to ask for feedback

The most common advice is – ask a happy customer for feedback.

However, we believe you can learn even more from unsatisfied customers. Sure, public reviews are better when coming from happy clients. But, if you’re interested in improving, ask someone who’s not 100% satisfied.

You can set up triggers that automatically ask for their feedback after they perform a certain action. For example, they’ve just interacted with your customer support agent. Now you can ask them to review the conversation.

Another idea: ask for feedback on an anniversary of using your product. You can also make it a big deal and congratulate your users! Make them feel special, and then ask for something.

If you’ve just introduced a new feature, you can collect feedback after someone uses it. It’ll help you determine whether it’s a successful feature or not. It can also guide you towards improving it.

Now let’s discuss what you can ask to get the most useful type of feedback.

What to ask

Here are some common questions for you to consider. We use many of these during case studies, check-up calls, renewal calls, and so on.

Whenever and wherever you ask for feedback, think of your primary goal, and try to phrase your request very clearly.

Don’t use all of these questions at once though! Pick the ones that matter the most to you right now.

“When planning your customer feedback interviews, be sure to document internal assumptions and biases, as these can often turn into leading questions. When you write down assumptions, you’re reminded to validate them, not reinforce them by influencing customers to answer in a specific way.”

Eileen Licitra, Product Marketing Strategist at Insight Out Marketing

Open-ended questions:

• What are you trying to achieve by using our product?
• What challenges led you to try our product?
• How did you find our registration process?
  • Is there anything you would change?
• Is there anything that prevents you from using our product? 
• What aspects of our product do you like? 
• What aspects of our product would you change? 
• What improvements would you suggest?
• How is your overall experience with our company?
• Is there anything else you would like to share?

“Pick one option” questions:

• How satisfied are you with our product? (CSAT survey question)
  • Very satisfied
  • Satisfied
  • Neutral
  • Dissatisfied
  • Very dissatisfied
• How easy or difficult is it for you to solve your issue with the help of our product? (CES survey question)
  • Very easy
  • Easy
  • Neutral
  • Difficult
  • Very difficult
• How likely are you to recommend our product to others? (NPS survey question)

• How responsive are our customer service representatives?
  • Very responsive
  • Responsive
  • Neutral
  • Unresponsive
  • Very unresponsive

Remember only to pick the questions that help you achieve your immediate goals.

With Canny, you can create an open invitation for feedback. You won’t need to send out separate surveys and think about what to ask. Your users will submit their opinion when they have something to share. That feedback can come from your chatbot, your sales rep, your support conversations, and more.

Tips for managing and organizing feedback

Collecting feedback is a lot of work. But the real work begins when you start processing it.

Once you receive feedback, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Especially if you’ve implemented a few of the systems we mentioned above.

Suddenly, you might feel like there’s too much feedback, and it’s coming at you from all directions.

It’s true – managing feedback can be a challenge. But it doesn’t have to be.

You need to set up a feedback management system. Ideally, all feedback is in one place, and you can quickly identify patterns. A good system will help you manage duplicate feedback and track how many customers voted for it. 

With Canny, you can do exactly that.

Canny connects to many different tools and helps you with gathering customer feedback.

You can also invite your users to submit feedback directly in Canny, upvote existing ideas, comment, and discuss with each other.

Then, you can see which feedback’s getting traction and focus on that.

To make it even better, you can prioritize your feedback based on custom criteria and select the winning ideas.

Things to avoid

Making false promises

Sometimes, customers get their hopes up. If you’ve done a good job, they know you listen to their feedback and genuinely care. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll build every feature they request.

Make that clear from the get-go. Explain that you prioritize the most essential features for your business at this time. Ensure them that their opinion matters and that you’ll consider their ideas later. But don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Asking too often

Yes, there’s such a thing as “overcommunicating.” Customers get tired of emails and feedback requests. So, instead of burdening them with those, make your feedback board available to them at all times.

Be strategic with your communications and walk them through how easy it is to leave feedback. This way, they’ll want to do it without reminders.

Close the feedback loop

Remember: managing user feedback is an ongoing process. It’s never set and done. Your product, users, and the environment around you constantly change. So you need to evolve too.

By listening to user feedback and implementing customer feedback programs, you can drastically improve your customer experience.

A happy customer also often makes a loyal customer.

So use the power of customer feedback! And start building better products today. Canny can help you get there. Check out what it can do for you, and book a free demo here.

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

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The post Why customer feedback is essential: the ultimate guide to effective feedback programs first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Why customer feedback is essential: the ultimate guide to effective feedback programs appeared first on Canny Blog.

Especially when the economy is unstable, prioritizing the most impactful projects is key. Optimizing resources really comes down to feature prioritization as well.

But what exactly is product feature prioritization and how do you approach it? We’re breaking it down in this blog post – keep reading! 

What is product prioritization?

Product prioritization is the process of deciding which features to develop first. Usually, a product manager assesses the potential impact on the user and the business when prioritizing. 

They consider factors such as:

• Customer need
• Market demand
• Technical feasibility
• Resource constraints
• Potential benefits versus the costs

The goal is to determine the most valuable and achievable features to build. Essentially, it’s deciding what to work on first to ensure the most significant benefits.

We recently held a webinar around resource optimization and prioritization. Product experts from Salesforce, Google and Mastercard joined us to talk about it. Check out the recording.

Why product prioritization matters

When you don’t prioritize, you essentially rely on your intuition. You might think that you know your product and your customers best. You may also have a very specific product vision. And you might be getting ideas from lots of different sources.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where you get your ideas. What’s important is prioritizing (aka picking the best) ideas. In other words, you need to have an objective way of determining which features are the most important.

Here are a few reasons to prioritize: 

• It helps your product team focus on developing the most valuable and impactful features from the product backlog
• It saves time and resources by avoiding wasted effort on low-value features
• It can help ensure that user needs are met, leading to higher customer satisfaction and retention
• You can stay competitive by delivering features that meet market demand
• You can prioritize features that generate the most revenue or cost savings

All in all, there’s no reason not to prioritize. But how exactly do you do that? Well, there are many different ways. And we’re going to break down the most popular and effective ones.

Models/frameworks

Most product managers rely on a specific framework to prioritize. These systems essentially help you make sense of the mess that idea management could become. Without a working system, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, miss important requests, and lose alignment with the team.

When you adopt one, or a few, of these prioritization methods, you can see the value of each idea. This, in turn, helps you plan and prioritize your overall roadmap.

Let’s go over some prioritization frameworks and models to help you prioritize product features.

Keep in mind your overarching product strategy when selecting a model. You’ll likely find that certain models fit better with your workflow.

RICE

Intercom introduced the RICE model, which is now one of the most popular ones. It uses four main factors to rate any project or idea: 

• Reach – how many stakeholders will this affect?
• Impact – how important is this feature to your customers? (low, medium, or high)
• Confidence – how sure are you that your reach and impact estimates are correct? (%)
• Effort – how many people need to be involved? How many days, weeks, or months will this take? 

After you’ve estimated all of these numbers, you can calculate the score using this formula.

 RICE = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort

Example

Let’s walk through an example.

Reach: How many users will this feature affect?

Score: 6 (the feature will affect a significant portion of your user base, but not everyone)

Impact: How much will this feature affect the key metric you’re trying to improve?

Score: 9 (the feature has the potential to significantly increase revenue)

Confidence: How confident are you in your estimates of reach and impact?

Score: 7 (you’re fairly confident in your estimates, but there’s still some uncertainty)

Effort: How much effort will it take to build this feature?

Score: 4 (the feature is fairly complex and will require a significant amount of development time)

To calculate the RICE score for this feature, you simply multiply the scores for each factor together:

RICE score = 6 * 9 * 7 / 4 = 94.5

Based on this RICE score, you might decide to prioritize this feature over others with lower scores. However, you would also want to take into account other factors, such as strategic alignment and resource availability, before making a final decision.

Remember: you can determine what each of these factors means to you.

For example, “reach” can be the number of new customers you expect to get after shipping a new feature. Or maybe it’s the number of new leads that will come.

Same with effort – some choose to focus on the hours it’ll take. Others focus on how many people need to be involved. And some combine these two to get a “person-months” number. Choose what makes the most sense to you.

Pros: Bird’s eye view. This framework helps you see the product from different perspectives.

Cons: Time – this framework is time-consuming. It’s also not 100% accurate since it relies on estimates.

Best suited for: established products. You need existing data to make future projections with this model.

ICE metric

If you liked the previous framework, but want something a bit simpler, ICE might be the model for you.

This scoring method ranks the impact, confidence, and ease of building a particular feature.

ICE score = impact * confidence * ease

Pros: quick and simple

Cons: subjective

Best suited for: time-sensitive projects, picking a winner out of a few already shortlisted options

Example

Imagine you’re considering three ideas:

1. Billing system improvements
2. Adding a community tab
3. Updating receipt design

Here’s how you could use ICE to score these ideas.

Community tab is the clear winner here.

Impact–Effort matrix

Aka effort-impact or a 2×2 matrix. It’s also sometimes called value vs. complexity/effort/impact matrix. It works particularly well for visual thinkers (marketers or designers for example). This matrix shows how the value (impact) of a feature relates to the complexity of development (effort). Here’s how it works. 

1. The product manager starts with a hypothesis and outlines all the required features
2. Product teams that will work on this project (product, engineering, design, etc) vote on where to place each feature on the impact and effort dimensions

 Every feature ends up in one of the four quadrants: 

• Quick win – low effort and high impact
• Big bet – high effort and high impact
• Fill-in – low effort and low impact
• Money pit – high effort and low impact

Example

Let’s say you are a product manager for a mobile app. You have these four potential features to prioritize:

• Add search functionality
• Create a new onboarding flow
• Allows users to save items to a wishlist
• Redesign the homepage

Rate the impact and effort: For each feature, you need to rate the potential impact on your app’s success. You also have to rate the required effort. You can use a scale from 1 to 10. It’ll look like this:

Then, to make it even more visual, you can create a 2×2 matrix like this.

Based on this matrix, you’ll prioritize search functions, followed by the new onboarding flow. And, thanks to this exercise, you can tell that a wishlist feature isn’t the best idea right now. Homepage redesign might be nice, but it’s not worth the effort right now either.

Pros: easy to use and understand. It’s visual and intuitive.

Cons: limiting with a high emphasis on impact. Not every good idea will have a high impact.

Best suited for: projects with only a few features. Otherwise, it can get pretty confusing.

When you have many features in each quadrant, you need to somehow score them further. For example, you can use the next prioritization method.

Feasibility, Desirability, and Viability (FDV) scorecard

Using this method, you score each feature idea from 1 to 10 and try to assess whether it’s feasible, desirable, and viable. Here’s what it all means:

• Feasibility – do we have enough resources, skills, time, tools, storage, people, etc to build this?
• Desirability – do our users really want this feature? Does it solve their problem? Viability – will our users pay for the feature? Will it bring significant ROI?

 To use this scorecard, create a simple spreadsheet or a table and assign a score to each potential feature. Then add them all together. Have an open discussion with everyone who’ll be involved in the development.

Example

Let’s walk through an example of four potential features that an ecommerce company might want to prioritize.

In this scenario, the mobile app wins.

Pros: puts customers in the center and considers potential risks.

Cons: relies heavily on qualitative data.

Best suited for: high-level discussions.

If you don’t have enough customer feedback, it might be challenging to accurately assess desirability and viability, though.

Weighted score

In this model, you give each feature a score based on two things: its importance, and how well it meets the needs of the user. Then you multiply the scores by the weight. This helps you rank the features in order of priority (higher scores = greater value to the customer).

Pros: Flexible, objective and comprehensive

Cons: Complex to set up; omits qualitative data

Best suited for: teams that have time and resources to set it up and adjust along the way

Example

What we love about this approach is that we can select our own criteria. Here’s how we made it work for us.

We took the factors that mattered the most to us and assigned a score to each of them (up to 100%). For example, we weigh more urgent items (priority) higher than design readiness.

That’s because urgent means it will no longer be relevant if we miss the window. Other projects may suffer, and we might need to reallocate resources to make this one happen fast. But, based on our calculations, it’ll be worth it in the end. 

We add these factors to our prioritization formula in Canny. It then scores ideas for us and tells us what the biggest priority should be. From there, it’s easy to add the winning ideas to the product roadmap and get to work.

We feel like this particular system gives us and our clients a good idea of what matters most at any given time.

You can also adjust the criteria and the weight as you progress and your priorities change. Each team and project might have different criteria, and this method allows for that flexibility.

It could be difficult to assign weight to each impact factor, though. So discuss it with your team to get alignment from the very beginning.

Cost of delay

“Cost of delay is a way to communicate the impact of time on the outcomes the company wishes to achieve.”

Joshua Arnold, CPO at Apex Group

Cost of delay framework helps you assess the cost of not finishing a project or feature. Maybe you choose to postpone, but you’d like to understand what it will cost you. If so, this is the model for you.

Here’s the formula and how to use it:

1. Estimate revenue per unit of time (how much additional revenue can you expect every month if you had that feature)
2. Estimate the time it will take to develop that specific feature
3. Divide the estimated revenue by the estimated time = cost of delay

Cost of delay = Estimated revenue / estimated time

Pros: focuses on money

Cons: subjective without accurate metrics

Best suited for: new product launches and other time-sensitive projects

Example

Your competitor releases a cool new feature and is luring in your clients. You need to react and build a similar feature or at least offer an alternative.

Your sales team also hears about this feature from prospects. You work together to estimate how much money you’re losing to competitors. At the same time, you can calculate how much additional MRR you could make if you had this feature.

Then you estimate that your engineering team would need about 5 weeks to develop a similar feature.

Finally, you divide the potential MRR by those 5 weeks and get your cost of delay.

Keep in mind: estimating ‌monetary value is effective, but also subjective. Talk to your sales team and invite them into the conversation. They can help you understand the associated deal value.

Weighted shortest job first

Weighted shortest job first is a part of the SAFe Lean-Agile framework. It uses the cost of delay from the previous section. With this framework, you’d divide the cost of delay by job duration. This framework is similar to value vs complexity, but is a bit more detailed. Here’s the formula.

WSJF = CoD/Job duration

Pros: Focused on ROI, consistent

Cons: Time-consuming to calculate

Best suited for: minimum marketable features

Example

Let’s illustrate with an example using three ideas.

Based on the calculated WSJF scores, you would prioritize the tasks in descending order of their scores:

Idea 3: WSJF = 480,000

Idea 2: WSJF = 80,000

Idea 1: WSJF = 50,000

MoSCoW method

This product prioritization framework is great because it’s also fairly simple. The idea is to use plain language and categorize all ideas into:

• Must have – features that make or break your product
• Should have – important but not vital features
• Could have – nice to have ideas
• Will not have – think back to the money pit examples from the Impact-effort matrix

Pros: flexible, collaborative, simple and quick

Cons: subjective, lacks big picture perspective

Best suited for: mature products

Example

Here’s how we would categorize our Canny features using this method. 

This analysis is especially useful if less technical team members are involved in a project. Be careful though: it’s easy to end up with too many must-have features.

Kano model

This model helps you figure out what features are most likely to satisfy customers. Then you weigh that against the investment to build the feature. It helps you determine which features are the most important to your customers. Knowing that you can truly build the right features that improve the customer experience.

Using the Kano model, you can group potential features into categories. For example, the categories could be:

• Delight customers
• Satisfy customers
• Disappoint customers

This model, unlike others, doesn’t have a specific formula. Instead, it utilizes a two-dimensional graph to plot customer satisfaction against the presence or absence of a particular feature. The results are then categorized into the five Kano categories: delighters, performance, basics, satisfied, and dissatisfied.

Pros: puts customers first

Cons: time-consuming and biased

Best suited for: startups striving to generate user feedback

Example

A product manager is working on a new feature: playlist recommendations in the music streaming app. Here’s how they’d use the Kano model.

1. Interview customers about this potential feature
2. Plot customer sentiment on a chart like the above

This way you can prioritize and focus on developing features that fall into the delighters and performance categories to maximize customer satisfaction.

Eisenhower matrix

This matrix helps separate ideas based on their importance and urgency.

“I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent” 

Dwight D. Eisenhower, US President

You can visually plot ideas on a 4-section diagram.

The outcome of this exercise would be:

• High priority: very important and very urgent
• Medium priority: important but not urgent
• Medium priority: urgent but not important
• Low priority: not urgent and not important

Pros: plain, open, and business-targeted

Cons: lacks the technical aspect, a bit oversimplified

Best suited for: more stable environments

Example

Let’s illustrate with these four example tasks:

Idea 1: Fix critical security vulnerability

Idea 2: Implement new feature requested by a key customer

Idea 3: Review and update documentation

Idea 4: Organize team meeting to discuss future roadmap

Here’s how you’d plot them.

Source

Walking skeleton

The walking skeleton method is common when developing MVPs. It helps to define which ones are absolutely critical for the product to work.

The walking skeleton represents a small implementation of the system with only a small end2end feature. It does not use the final architecture yet. At the point of production, it has the first connection with all the architectural components of the system. Later, the architecture and functionality evolve and grow together. This method is also the proof of concept.

Pros: fast prioritization and market validation

Cons: limited functionality

Best suited for: MVPs (minimum viable products)

Example

Here’s how you can use the walking skeleton method.

1. Define product scope: get clear on the overall vision and goals of the product. Identify the core features and functionalities.
2. Identify key user journeys: determine the critical user journeys that the product needs support. These are typically the most important paths that users would take to achieve their goals.
3. Prioritize minimum functionality: prioritize the essential features and functionalities. Focus on building the absolute minimum set of features necessary to create a working product.
4. Create the walking skeleton: create a functional end-to-end system that supports the core user journeys. It’s OK if it lacks additional features or polished interfaces.
5. Gather and validate feedback: validate your skeleton with users, stakeholders, or early adopters. Gather feedback on the usability, performance, and overall experience of the core product. This feedback will help shape future development and prioritize additional features.
6. Iterate and expand: Based on the feedback, iterate and expand upon the walking skeleton. Gradually add more features and functionalities. And don’t forget to address any technical challenges or usability issues you discovered during the initial implementation.

Story mapping

Story mapping technique starts with the product backlog and takes it to the next level. Through story mapping you can determine your next product iteration.

The product team maps out users’ interaction and usage of the product. They focus on the significant steps first, but also break them down into individual stories for each customer cluster. Here’s how:

• Horizontal axis: create a series of sequential categories that represent each stage of the user’s journey
• Vertical axis: prioritize these tasks from top to bottom

With the story map, you’ll get a visual and logical sequence of the user experience. This will help you determine which stories are a high priority.

Pros: you can quickly identify an MVP, collaborate with your team, and put your customers’ experience first

Cons: avoids external factors like complexity

Best suited for: MVPs

Example

Here are the detailed steps you’d take to create a story map:

1. Define the user journey(s).
2. Break it down into detailed steps and plot them on the horizontal axis.
3. Add user stories and plot them on the vertical axis. When thinking of user stories, try to answer this question: what feature or functionality can support this step?
4. Prioritize user stories. Consider factors like customer value, business goals, technical feasibility, and dependencies.
5. Plot stories in order of priority: higher priority – top, lower priority – bottom.
6. Get to work: focus on the high-priority user stories at the top of each column.
7. Reiterate: keep adding to the story map, and reprioritize as needed.

Opportunity scoring

This method is also known as opportunity analysis or gap analysis. It comes from Anthony Ulwick’s concept called outcome-driven innovation.

In short, Ulwick says that customers buy things to get certain jobs done. He goes on by saying that customers aren’t very good at coming up with ‌solutions to their problems. Still, their feedback is very important. And we agree!

So you can use this feedback to list ideal outcomes. And after that you survey your customers, asking them:

• How important is this outcome or feature?
• How satisfied is the customer with the existing solutions?

Then, you can apply the numbers to the following formula:

Importance + (Importance – Satisfaction) = Opportunity

You can now rank different ideas or opportunities based on potential satisfaction and importance. To make it easier, you can plot the answers along the chart.

At this point, you should be able to see the features that matter the most to the customers but have low satisfaction scores within your product. This is a clear indicator to prioritize these features.

Pros: easy to visualize, categorize, and quickly identify innovative solutions

Cons: biased based on survey results

Best suited for: products with lots of potential features and a large and engaged existing customer base

Example

1. Define opportunities

 Identify a list of potential opportunities or features to evaluate and prioritize. For this example:

• Opportunity 1: improve search functionality
• Opportunity 2: enhance mobile app performance
• Opportunity 3: build a new integration

2. Assign importance and satisfaction ratings

Rate each opportunity on a scale of 1-10

• Importance (or potential value of the opportunity)
• Satisfaction (current level of satisfaction or fulfillment of the opportunity) 

Let’s assume the following ratings:

• Opportunity 1: Importance = 9, Satisfaction = 3
• Opportunity 2: Importance = 7, Satisfaction = 5
• Opportunity 3: Importance = 8, Satisfaction = 2

3. Use the formula

• Opportunity 1: 9 + (9 – 3) = 15
• Opportunity 2: 7 + (7 – 5) = 9
• Opportunity 3: 8 + (8 – 2) = 14

4. Prioritize opportunities based on the scores

• Opportunity 1 (15)
• Opportunity 3 (14)
• Opportunity 2 (9)

Product tree

This is a highly visual way of prioritizing. The goal is to “prune” the tree. Here’s how.

1. Draw a tree
2. Add existing product features to the trunk of the tree
3. Add coming soon features to the closest branches
4. Add the rest of the ideas to the further branches
5. Involve your team and customers; add their ideas as the leaves of the tree

Once you’re done, you’ll see which branches have the most ideas. This should give you a clearer direction as to where to take your product.

Pros: highly collaborative and visual

Cons: not quantitive

Best suited for: organizations with a large portfolio of products

Example

Buy a feature

This approach involves inviting your customers and other stakeholders to play a game. Here’s how it goes:

1. Create a list of features you might want to build
2. Assign a monetary value to each (based on effort, costs, time, etc)
3. Get a group of people together and give each a set amount of “money” to spend
4. Invite them to “buy” features and watch what happens
5. Organize and prioritize your features based on which ones were purchased the most

Quick trick: purposefully place some features out of people’s price range. Encourage them to team up and put their funds together if they have to. If that happens, that’s an awesome indicator that a particular feature is super valuable and desirable.

Pros: fun and collaborative

Cons: won’t work for early-stage ideas 

Best suited for: polished and ready-to-go features

Jobs-to-be-done framework (JTBD)

This framework encourages product managers to take a step back and dig deeper into customers’ motivations. It originated from Anthony Ulwick’s opportunity scoring that we discussed above. And it’s a bit similar to user story mapping.

A common example is this:

1. Someone says they need a drill
2. You discover that they actually need to drill a hole in their wall
3. As you keep digging, you realize that they want to hang a picture on their wall
4. Now you can offer them alternative solutions (double-sided stickers, hooks, etc) and explain that they don’t actually need a drill

To use this framework, you need to develop a job statement. Here’s the formula:

[Verb] + [Object] + [Context]

Check out this episode of Lenny’s podcast featuring a co-creator of this framework (Bob Moesta).

Pros: provides a deep understanding of customers’ motivations and needs

Cons: might get too abstract and high-level

Best suited for: complex or high-involvement products

Example

If you’re building a fitness app, a job statement might be “improve physical health and get stronger”.

You’d collaborate with your team to define how your product can get that job done for a customer. You’d also list some desired outcomes for your customers. Then you’d assess potential importance and satisfaction and prioritize from there.

Priority poker

Here’s another collaborative and fun way of prioritizing feature requests. And here’s how you can use it.

1. Shortlist some ideas
2. Get some stakeholders together
3. Give each of them 20 cards – 2 sets of numbers of 1 to 10
4. Introduce the first idea
5. Ask the team to lay down a card that represents how valuable this idea seems to them (1 = not valuable, 10 = very valuable)
6. Reveal the cards and break people down into smaller groups; let them discuss
7. Now ask them to lay down a card that represents estimation (1 = easy task, 10 = very difficult)
8. Reveal the cards and break people down into smaller groups; let them discuss
9. Add up valuation scores for each idea
10. Add up estimation scores for each idea
11. Divide the average valuation score by the estimation score
12. Repeat for each idea

Pros: fun and interactive

Cons: time-consuming

Best suited for: products with a short list of ideas and lots of resources

KJ method

This method is also known as the sorting method, the matrix method, or the paired comparison method. Here’s how you can use it:

1. Brainstorm a list of features
2. Gather a few stakeholders
3. Write each feature on a separate card or piece of paper
4. Shuffle all the pieces of paper
5. Ask each person to pick two random cards
6. Now this person needs to pick one out of those two features and explain why they chose it
7. Repeat

Pros: collaborative and fun

Cons: subjective as only one person makes the decision

Best suited for: products with a short list of already good ideas

Constraints framework

Many methods we’ve described share a similar drawback: they ignore the external environment. Lots of ideas can seem good on paper and rank very high when prioritized. But there are outside factors that can make building this feature very complicated.

That’s why the constraints framework (also known as theory of constraints) exists. It focuses specifically on constraints. Here’s how:

1. Identify any constraints you currently face or may encounter in the future  – time, budget, resources
2. Rank them – either assign numbers to each, or use a weighted ranking system we discussed above 
3. Compare the constraints’ scores to the features you prioritized

Pros: includes the external environment

Cons: limited scope lack of precision

Best suited for: choosing the basic features for an MVP

How to choose a prioritization model

As you’ve read through these prioritization models, maybe some particular ones jumped out at you. If not, don’t worry – we’ll help you choose!

To select the right prioritization model or framework for your business, consider the following factors: 

1. The nature of the tasks you need to prioritize
2. The goals you want to achieve through prioritization
3. The resources and constraints you have available
4. The team or individuals who will be involved in the prioritization process
5. The level of complexity involved in your project or task

For example, if your number one goal this quarter is to retain current customers, maybe the Kano model is right for you. After all, it focuses on delighting existing customers.

Keep in mind: you don’t have to only to pick one. There are so many frameworks for a reason. And different projects, teams and timelines require a different approach. So keep this guide handy and refer back to it when you’re trying to prioritize new ideas.

You can also combine a few of these methods to find what works for you.

Prioritization in action: examples

Here’s how we prioritize at Canny. As we mentioned, we use the weighted scoring model.

First, we outlined the factors that matter to us: 

• Votes from users
• Does this feature help to retain current customers?
• Does it help to generate new business?
• Is the idea coming from engaged companies?
• Is it a high priority?
• Is it ready for design?
• Will it help win new business for open opportunities?
• Is the vote coming from a paying customer?
• Does it improve our product roadmap?
• How does it affect our MRR?
• How many employees does this affect?

Here’s what it looks like.

As you can see, you can be as detailed or high-level as you’d like. Typically, companies start high level and then discover what they need to add along the way.

Gathering supporting data

Integrating with other tools makes prioritizing even easier. You know, the tools you already know and love:

• Project management tools: ClickUp, Jira, Monday
• CRMs: Hubspot, Salesforce
• Customer support tools: Intercom, Drift, Zendesk

You can also feed ideas and feedback from these tools to Canny – a user feedback and product management tool. That eliminates a lot of unnecessary work.

For example:

During a sales call, a prospect mentions a specific feature you don’t currently have.

Without leaving Hubspot or Salesforce, your sales rep can log in that feature request and make a note that this deal will help you win new business.

They can also note how much potential MRR this deal can bring.

This is exactly what we do at Canny. 

When you’re ready to work on that feature, you can import all the info directly into your project management tool – ClickUp, Jira, Monday, or others.

Key to building a killer product

Product prioritization will help you truly delight your customers. When you prioritize the right projects, you’ll innovate, win new business, and retain existing clients.

 There are many ways of prioritizing. You can certainly find a method that works for you. And don’t be afraid to try a few different ones. You’ll only know when you give it a try.

To make it all easier, try a product management tool. Canny will help you streamline all your feature requests and prioritization.

Give it a try for free and see how easy prioritization can be.

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

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The post The 2024 guide to product prioritization + the best frameworks first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post The 2024 guide to product prioritization + the best frameworks appeared first on Canny Blog.

One powerful tool that can really help is Canny. And in this blog post, we’ll explain how.

We’ll also explore how Canny can help your business thrive, especially in the B2B context. Keep reading!

What is Canny?

Canny is a product management tool focused on user feedback. It’s designed specifically for businesses. It helps companies to collect, manage, and analyze customer feedback effectively.

When you harness the power of customer input through Canny, you can make informed decisions. That helps you improve your products and services.

Understanding the B2B environment

Before we dive into how Canny can assist in growing a B2B business, let’s take a moment to understand what B2B actually is.

In B2B (business-to-business) transactions, companies sell their products or services to other businesses. In contrast, B2C is business to consumer. These relationships are typically long-term and involve larger purchase volumes. Building strong and lasting relationships with clients is vital in this space.

Canny can help you keep, improve, and build more B2B relationships in the following ways.

1. Collecting customer feedback

Canny allows you to gather valuable feedback directly from your clients. Our feedback portal invites your customers to voice their opinions, suggestions, and concerns. This feedback is invaluable in understanding your customers’ needs and expectations.

2. Prioritizing feature requests

Canny enables you to categorize and prioritize feature requests. By analyzing the feedback and identifying patterns, you’ll know exactly what to build. You can focus on developing features that align with what your customers need. This helps to create a more customer-centric product and streamline your business.

3. Enhancing customer engagement

Canny can help improve your communication and engagement with your clients. How?

You can respond to customers’ feedback and update them on feature developments. This level of interaction fosters a sense of partnership and builds trust.

4. Driving product development

You can use the insights from customer feedback in Canny and decide where to take your product. You can also identify:

• Areas for improvement
• New features to incorporate
• Potential product enhancements

This process ensures that your offerings align with your customers’ evolving needs. 

5. Demonstrating transparency and trust

With Canny, you can become more transparent.

When you showcase the feedback you’re getting and how you action it, customers start trusting you more. They feel that their opinion matters and that you actually care.

This transparency can become your powerful differentiating factor in the competitive B2B landscape.

Listening to your customers and adapting to their needs is essential for growth and success. Canny offers a comprehensive solution to collect, manage, and analyze customer feedback. These insights you get from user feedback can drive your business forward.

By implementing Canny in your B2B operations, you can:

• Enhance customer engagement
• Prioritize feature development
• Build strong client relationships

So start embracing this customer-centric approach today. It’ll position your business at the forefront of your industry, fueling its growth and profitability.

Get started with Canny for free today!

Canny

Canny is a user feedback tool. We help software companies track user feedback to build better products.

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The post Canny for B2B companies first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Canny for B2B companies appeared first on Canny Blog.

We had the following experts join us:

• Ross Dixon, Director of Sales at OnCall Health
• Jesse Saldana, Director of Product at Givebutter
• Alice Wong, Head of Sales at Canny

Here are the key points from this discussion.

• Feedback comes from many places: customers, marketing, sales, and product teams
• It helps tailor the sales process and improve the product
• It also helps both product and sales understand the customers better
• If you can attach a deal value to a feature request, you can then prioritize feature development with higher revenue impact and align sales and product teams
• Customer feedback can help you uncover gaps in your product
• You can also find upsell opportunities when you build the feature a prospect requested in the past
• Feedback-driven improvements in product features can help prevent customer churn and win back closed lost deals

If you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, watch the full recording here.

Spoiler alert: you’ll hear some really insightful stories and examples, so don’t miss it!

Stay tuned for our next webinar! We’ll be announcing it on our social channels, so make sure to follow us.

Ready to boost your sales with customer feedback management? Canny can help!

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

All Posts - Website · Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn

The post Webinar recap: how to sell more and delight customers through feedback management first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Webinar recap: how to sell more and delight customers through feedback management appeared first on Canny Blog.

We’re pumped to announce that our Canny + Asana integration is now live!

Now you can link Canny posts with Asana tasks. This way you can associate customer feedback data with project management data. Here’s how it works:

1. You receive a feature request in Canny
2. You prioritize that feature request and decide to build it
3. You link that post to Asana
   • In the Roadmap view, under the Push column, click on the Asana logo.
4. You manage this project in Asana, assigning roles, deadlines, dependencies, etc
5. You link statuses on Canny and Asana, so everything is updated automatically
   • When your Canny posts and Asana tasks are linked, changes and updates are synced between the two. So you don’t need to manually update statutes in both tools.

You can also link existing Asana projects to Canny posts.

The best part? The Asana integration is available on all plans!

Learn more about this integration here and start saving time today.

P.S. Wanna see how we built it? Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes video. And it’s not what you think.  

Maria Vasserman

Maria loves all things creative – writing, photography, movies and beyond When she's not creating content to tell the world about Canny, she's either photographing a wedding, jumping at a rock concert, camping, travelling, snowboarding, or walking her dog

All Posts - Website · Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn

The post Introducing Canny + Asana first appeared on Canny Blog.

The post Introducing Canny + Asana appeared first on Canny Blog.