We're getting to the point where we have tons of businesses giving us feedback -- sometimes it's directly to me, sometimes to our two sales reps, sometimes to others. We're storing a lot of the feedback as a mix of support tickets + notes in Excel.
Does anyone have advice on frameworks/software/processes they use for storing product feedback to determine what is important, what to build next, etc.?
Thank you!
Try something like this:
1. Store feedback in a ticket system (or some other system). Try to store the detailed feedback/data, not your interpretation of it. In other words, don't write: "We need feature X for client Y", but write: "Client Y told me usecase Q and Z." Get the data. This is a different format than most bugs require. Try to get the story.
2. Plan roadmap sessions. They could last multiple days. Get multi-disciplinary teams in them. During the sessions, first, go over ALL feedback you got, write it down on sticky notes, and put things on the wall. (The wall part is important.) Then, discuss, review, prioritize, organize, and discuss some more.
Out of this, a roadmap will gell that's based on actual customer needs.
(Note: you will gather a mountain of data. That's good. Then use the process to go through it and make decisions based on data.)
(P.S.: look up "grounded theory" and "contextual inquiry" (the analysis part of it) for more ideas.)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_inquiry
(Feel free to email me at peter@craftinc.co if you'd like to discuss further.)
Good luck!