Customer Feedback as a Product Loop

I recently discovered Kevin Kwok’s Blog. I especially enjoyed his posts about the product loops in Figma and Superhuman. I was talking to Matt Ayers this week, and he helped me realize that I’m building a product loop, but this one is around customer feedback.

At Talk Hiring, we’ve built a mock interviewing tool for career readiness programs. High schools, colleges, veteran programs, and more general workforce development organizations purchase Talk Hiring to improve the interviewing skills of job seekers. For Talk Hiring to be successful, it obviously has to be liked by both staff and job seeker end-users.

We collect all kinds of user feedback, but one of our primary forms of feedback comes through surveys. We send end-users an optional, 3-question survey after every mock interview. The interesting twist is that we share this feedback with the staff at the relevant career readiness program.

What are the loops here?

• Staff at career readiness programs nudge end-users to fill out the surveys to get insight into whether Talk Hiring is worth paying for. Every Monday morning, we send an automated email with all the feedback received in the past week. We also display this feedback in real-time dashboards for staff. When feedback is positive, programs are more motivated to keep using the tool.
  • And it’s important to note that when feedback is very negative, that can bring on a negative feedback loop. If your product is very early and getting lots of negative feedback, it’s probably not a good idea to share feedback this openly.
• Every prospect wants to evaluate Talk Hiring qualitatively and quantitatively. By automatically tracking and reporting on qualitative benefits, as well as quantitative ones, we make it easier for new programs to evaluate if they want to pay for Talk Hiring. If we’re confident in how the metrics will turn out, which we are, we’re making it easier for prospects to move forward in the sales process. And as my mentor and coach always says, “business begets business.”
• I get more user feedback to improve the product, which should result in more users, and then more user feedback.
• I’m collecting feedback to quote in success stories, which I then use as sales collateral.