In my experience as an agile transformation coach working globally across multiple industries, a critical challenge I have encountered is that many digital product organizations struggle with delivering the value that customers desire - on a sustainable, predictable, and viable basis. Drifting from expectations results in the loss of product fitness which can be very costly to recover especially in fast-moving competitive digital markets. There is no shortage of innovators that have had initial market success, but then later failed to resonate with customers because they did not heed valuable signals in early product feedback.
Product feedback is an essential element in gauging the success of a product in meeting customer expectations and being competitively positioned in the market. As enterprises and government agencies continue to undertake digital transformations to increase their business agility to remain competitive in today’s increasingly VUCA world, a significant shift is underway in the adoption of product-oriented business models that enable shorter cycle times from product innovation to revenue.
This shift increasingly places customer experiences and journeys at the very core of business transformations. The success of these transformations is fundamentally dependent on the ability of an organization to understand and track the ever-changing needs and desires of customers. A critical factor for successful transformations is enhancing the velocity at which organizations can make informed investment decisions.
To meet these challenges enterprises continue to adopt design-led, customer-centric approaches to products, and typically leverage the adoption of enterprise lean and agile scaling practices for product research and development lifecycles necessary to move at the speed of digital markets and accelerated by the introduction of AI. Adopting and applying incremental and iterative approaches is crucial to the viability of any digital product organization – frequent learning is the essence of adapting.
Making timely product investment decisions to support smaller, more frequent product releases is essential to surviving in digital marketplaces, yet this remains challenging for many organizations that historically have used annual planning and budget cycles. The inability of executive teams to reduce their budget decision cycle times is a frequent root cause of transformation failure. Lean Portfolio Management has emerged to address the needs of customer-centric product organizations that must operate at faster digital market cadences and equips digital product leaders with the constructs and governance necessary to operate effectively.
Leading digital product organizations are adopting a combination of Design Thinking, scaling frameworks such as SAFe, value flow management such as Kanban Method, and Lean Portfolio Management practices such as the Lean Startup Cycle coupled with concepts of MVPs, MMFs, MVRs, etc. - all aimed at maximizing learning in the shortest possible time to enhance their decision agility in responding to market opportunities. Understanding and responding to product feedback is a critical aspect of data-driven customer-centric product investment.
The process of gathering, organizing, and harvesting meaningful indicators of customer satisfaction, sentiment, and wishes from Product Feedback can be time-consuming especially when confronted with increasing volumes of feedback scattered across multiple channels including social media, product review sites, user communities, and emails received from sales, support and directly from customers.
Delays or misses in reacting to Product Feedback are very costly. Digital Product Managers struggle to keep up with it all to detect trends and identify valuable gems. Leveraging automation and AI is essential to enable Digital Product Managers to become more efficient at harvesting from Product Feedback to ensure that their products remain customer-centric and viable in the marketplace on a sustained competitive basis.
ServiceNow recently released a new Product Feedback capability in our Vancouver (September 2023) release to help Digital Product Managers address these growing challenges. ServiceNow Product Feedback is focused on the ingestion of tagged Outlook emails, items from our existing ServiceNow Ideas Portal, and existing funnel items to bring together multi-channel feedback analysis. This consolidated feedback can then be leveraged to define new epics and features, providing a more efficient process for Digital Product Managers using ServiceNow’s Strategic Portfolio Management to keep pace with the demands of digital marketplaces.
