The Feedback Lacuna

la-cu-na [luh-kyoo-nuh] (n.)

a gap or missing part, as in a manuscript, series, or logical argument; hiatus

Much noise is made about the way that social media will influence products.  Whereas social media is beginning to collect huge amounts of customer data, this feedback is not yet making it to the right people: the product managers and developers.  Though I don’t have a simple solution to this problem, I hope to convince you that there is indeed a lacuna that needs to be bridged.

The Playaz

On one side of the lacuna are social media gurus and marketing types, who cheerily proclaim “Feedback from customers through social media will cure your product woes!”  They imagine that Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc. are channels to listen to users in a brand-new way. They're sick of putting “lipstick on a pig,” and believe they have access to a feedback stream that will connect the organizations directly to users in a way heretofore unimagined.  The products resulting from this feedback will delight users.

On the other side of the lacuna are the product managers and the developers, who groan loudly upon hearing this advice.  After years of usability studies, user-centric design, log-analysis, and countless other techniques to get into the mind of the consumer they wonder, “What now?  They’re always cooking up something useless in that marketing department.  Why don’t they just focus on what they’re good at instead of trying to bother me?  I have a product to build!”

The Problem

Putting on my marketing hat, social media gurus are wrong if they believe that social media is the panacea that will solve all product development problems, but right in believing that they can deliver a new, important voice.  Putting on my product manager hat, I feel justified in being skeptical of marketing people who have never built a product, but I can’t deny that they have access to a fascinating new stream of data that I want to incorporate into my product planning and design.

The real question should be about how marketing/PR folks can get looped into the product development process and how product managers can partner with marketers to create the right product and inform the market about what they’ve (jointly) created.

Bridging the Lacuna

Assuming that we all agree that there is some signal in the noise of social media (right?) and that products could benefit from listening to it (yes?), the question is: how do you get that information to the right people in the organization?

Therefore, I propose a few questions that I’ll follow up with more detailed posts:

• How can we tell the difference between a prominent, whiney customer, and other problems that affect the more subdued masses?
• How should feedback through social media channels be communicated to the right people in an org?
• Why should product managers think about PR/marketing while they’re writing specs?
• (and the flip side) Why should PR/marketing demand to be involved in the spec writing process?
• How do marketers walk in the shoes of product managers without stepping on their toes and vice-versa?
• How should product management use social media to communicate with customers?
• How should marketers get more in tune with the product to be even more effective with social media?
• Why should PR people know about the product development process?

This list is really only the beginning and represents my product manager-focused view of the world.  I’d love feedback from marketers, developers, PMs, CEOs, and social media experts. As with any process, this is an evolution: techniques will be tried out and some will survive, some will fail, and others will be amended with improvements learned from trying.

Let’s work together to bridge this lacuna (see Julie's "Mind the Gap" response) so our products benefit from this phenomenal new source of customer feedback.

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