How do you gather customer feedback insights to help you weight and prioritize what to do next?

The short answer is that I talk to customers a lot.

Going one level deeper, I like to source customer feedback through the following channels:

1. User Interviews (Weekly) - I ensure to schedule at least 2-3 interviews per week with internal or external customers. During these meetings, I take notes and record the conversations, then share the synthesis with my teams.

2. Advisory Board (Monthly) - I find value in nurturing a customer advisory board with a diverse mix of engineering-based seniority, representatives from different codebases, and a balance of long-tenured and newer employees. I run these sessions monthly to share ideas or review our existing goals.

3. Developer Surveys (Yearly) - Depending on the size of your organization (at Carta, we have 300+ engineers), it's practical to conduct a company-wide developer survey to capture the overall sentiment and pinpoint where the problems are. Since this process is time-consuming, I like to gather feedback once or twice a year to inform my team's longer-term investments.

Another great tactic to consider is crowdsourcing customer feedback via an ideas portal. This is where you allow your customers to share their ideas for your product and let everyone up-vote the best ones.

Platform teams can be very data driven if they have instrumented and are gathering good metrics but you have to get out of the office and get some qualitative data too!

Go talk to your customer who is often a coworker. Grab time with developers on those teams to talk about what they are working on and why. What can't they do for their customers and think about how the platform can solve or make those problems go away before they get to them.

The only thing to watch out for is over indexing on a small number of users. See if the data backs up the problem being described to you or if it has to do with how that team or user is trying to use the platform.