Sefaira is an enterprise software company. We have a dozen sales reps & sales engineers, and half a dozen customer success managers across 3 continents. We have conversations with ~ 100 customers & prospects every week! As a result, we large volume of data from our customers. However, we weren’t successful at mining this data to inform our product priorities. Our responsiveness as a product team suffers
As head of Sefaira’s products, it was my job to make it easier for our product managers to get clarity on what’s important to our customers, and for our customer facing teams to be able to move information to our product managers. This alignment was critical for a responsive & creative product team.
What did we want?
Before shopping for, or building this tool, I decided to establish what characteristics such a solution would have.
- Team dialog – The right solution would facilitate a fluid and ongoing dialog between product managers and customer facing reps, about customer feedback, & priorities.
- Distilling signal from the noise – This isn’t the 1st time we were trying to learn from customer feedback, & we had failed in the past in learning what mattered. We needed a way to establish a signal of what we were hearing most from our customers, and how much it mattered for us.
- Team transparency – It was important for us to have a solution where anyone in the company could go, & learn what our customers were saying, and have a voice. This is important as sometimes customer facing reps are shy of providing feedback if they feel that they are a lone voice.
After some playing around with the usual suspects (Google Sheets, Salesforce) & looking at software available on the market (Prodpad, Wizeline), I decided the Asana would meet our purpose. Of course, this much different from what Asana is imagined as. Asana is a task management software, but we wanted to use this as a feedback & prioritization software.
How did we use Asana?
We set up an Asana project for customer feedback, where any customer facing rep could log a request for an improvement or a feature as a “task”. We asked them to add the customer name as a “tag”, as well as the monthly recurring revenue associated with the customer. Under description, we asked them to add any additional description about the problem the customer was facing. Since each “task” has space for comments, this became the place where product managers and the rest of the business could discuss specific feedback.
If an improvement, or a feature already existed in the list, we asked the customer facing rep to “heart” the task, and add relevant tags. The idea was this system would allow us to learn what the most popular features/improvements were, what accounts were requesting them, and how much MRR was associated with the specific feedback/improvement. As an added twist, we gamified things a bit by constraining how often they could heart features. This helped them put on their product manager hat, and helped make informed decisions.
Did it work for us?
For the most part, yes. We rolled it to our customer success team first, and they loved it. They loved being able to have an ongoing dialog with product managers, and loved learning what their colleagues were seeing. “Hearts” were a hit, and for our product managers, they systematically knew what most of our most requested improvements & features were.
However, some things didn’t quite work. Due to lack of integration with Salesforce, we weren’t successful in adding customer tags systematically, nor did we track MRR associated with customers.
What’s next?
We are piloting Wizeline because it integrates with Salesforce, and is the right tool for the job. We’ve also started using Asana to get feedback from our development team on key non-customer facing priorities, to allow us to continuously improve our tech stack. Until now, we have found it difficult to systematically learn of important issues.
Of course, Asana wins because we now have more team members using Asana regularly, although nearly 2/3rd are not using it for “task management”.
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