What is Stakeholder Feedback?
Stakeholders refer to the group of individuals involved in the development of a product, such as customers, suppliers, and investors.
Customers: They are the users of the product.
Suppliers: They provide materials or services for the product.
Investors: They fund the product development and expect a return on investment. The success of the product affects their financial outcomes.
Any decision related to product development directly impacts the stakeholders, so it is necessary to consider their feedback at every step of the process.
Why is Stakeholder Feedback Important?
Stakeholder feedback is essential for the development of a product. Products are made for the stakeholders, so their satisfaction is a top priority when developing products. Feedback can serve as a source of inspiration and innovation guiding developers in making a quality product that brings a great return on investment (RIO). By utilising stakeholder feedback as a tool in product development, dev teams can ensure that their time and resources will be employed in the best way possible. Thus, a company’s success rests on stakeholders’ experience and satisfaction.
Benefits of Stakeholder Feedback
Stakeholder feedback is vital for product development. Some of the many important benefits of incorporating stakeholder feedback in product development are as follows:
Achieve the three Ps of customer service
Build rapport with customers
Improve the product
Overcome roadblocks
The Three Ps of Customer Service
Stakeholder feedback offers great insights that can improve customer experience and satisfaction. Collecting and analysing data from the feedback can help to identify the three Ps of customers:
Perceptions
Preferences
Pain Points
The three Ps help in tailoring the product strictly in accordance with customer demands. At the same time, developers can address issues and inconveniences at the user end.
Build Rapport with Customers
Customer experience greatly influences a company’s success. It’s important to listen to your customer’s needs as it helps to show that you value them. By actively making efforts to understand your customers, you cultivate trust and ensure customer loyalty.
Improve The Product
Your product needs to be aligned with your company’s goals and vision. A company invests resources and time into developing products. Taking stakeholders’ feedback into consideration significantly improves business performance, since you’re directly addressing the stakeholders’ needs.
Overcome Roadblocks
Roadblocks are common in product development. The best way to overcome roadblocks such as bottlenecks is to anticipate them beforehand and strategize ways to tackle them. Continuous feedback loops bring in different perspectives that help in formulating workable solutions.
Best Practices for Stakeholder Feedback Collection
Getting feedback from stakeholders is not a walk in the park. Instead, you’ll likely need to follow certain steps in order to probe and obtain your required information. For this purpose, we have put together a list of best practices that you can utilise when collecting stakeholders feedback.
Set objectives
Categorize stakeholders
Select a suitable format
Prepare the right questions
Design simple and engaging feedback forms
Set Objectives
The first step in crafting a feedback form is to lay out the objectives. Objectives define the exact areas you’re trying to assess through the form. This provides a clear picture of the purpose and a set structure for the form.
Categorize Stakeholders
Stakeholders comprise a wide variety of people, including customers, investors, suppliers, and members of the community. Each group offers a different perspective, even on the same product, so it’s imperative that you craft questions catering to the specific audience.
Select a Suitable Format
The format of the feedback form is directly related to its purpose. There are a variety of feedback formats to choose from, such as interviews, surveys, and reviews. Generally, the choice depends on your objectives and audience.
Prepare the Right Questions
The only way to get the right kind of feedback is by asking the right questions. The questions need to be well thought out so that they carefully probe the exact information that is required. For instance, if you want to know whether the product has been lagging, it’s better to ask a question related to software performance or speed.
Design Feedback Forms
Once you’ve gathered all the aforementioned items, it becomes time to assemble them in an appropriate design. Make sure to keep a simple and engaging design so that the stakeholders can easily navigate the form.
Feedback Received: Now What?
Collecting the feedback is only the first step towards improving your product. The real question is what to do with the feedback. Developers need to extract the pertinent information so that they can monitor and improve the product. There are three steps that you can follow to fully leverage the insights from the feedback.
Data Organisation
Data Analysis
Final Evaluation
Communicate Results
Data Organization
Once you’ve collected the data, then it’s time to organize it. Categorize the data into the following categories: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This step allows for a smooth data analysis.
Data Analysis
With the data sorted out into categories, the next step is to perform an analysis. This involves identifying themes, patterns, and trends that will give you insights into the three Ps of customer service.
Final Evaluation
The final evaluation is an important step. This step is where your findings are structured in a logical manner to present in a final report. Moreover, this evaluation informs the dev teams whether the expectations were met and what improvements are required, as well as possible suggestions on how to solve the issues.
Communicate Results
Your stakeholders need to be involved and updated with the results, and this is why communicating with stakeholders is vital to product development. The final evaluation needs to be shared with all the stakeholders, including all teams and departments, so that everyone is aligned and on the same page with product development.
Conclusion
Wrapping it all up, receiving stakeholder’ feedback involves collecting information about a product with the goal of improving it. By creating and conducting a feedback loop with stakeholders, companies can gain valuable insights that they can use to enhance the quality of their products.
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