Are you wondering why your Internet services supplier asks you to rate its customer service portal? Are you irritated by e-mail and text messages, or pop-up windows with requests to rate applications’ new functions or services? “Rate it”, “describe it”, and “say if you like it” messages pop out of almost every window of your browser.

Welcome to the era of customers creating products!

Yes, it can become a nuisance, and more so because the wave of products fuelled by customers’ feedback is gaining momentum. How was it possible that before products were developed without your involvement? It was largely for the same reason why so many of them didn’t succeed and you never heard of them. They failed to respond to actual business needs. In the age of easy access to information, analytical systems, and ways to enable quick contact between the maker and the user, companies that develop solutions for you don’t want to join the crowd of losers before the race even starts.

Before, what mattered at the execution phase of a project was three things – time, budget, and scope. Come to think of it, some people would add quality to this mix. First, products were developed A to Z and only when they were ready did they make their way to the market. Then their authors just waited for the results. Results meaning your reaction, dear User. If a product sold well, it meant that it appealed to the buyer, thus becoming successful. Clearly, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where there’s no success, and all effort, investment, and big plans go to the garbage bin, which is why nowadays – in the Time of Agile Product Development – product makers prefer to make sure early enough that what they’re producing will find buyers.

Who might want to know my opinion?

The project or company’s size doesn’t matter – the development of every product requires feedback. This rule is applicable not only to the customer-producer relation, as feedback comes to developers from all directions – users, other teams in the company, and the market – through trends and competition analysis. Feedback from customers is particularly important to companies developing solutions for a very specific group of users or B2B solutions, or companies trying to launch an innovative product which no existing customer has had an opportunity to use. Consequently, developing another chat-type communication system where it’s easier to start the work based on a benchmark of existing solutions and omnipresent opinions about available applications’ pros and cons is very different from creating a product that has no counterpart on the market (the case of Upsaily, which applies customer intelligence and machine learning for data analysis used in marketing). In the case of the latter, companies will try to acquire as much information as they can about your needs, what’s important to you, and how you have dealt with a given issue so far. Based on the information you provide, the development team will be able to create strategies and tools that can not only streamline your workflow but also help you achieve results that are unattainable with your current work methodology.

How can software developers find out about whether a tool appeals to me?

You must know many such methods – from the already mentioned pop-up messages, surveys, and thumbs up and down to text messages asking your opinion. There are many ways to reach the user, depending on the extent of product development. If the product is at early production stages, its authors will need you, the Customer, to provide a bigger chunk of information – in such cases, the most frequently used strategies are meetings and talks in which the customer presents their needs, reservations, and current strategies for dealing with issues. Based on them, a product development roadmap is built, comprising potentially helpful functions. It’s advisable to accept invitations to such meetings, as it often happens that in return for active participation in product development the developers offer a free-of-charge trial version of the system which your competition hasn’t yet seen or an opportunity to create elements tailored to your business.

If the system is already functional, the pool of strategies for acquiring information is expanded with analytical tools that make it possible to check whether and how you use a given solution, how often you visit a specific part of the application or system, and which, if any, parts of the system you look at for a longer time. Such tools enable regular checks and adjustments to the development of the systems’ particular parts ensuring their compatibility with your work style.

In many situations, an idea put forward to the developers will not be translated into the product. Why? An idea for a solution is just an idea for a solution – it may turn out that it doesn’t harmonise with the vision or product development strategy, or that there’s another way to respond to your business need. Therefore, you can be offered a solution different from what you initially had in mind, as at the end of the day, every problem can be solved in many ways. Don’t be afraid to try new available functions in practice, and if there is something you find unclear or if you aren’t sure whether you’re using the product’s full potential, be certain that when contacting its makers you will use all necessary guidance or assistance – after all, you live in the age of customers creating products!

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