3 reasons to use a feature upvote tool for your product

Customer feedback is the center of the most successful products in the world. What if we allowed users to upvote for features that they would pay you for? What if the users set the roadmap you require to build a great product that promotes adoption? This is exactly why feature upvoting is crucial for a product that needs to succeed.

Why is feature upvoting important?

There could be hundreds of reasons as to why feature upvoting is important, but everything boils down to just 3 (three) simple reasons:

1. Know your users' reactions before investing a penny
2. Preventing launch or feature failures
3. Keeping the customers in the loop
4. Higher rate of success

1. Know your users' reactions

The Tweet below showcases how Cristina Cordova handled the first day of her job at Notion.

Today is my first day at @NotionHQ, where I’ll be leading Platform & Partnerships! 🎉 If you have any feedback on our API (in the works) or partner integrations, I’ll all ears. 👂

— Cristina Cordova (@cjc) March 30, 2020

Here's what she did:

1. She announced that she is joining Notion as a lead for Platform & Partnerships;
2. She wanted to listen to her users about their feedback;
3. I am sure she is going through a tough time organizing, cleaning the duplicate feedback and doing much more;

We have to applaud Cristina Cordova for doing what a great manager would do, which is listening to their product's customers. But the problem comes in when the product owner or manager must organize the feedback that are coming at them in volumes that are in-human.

This is where a feature upvoting tool comes into picture. Now, imaging if Cristina had done this instead:

1. She announced that she is joining Notion as a lead for Platform & Partnerships;
2. She wanted to listen to her users about their feedback;
3. She tweeted out a link where people can give her feedback about Notion.

What would have now happened is very simple. She goes on to take the onboarding lessons at Notion. Keeps a tab on what their users are telling about Notion on a tool like Hellonext. Users find it easy to provide feedback since someone would have already mentioned what they wanted to tell in just a second. Everyone stays at home, happy. Ultimately, Cristina can now respond, invite her team and prioritize what they should build next to achieve the company's targets.

This, my friend, is heaven for product managers.

2. Preventing launch or feature failures

Feature failures are one of the most underrated things in the world. Many entrepreneurs and product managers dream. Some dreams are too vivid to ignore. So they go ahead an build a feature that they thing their users would love. Sometimes, users love it. But many times, these features could be nothing but a tab in your app that no one wanted to use.

Snapchat's UI redesign is one such example. All of a sudden, when people updated thier Snapchat app, thinking that they would see something new, they were in for a surprise. The app turned itself into a redesign monster, where even the professional Snapchat users couldn't use the app anymore. It is beleived that the company invested time of hundreds of engineers, over a span of one year.

This redesign went so bad, that over 1.2 million people signed a petition to Snapchat to revert back to the old design. This could be one of the biggest product feature failures of this era. After years of planning, work and effort, Snapchat had to scrap everything they did to revert back to the old design. Just like what their users wanted it to be.

Now, imagine if Snapchat had listened to a very small and closed group of users, before, during and in the final stages of this redesign. And had these users upvote on features (via a Private Board) that they liked and disliked. That would have saved the company millions of dollars and above all, the effort and time the engineers put in to build it.

This is a huge lesson that any product manager should learn before investing in features based on assumptions.

3. Keeping customers in the loop

Today, the landscape of selling has changed. More than selling, the problem that product owners are trying to tackle is 'customer retention'. Allowing a customer to upvote for features that they think will make sense for your product is the center of customer retention. Here's a quick example.

Millions of people buy Apple products and download the updates that Apple Provides as soon as it drops in the market. This is a loyalty that many product owners would go to war to get from their customers. But the loyalty that Apple has built with its customer is different from the way product owners should build loyalty today. Apple cultivated its loyalty over a span of 40 years. This is a timeframe where no SaaS companies existed, there were not a lot of competition and Apple kept delivering and amazing people with their products. Now, this created a sense of trust among people, where they believe that the company would have done the best work it could ever do, for the money they pay to buy their product.

Today, where life-saving news about a Pandamic spreads over social media. It is important for product owners to keep the customers in loop about what you are working on, to keep them hooked to your product and slowly build loyalty around it. For example, say that you pay a hefty $500 per month for a product you use. You are currently using its features, but you know that you need more to get value for the money. Imagine if there is a way for you to tell the product team that you are looking forward to the features you want, and you are constantly kept in the know about the updates about the feature that they are building for you. This is going to keep you updated as well as you know that the feature is going to be available to you soon. This is exactly what a customer feedback tool does to your customers.

Pro Tip: Make it simple for your customers

Anything that you get from your customers, right from the payment to feedback, it has to be extremely simple. You don't want your customers to write emails asking you to fix a bug or improve a feature. You want them to find a spot to provide you feedback quickly and get it over with.

Try Hellonext

Hellonext's user interface is intentionally kept simple. The team that builds Hellonext are the ones who have helped Fortune 500 companies build faster and better designed products that impact millions of people across the globe.

Now, we are bringing the same experience to you, so that you can build something that can create an impact in the world. All of this, starts at just $10/month/company.