Listening to your customers is critical to developing better software. Their feedback enables you to stay in sync with customer expectations, to make changes before those changes become costly, and to pivot if necessary. Sharif shares five practical tips for building, capturing, and scaling feedback loops, providing real examples of what his team has learned. He explores how to create a feedback strategy, how to make feedback fun using gamification techniques, tips and tricks for reducing friction in the process, how to validate ideas before writing a single line of code, and how to manage the process when you get too much feedback. Each of these techniques provides a deeper understanding of your customers, making software development more effective and productive. Don’t finish your next software project thinking, “I wish I’d known that earlier.” Obtaining valuable feedback is easier and more fun than you might think.

1.
BW2
Session
6/5/2013 10:15 AM
"Building Customer Feedback Loops
to Learn Quicker, Design Smarter"
Presented by:
Sherif Mansour
Atlassian Software
Brought to you by:
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073
888‐268‐8770 ∙ 904‐278‐0524 ∙ sqeinfo@sqe.com ∙ www.sqe.com

2. Sherif Mansour
Atlassian
Sherif Mansour has eleven years of experience in software development. He is currently senior
product manager for Atlassian, responsible for Confluence, a popular social collaboration tool
for product teams. Sherif recently played a key role in developing one of Atlassian’s new
products—Team Calendars. Previously, he served as Atlassian’s cross product integration
manager, ensuring a high quality experience for customers. Sherif has worked in software
development for a web consultancy firm, and for Optus, the second largest telco in Australia.
His areas of expertise include agile product development. Sherif thinks building simple products
is hard—and so is writing a simple, short bio.

3. Building Effective Customer
Feedback Loops
Sherif Mansour
Senior Product Manager, Atlassian
sherif@atlassian.com

4. ur
erifmanso
@ sh
?

5. Agenda
• Build, measure, learn
• Five tips for building effective feedback loops

7. 2.0
Build
Measure
Learn

8. Five Tips
for building effective feedback loops

9. 1
friction

12. 1
GOT FEEDBACK?
900+
feedback
submissions

13. 1
↓ barrier to entry
Avoid login, context switching...
↓ fields
*
Less fields, reduce required fields
Automatically populate where possible
required
Rate this feature:
bad
good
great
Easily express yourself
Quick and simple

14. 1

15. make
it
2
fun!

16. 2

17. 2
FREE
license
BETA
Release notes
Thank you:
•
PRIZE
movie tix
•
John Masson for reporting CONF-334
Ryan Anderson for the feature
suggestion in CONF-4534
SAY
THANKS

18. 2
Incentivise
Through prizes and awards
Thanks!
Say thank you
Provide recognition in release notes, @mentions
Game mechanics
Encourage feedback

19. 3
get
pers nal

20. 3

21. 2
3
?

22. 3
get personal
jkodumal
2.0/4.0
name
key feature usage

23. 3
=
Put a face to the stat
Make that customer connection
Engage engineers
Review it daily, get it on your wallboard, talk about it...
KNOW the customer
Use data to drive interviews

24. 4
ack
db
fee
ea
rit
w
gy
ate
str

25. New
new
• Techniques to
encourage install
vs
• Finding BETA
Both
internal
(Internal+External)
• Internal feedback:
captured more data,
easier to engage
vs
existing
• External feedback:
General
Deadline
customers
external
increased privacy
specific
• Incentivise the
• Arranged casual
• Followup plan
• Placement of
“feedback” button
vs
general
interviews
ad-hoc
feedback process
vs
deadline
Feedback strategy

26. 4
Write a plan of attack!
Seriously, just do it.
Consider setting numeric goals
Especially if you’ve got a baseline.

27. 5
get
kb
bac
ed
fe
ART
ST
ou
ey
for
e

29. fake
it till you
make
IT

30. tools to help you
fake
IT

31. Atlassian User Interface (“Flatpack”)
http://atlss.in/AUIFlatpack

32. User-specific extensions (“Speakeasy”)
http://developer.atlassian.com/display/SPEAK
Per-user extensions
Great for visual prototypes, quick DOM manipulation,
dialogs, prompts, JS-based changes...
Quick and easy to hack up
HTML + CSS + JS and you’re done

33. ?
fidelity
speed

35. ?
fidelity
speed

36. ion
dit
K
eE
ot
eyn
Faking it: A recipe
1
Make your base
2
Mix & match keynote goodness
3
Apply desired icing on top
Take a screenshot with the main screen(s) you want to work with,
paste in Keynote.
Use pre-prepared some ready-to-use dialogs, menus, buttons... all in
Keynote ready to to mix in with your recipe.
Link parts of the screen, transition slides show screen flows, animate
to show interaction... it’s all up to you!

38. 12
9
3
6
It’s okay to fake it
Save time and money - validate your concepts, fast.
Build a toolbox
Create a visual library of your product components, consider a
JavaScript framework or prototype in Keynote or PowerPoint.
Use the right tool
High fidelity prototypes are not always what you want.
Choose the right tool for each situation.

39. Conclusion
incase you forgot...

40. get
pers nal
friction
dback
a fee
write
rategy
st
make fun!
it
2.0
get feed
fore you
back be
START

41. Questions?
... or similar experiences?

42. Thank you!
@sherifmansour
sherif@atlassian.com