How to respond to reviews of your product?

Over the past few years, I have been completely convinced that finding as close as possible to users (at the expense of the Minimum Valuable Product - MVP, feedback mechanisms, etc.) significantly increases the chances of a product for success.

However, as soon as you have a decent user base, you face another problem - what to do with all these reviews? The offers you receive begin to quickly outpace your ability to respond to them, and obviously you don’t need to respond to all of them in any way.
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Of course, I do not have a panacea for this problem, but I want to say that a model aimed at satisfying the proposals that received the most votes, and working on them in this order may not be the best solution for any situation. Should take into account:

Small changes can cause big changes. In my last company, we conducted significance tests, changing just one word, and some changes led to an incredible increase in our funnel.

Small changes that lead to big changes are often not obvious. That is, you need a large number of iterations, similar to the mountain climbing, before you catch your luck.

Adding new features can lead to chaos in the interface.

Polishing a product has a non-linear effect. If you achieve the perfect UX, it will cause a viral effect.

In other words, you are often confronted with a real choice, taking into account that your resources are limited: you can take the path described by the saying “chasing two hares — you won't catch any of them” (creating many small viable features that you are asked users); or you can follow the way of working on one or several features.

Both strategies are definitely viable (despite the negative shade of the sayings), as evidenced by numerous success stories. And I believe that there are various situations, when one or another strategy is more justified.

Nevertheless, I have a premonition that many startups fall into the first category almost by accident, because they lack the will, desire, vision, perseverance, or something else to seriously get to work and take the second path. That is, they do not make an informed choice, and in the end this decision may not be the best.

The reason is that the work on the features that people are asking for you, the way is the least resistance. Not doing - requires you to consciously ignore (or at least politely postpone) a large number of obvious requests for features and carefully concentrate on things that seem much smaller and for an inexperienced eye - irrelevant.

And this is the key. Are these small things really irrelevant or are they part of a strategic vision where you have to end up with a truly polished product. It is often difficult to say for sure, and sometimes it is just a probability rate. You never really know if you can achieve the ideal experience ( * user experience ) until you achieve it.

This is an illogical strategy and often requires working on features that no one would even notice, but it will make their experience smoother; or over a series of “advanced” features, each of which will be useful to 5% of your users, but in general, a series of features will be useful to everyone, which means that almost everyone got a smoother experience.

Such a strategy is also illogical, since it seems so difficult to compete with other companies. You do not add more features to the general list. But it's not easy to understand that small changes are much more difficult to copy, because you made a bunch of small decisions that others cannot implement in the same way, and thus copying will end up with completely different funnel results.

Coming back to product reviews, you shouldn’t ignore “one of” - be it a proposal or a comment - just because it is one of many. Perhaps it is a real puzzle piece.

Friends, after the last article, our team of enthusiastic translators has grown substantially. However, the design area and the UX remained poorly closed. I urge everyone who is interested and who knows English to join the translation of cool English articles! At the exit: pumping English, expanding horizons and respect from those who can not afford to read them in the original. Write in a personal!