A team or organization that knows how to share feedback and intentionally exchanges ideas is destined to excel one way or another. Feedback is indeed an inseparable component of a meal plan for champions, and mostly the why behind where we are today in aggregate. Structuring a system, where harvesting feedback from those who can engineer it constructively is one of the mission critical tasks you need to nail down to grow your business.

As a subset, customer feedback, on the other hand, has a more complex nature. While you need a constant stream of feedback coming your way and customers mostly are fond of sharing their ideas, the mastery here lies in knowing when to ignore certain feedback. I won’t go all the way and talk about how the “If I asked them, they’d want a faster horse” mentality makes sense, but I believe that adjusting how much customer feedback influences your backlog at different growth stages has a decisive effect on your trajectory.

In the early stages, you mostly need particular types of feedback from your customers, which revolves around whether or not your product works for them at a price that is commercially acceptable for you. And if not, why? That’s it. Everything else—from brand assets to business model feedback—can wait. However, over time, after you’ve found your footing, you should lean towards listening to your customers more as retention becomes a hot topic. What makes your users stick, whether it’s your tone of voice or the pricing tiers you put in place, starts to pull more weight when you’re about to make a move.

For what it’s worth, this transition towards what your customers say is not an easy one. Even though the volume of signals exponentially increases after having found PMF, some founding teams do not easily change, and they keep on believing that what they’ve done so far brought them where they are, so that their core understanding and own judgement will take them further. But, as your user base expands, customer personas and use cases become radically more diverse, making it increasingly difficult to rely solely on internal assumptions.

At this intersection, one trick I’ve seen that works is to establish a dedicated growth team with the autonomy to explore what matters beyond your current focus and let them work independently to elicit the things you may or may not think matter. As time passes, founders or team leaders inevitably face situations with multiple equally viable paths forward. To keep the momentum on making the right decisions —since it’s a game of making the right amount of right decisions consecutively— what they can do is to diversify the voices at decision-making tables. The more your business matures, the more nuanced perspectives you need to make breakthroughs. Your A-team members should increasingly focus on identifying patterns in user needs that even customers themselves haven’t fully articulated.

One way to increase the quality of feedback is to frame “collecting feedback” as more of a practice, a novel approach to product development that goes beyond merely talking with your users. When every team member remains constantly aware of product and business realities, they’ll recognize that all interactions—with users, partners, or regulators—contain valuable insights. Let’s leave the easier-said-than-done stamp over here again, as cultivating a sense of ownership is not a light task. But, still, you can be mindful as a leader to push this agenda and turn each interaction you have with your team to foster product-led thinking.

You’ll have incoming feedback from your comms and support channels all the time, which are mostly valuable for identifying usability issues and prioritizing bug fixes. Users tend to voice complaints, especially if they pay for it, so your call centre and marketing channels are gold mines for understanding user frustrations. If you have product-oriented people on these fronts, customer success and marketing, who are good at listening to users and translating complaints into actionable bits for product teams, your product backlogs will never be short of ideas to work on.

Apart from incoming feedback, to make your backlog future-proof, you should also find a way to synthesise internal feedback, too, about competitive landscape, market trends, and prospective user needs. This type of cultivated feedback can and should come from anyone within your company, from your research teams to the least research-mandated teams. The critical challenge is to devise an imaginary pneumatic tube system which would allow you to collect all ideas and channel them into a pool, where they’ll be sorted out, categorised, and prioritised.

So, if you press hard, incoming and internal feedback will fill your pools to the brim. But this time, at this stage, a robust prioritization framework becomes essential—one that systematically moves high-impact ideas up while appropriately deferring others. Inside the cresting wave of feedback, your product teams should be able to surf to improve things business-wise without falling off their boards (aka their mental health) while catering to those who want more of your products.

Therefore, the game is threefold. One, you grow a mentality for sharing feedback company-wide and turning insights into workable items. Easier said than done, stamped again. Two, you devise a tube system where all the feedback slides into the same pool. After a certain scale, it may get out of hand quickly, so keep things tight from the start by using proper tags and taxonomy. Three, you define a framework to sort through everything you have. From using a basic ICE modification to creating something tailor-made, giving weights and scores to each idea or complaint might do the trick. A pro tip: do not make any feedback gatherer feel useless by ignoring their input. If you take these three steps and make it work at the right time, you’ll see your roadmap will slowly turn into a customer and insight-centric one.

Being customer-centric means pretty much this, if you ask me. Not blindly giving an ear to your users or not ignoring them like they did not exist, instead making sense of their motivations and acting upon the insights you catch, with the right timing. Making users happy while generating business is the simplest way to explain the game, and the feedback you collect is an essential variable to extend the game time.