Integrating Customer Feedback is Product Management

Dan Erickson is the CEO and founder of Viable, which helps companies use AI to analyze customer feedback.

As one might expect, he has strong feelings about the importance of such feedback.

“Customer feedback is one of the best ways, if not the best way, to tell if you’re on the right track,” Dan says. “Basically, you’ve got a vision, you’ve got something you want to build, and there’s really no way to know whether or not that thing is something people want without talking to people first.”

And whose job is it to talk to customers and collect that feedback? According to Dan, “Literally everyone.” He is also very clear on the three things that must be in place once “literally everyone” has collected feedback in order to act on it successfully:

1. The company has a central repository where anybody can go to find the feedback that is relevant to the job they’re doing. 
2. Each team in the company works to understand how the customer’s opinion affects their day-to-day role. 
3. Everyone uses feedback in every part of their iteration loop — idea, design, build, validate — and integrates feedback into the entire design and development process.

Viable uses generative AI to help manage that process and analyze the feedback, and Dan has equally strong thoughts about the changes AI is bringing to, well, everything: “We’re in the middle of a transition right now in the tech industry and, really, in all industries, as AI becomes more and more adopted. This is on par, at least, with the iPhone coming out and potentially with the internet being invented. So this is a huge, huge shift we’re going through right now, and I truly believe that this is one of the big-phase changes in technology that we’ve had.”

If you want to learn more about how Dan thinks AI will change things — as well as his take on everything from product-market fit to hope punk — tune in to this episode of This Is Product Management.

Download the transcript:

Here are some highlights: 

• Whose job is it to talk to gather customer feedback? 
• Using customer feedback to help find product-market fit 
• How generative AI is changing how we build products
• Considering AI, should PMs be worried about their jobs? 
• Hope punk