One of my fave things to do when I’m learning how to build and sell a new product is so simple and so old school: I like to set up two “Complaint Boxes.”
First is the Customer Complaint Box. I send an onboarding email that asks an open-ended question, “What’s going on in your world that led you to sign up for [your product] today?” I learned this question from Joanna Wiebe 10 years ago and it remains the single most useful sentence on the Internet.
I pipe the responses to a single destination where anyone on the team can thumb through them to see what we look like through our users’ eyes.
Second is the Internal Team Complaint Box. I set up a space inside our documentation tool for folks to share the problems they see and solution ideas they’ve been kicking around. I meet 1:1 with my main stakeholders to show them how to help us help them.
The customer VOC helps us stay tightly aligned around what’s going on for our customers in the moment when they reach out to us. You get way more than complaints, of course. I’ve seen these folders grow to many thousands of responses full of competitive intel, product pain, questions about features we have on our roadmap, and questions about features we have built but haven’t marketed.
It becomes an endless supply of big ideas for copy & UX, a shortcut to fast-track prioritization meetings, and osmosis-material for long-term visioning.
For the internal complaint box, any time someone wants something from us, we have a place to ask them to put their request. We avoid having to say, “No, that’s not on our roadmap.” Instead we say, “Tell me more, how big is this opportunity? How many people are affected? If we fix it, what improves?”
We also have a place to put all those loose DM’s, snippets from meetings, and “hm this is interesting I’m not sure why yet” stats. A place for the planetesimal strategy dust that will one day become Jupiter-sized initiatives, all collected in one spot where it’s ready to inform the discussion, build the brief, pitch the stakeholders.
With one team, the complaint boxes led to a major positioning shift. We had a few feature ideas from internal users that seemed disconnected on the surface. Conversations we had with the stakeholders 1:1 even revealed that each believed their departments were misaligned.
But because we’d been collecting so much data for so long, we saw it differently. Both departments were solving a similar problem – which was, at its root, a result of our customer teams expanding beyond the stakeholders we had originally served. The customer data was sparse, but it revealed without a doubt that we hadn’t yet been selling to or building for the market that was previously showing up as side characters in sales and customer success calls.
When it was time to shift our positioning, we had a foundation of evidence so solid that everyone was interrupting us to say, “Yes let’s do it” before we could finish our pitch.