Daryl Katz Riethof
Client feedback is integral to the success of a project and as a product owner, obtaining it is part of your responsibility. Good feedback is not synonymous with positive or negative feedback. A client should feel empowered and comfortable enough to speak up when something isn’t right. If they wait to share their honest thoughts, there is a high chance it will cost more time and money to fix down the road.
Below are some suggestions to elicit better feedback from your clients. Here at Caktus we present our work in sprint reviews, but these tips can be applied anytime you are presenting work and require client feedback:
-
Start your presentation by being extremely clear on the goals of the meeting. Let the client know that the entire purpose is to get their feedback on the stories/features your team is presenting. Remind them that they will not hurt anyone’s feelings if they tell you what is not working for them (they should, of course, provide details and not just a generic, “This is terrible and wrong” comment).
-
Share only the stories or features that will elicit feedback. There is often work done in a sprint that does not have any user-visible components (e.g., technical debt). Feel free to let the client know that those items have been accomplished if you think it is relevant for them to know (after all, it was work that the team accomplished). However, spend the majority of the time sharing features that they can see and understand, and that do require their feedback.
-
Tell a story. Go through the completed work as a sequence of events as the user would experience them. Be careful not to just review the work ticket by ticket, but as a holistic version of how the overall feature works.
-
Show the functionality from the customer’s perspective, not from the code level.
-
Use real data, or at least data that makes sense. Populating the application with lorem ipsum or some other random dummy data will make it difficult for you to present the app in a way that makes sense for the client. For example, if you are creating an app for booking flights, you will want the data to reflect that (cities, times, airlines, dates), even if it is just placeholder data.
-
Ask your developer to tell the client why they developed a feature in the way that they did, how it benefits the user, and what kind of feedback is needed. “For this feature, we made it work this way because ABC. Does this accomplish what the user needs to do? What are we missing?”
-
Coach the client on the specific types of feedback that would be most helpful. “Here we are looking for specific feedback regarding the navigation,” or, “For this feature, how close is this layout to what you had envisioned?”
-
Ask for the feedback in an open-ended manner versus questions answerable with yes/no. “How do you envision the user would utilize this feature? In what ways might it be confusing for them? What might it need to do that it is currently not doing?”
-
Try to make the sprint review compelling, relevant to the audience, and at an appropriate technical level. This will help you keep people’s attention and ensure they are engaged enough to give the feedback you need.
Guiding your client in a way that helps them articulate and communicate what is working and what is not will help to ensure that you are building the product they want. Getting the feedback as early as possible helps the team do this within the time and budget allotted. Good feedback will lead to a good product.
Find more project management tips in this post about being a product owner in a client services organization.
