Featuredeck was born out of necessity
While building Mobiscroll for the past couple of years, talking to thousands of customers and leads we realized that we need a structured way of tracking and organizing where people are struggling and what recurring questions they throw our way.
1. The Gut feeling period
When someone heard of an issue enough times they brought it up on a weekly standup. After a little debate if it still made sense, we created a Trello card and it got onto our development list.
- This was far from a process
- We talked only about issues that were top of mind, things we heard about recently
- Everyone at the company was doing customer support so it was hard to keep track of what everyone else was encountering
- This was more of a gut feel decision being fueled by vocal customer requests
2. Realizing the need for tracking things
After that we started creating cards with a number on them acting as a counter. As we heard about different topics we increased that number. Simple +1 logic.
- We didn’t have any context around it, we just had a number
- Is this coming from customers or leads?
- We didn’t have a way to know if the same person from a different thread was already added
- We didn’t have people to recruit for research or anybody who would be happy if we built it
3. Job for a single person
A process started taking shape. After a conversation or ticket was closed by a teammate a summary was added and somone was tagged to review it and stick it to an existing topic or create a new topic. Basically it became the responsability of a single person to organize the stories into topics and to copy the names, contact details and a link to the thread onto the Trello card. This time around we also stared following up with people after we shipped a new feature. We made a great impression and people started thanking us.
- Because of the manual process the person doing it became the bottleneck and a huge backlog of unprocessed threads started piling up
- People from the team were still working in silos. There was no easy way to keep everyone informed on how the landscape changed
4. Defining a process
We ended up creating a trello board where the cards were the topics and collected the stories on those cards. The topics were ranging from new features, improvements, brand new products not only limited to product development but to marketing, documentation and our website.
- The same problem was present, how to inform the team about what’s new so that it easy for them to spot patterns. How to get everyone on the same page?
- How to speed up the process? It was a number of tedious manual steps for getting in the stories and connect them with the cards
- How to spot trends and how to navigate the collection of growing topics?
Last year we released our first batch of products and features that were
coming
out of
this, backed up by
user stories and research. We had an informed go-to market strategy, we knew what objections
customers
were
having,
we knew about competitors and we knew what we had to build. It was a success!
After much debate, talking with other founders and product managers to learn about how
everyone
else is doing
it, things started clicking: It is time to get started on Featuredeck.