Matt Young

Episode 92
Brave UX

Using Customer Feedback to Make Better Decisions

In this episode of Brave UX, Matt Young speaks to the importance of aligning engineering, product, & design, the roles of creativity and logic in decision making, and using customer feedback wisely.

Highlights include:

How do you know when it’s time to kill a feature?
Why and when do you speak directly with people?
How have you integrated your engineering and product orgs?
When should you deploy emotion and when should you temper it with logic?
How should customer feedback be used to influence executive leadership?

September 27, 202201:14:59

Listen on:

Who is Matt Young?

Matt is the CEO of UserVoice, a software company that helps growing B2B SaaS companies to collect and make sense of customer feedback.

Before joining UserVoice in 2015, Matt was the Vice President and CTO of Vodori, a digital marketing consulting and product company. There, he spent seven years focused on achieving excellence in enterprise software development.

After earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, as well as a Master’s of Science in Computer Science, Matt invested 22 years in engineering before becoming a product leader — a journey that gives him a unique and valuable perspective.

Matt has recently been generously sharing that perspective with product people at Product School and Product Camp, as well appearing as a guest on podcasts such as the Scale Up Show, Lessons On Product and Tied Together, amongst others.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of TheSpace InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to dearest product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together, I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Matt Young. Matt is the CEO of UserVoice, a software company that helps growing B2B SaaS companies to collect and make sense of customer feedback. Appointed to the position just before the pandemic arrived, as a first time CEO, Matt has undoubtedly had an eventful past couple of years as he's grown the company and continued to lead the evolution of the UserVoice product.
Before joining UserVoice in 2015, Matt was the Vice President and CTO of Vodori, a digital marketing, consulting and product company from Chicago. There he spent seven years focused on achieving excellence in enterprise software development after earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Syracuse University, as well as a Master's of Science in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Matt invested 22 years in engineering before becoming a product leader, a journey that gives him a unique and valuable perspective. Matt's recently been generously sharing that perspective with product people at Product School and Product Camp, as well as appearing as a guest on podcasts such as the Scale Up Show, Lessons on Product, and Tied Together, amongst others. And you guessed it, he's now here with me for a conversation on Brave UX. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Young:
Hey Brendan, it's great to be here and very weird to hear your whole life rolled up into a one minute explanation like that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Did I miss anything?
Matt Young:
The whole part of me that isn't professional but [inaudible]
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, let's get into that cuz as far as I understand, Matt, you are the owner of a Philly Young and boisterous German Shepherd called Banks. I was wondering, is Banks going to be joining us on the show at any point today?
Matt Young:
He is in the background and he is been with me all day. We're working from home like most people and if the male person decides to show up, you may hear some of his commentary in the background.
Brendan Jarvis:
Excellent, excellent. I was speaking with Christina Wodtke last week and her, I think she might be a German Shepherd as well, I'm not sure. I'd never actually saw the dog but it made an appearance right at the end of the podcast and was quite excited. So [laugh], see how we go. We're dog friendly. It's dog friendly show.
Matt Young:
I don't know if you've heard the theory that a lot of people have pets that kind of mimic their personality and growing up we always had golden retrievers who are adorable, friendly dogs and maybe not the most intelligent species that are out there. I was always attracted to German Shepherds, just the loyalty and intelligence combined with the very quirky, it takes a while to earn their trust thing. It models my personality really well so we get along well.
Brendan Jarvis:
Mm-hmm The size of the dog, they seem to me to be a medium size dog. Like I said, they seem to have a lot of energy. Just how much attention does banks need?
Matt Young:
I walk him three or four times a day about a mile and a half at a go. Good for me, good for him. He's a world class ball catcher. That's his job to do. I don't know how he does it. I can surprise him and throw a ball in any direction any time and he misses 1% of the time. It's, it's crazy. He will jump backwards off the ground to grab the thing outta the air.
Brendan Jarvis:
Very athletic. I'm a cat person. I hope that won't affect us today.
Matt Young:
Nope. I love cats too. I would probably have a cat except certain varieties of them are pretty allergenic to me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, I see. But I see
Matt Young:
There are very few pets. I don't think that I would deal with a snake very well. I think if you were raised in any kind of religious environment, snakes are just inherently scary even though there's nothing really wrong with them except for that fact that some of them can kill you. But yeah, most pets, good cats are great
Brendan Jarvis:
When it comes. I know we're going on a bit of a tangent here, but while we're talking about snakes, there is a very good reason and I think it's, it dates back to prehistoric times as to why humans fear reptiles in particular snakes. So I think you're in good company here as well. I live in New Zealand, we have no snakes at all really. I'm about to holiday in Australia, nothing. There are no snakes. There's only one poisonous spider that's indigenous to the country pretty much untouched. But I'm about to go to Queensland in Australia, which is riddled with things that want to kill you, including all manner of different species of snakes and saltwater crocodiles, tiger sharks. So wish me luck if you don't hear from me. I know over the next couple of months you'll know it didn't go well.
Matt Young:
Australia is the land of animals that try to kill human beings and where I live in North Carolina, in the United States, there are quite a few species of venomous snakes and I don't see them too often, but every once in a while I'll walk the dog and, oh, just need to go in the other direction. If you ever wanna see me behave like a 12 year old girl who's just been the most frightened of her life, the time you see it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Hey, so speaking of younger people in particular, you as a younger person, you grew up in the 1970s and 1980s just outside of New York City from what I understand and your dad worked at I B M and that gave you access to a PC at an early age. How did that access, how did having access to that computer change your life?
Matt Young:
It completely set the direction of my life. This was an IBM PC one, which I think most people, no matter how young they may be, have probably seen that iconic wide heavy machine with floppy drives, usually pictured with a green and black monitor on top of it. That was literally the computer that we had. And my father, even though he worked for ibm, he was like, he started out as a typewriter salesman and worked in marketing so it was all foreign to him. I think he was trying to set my brother and up my brother and I up for a career in something tech technological. I sat and taught myself how to program that thing and couldn't stop playing with it. I had a modem, which was the way to connect with other computers at the time through the telephone lines and remember getting in a lot of trouble for racking up a very large telephone bill at one point.
But I think it kind of was the precursor to my software experience on the internet back there. I was the kid when I was in third grade who would stay in at recess to play with the Apple two that they had at my element elementary school. And in high school there was no one who would teach a computer programming class. So they arranged an independent study for me with the physics teacher who had some interest in it. But I remember him saying about four weeks into this school year, Matt told you everything I know, here's the manual [laugh] go. Fortunately Syracuse has a really good computer science program. It's modeled after MIT's computer science program. And that kind of theoretical introduction to computer science really prepared me for all the evolution that came up over the next couple decades.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now it would be possibly unfair for me to ask, cuz I'm not sure if you've actually seen the show, but it seems to be fairly popular over here in New Zealand, a show called Stranger Things.
Matt Young:
Oh yeah, of course. Stranger Things Interestingly is by two guys named the Duffer Brothers who grew up 20 miles in that direction in Durham, North Carolina. And a lot of the names of the locations in Stranger Things are street names from Durham, which is where I used to live. And it's really fun to hear that stuff.
Brendan Jarvis:
How closely aligned, if you've watched the show, is it in terms of the nostalgia that it brings back for you being a teenager in the eighties?
Matt Young:
I think it was season three that was centered in the mall spot on. It was perfect and even the whole culture around it, when you were 14 or 15 years old in the eighties, you went to the mall and hung out and that's how your parents got you outta the house. And I feel for parents these days, because that seems like an inherently unsafe thing to do, but for us it was cool, here's 10 bucks, go knock yourself out. With four hours of wandering around aimlessly, probably much to an annoyance of all the people who were trying to run their businesses out of that place.
Brendan Jarvis:
I seem to remember there was a movie, I think I'm a slightly younger than you, but there was a movie I watched when I was probably preteen or teens, so sometime in the nineties called More Rats, which comes to mind. Oh yeah, when you're describing that
Matt Young:
Also the decorations and the houses and stranger things, the wood paneling, the kids hanging out in the basement with an Atari 2,600 or something like that. That was our childhood. It's a perfect description of it and I was talking to my brother about it. My brother is three years older than I am. We were looking at it and it was like, do you look at this wistfully hoping for a simpler time and nostalgic for it? Or is it like no thank you, I'm glad we don't have to do that anymore. And I think I'm more in the latter camp because I just think the advancements of society and the availability of information and better ways to spend your time is a good thing for
Brendan Jarvis:
People. And I think every age has its challenges and I think you're right, it would be easy to look back at the eighties and see them as the golden years in many ways no respects,
Matt Young:
But they weren't, I mean there was rampant drug culture among young adults, especially for one, I'm really glad that I didn't have to grow up in an era where social media was telling me how unpopular or unattractive or whatever it might be that I was at the time. But that doesn't mean that we didn't have our own challenges in that same moment.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now you said something about your personality and growing up that I'll quote you on now. You said I'm always kind of a blunt person, it's my northeast upbringing now having watched several hours of you talk to other people explain your story and talk about product and all of those sorts of things, I really don't see that bluntness and having this conversation with you now. So I was curious about this because you definitely come across as someone who's very calm and very thoughtful. So what is it that I'm missing, when does this blunt part of you that you've spoken about, when does this present itself?
Matt Young:
I'm glad that you think I'm a calm and [laugh] polite person. That's important to me and I think it's something that's been lost in society, but there's a time for cutting through the sugarcoating and there are two situations where I think that that's critical. The first is in business. So if you work with me, I'm, I'm never mean it isn't personal or anything like that, but to dance around a subject is doing people a disservice when you're talking about my performance or their performance or the company's performance or something like that. Let's get to it and talk about what the real problems are. I think the same thing holds true with very close personal relationships to be able to know what you think, where you stand, why leave that to chance? I mean life is short, so say what you mean. Yeah, I think a lot of people interpret bluntness as rudeness and there are some people, especially I, I'm acutely aware of it now living in the South where I think people are mean in a more backstabbing way. They don't do it to your face. I dunno if you've heard the expression in New Zealand they use it here. If someone says bless your heart about you, it roughly translated means you're the biggest idiot I've ever spoken with in my
Brendan Jarvis:
Life. Do they give you a handbook when you move from the north or from Midwest to the
Matt Young:
South? You learn by a trial, by fire very quickly what you can and cannot do and then what they will do to you. And I just, everyone's got their own regional differences. I think I just value people who are straightforward in what they say and I think my marketing team is probably sick of me looking at copy that they write and slicing out all the fluff. One thing I really don't like about our industry and technology as a whole is that the boastful claims, the superlative words that get put around things, one word that's banned I will not let us use anymore is effortlessly. If you look on a lot of marketing sites for a lot of technology companies, they will tell you that you can effortlessly do this and effortlessly do that. And this is where I will get blunt. That is bs. Nothing worth doing is without effort or everyone would do it and it wouldn't be a differentiator at all. But that kind of stuff, that being a scientist in the background, I like words that speak the truth rather than words that try to trick you into something that is not true.
Brendan Jarvis:
So aside from this very direct approach to communicating with people about important matters and also you're touching on there not representing the benefits of the product, you are someone who has been in the workforce now for some time. You entered in 1996, you've worked at only three organizations since that time. And this also intrigued me. You know, spent 11 years at Duke, seven years at Vodori and now you are seven years counting at UserVoice and when you've got a world where the average tenure is 18 months at best, I would assume in technology this meaning you, you're a little bit of an outlier here. And so if I asked one of your closest friends or perhaps colleagues, why is Matt so committed to the places that he works? What would they tell me?
Matt Young:
I don't think it's commitment. I don't begrudge anyone who changes jobs every 18 months. It is a very viable way to move up the ladder, make more money. I have probably done economically probably not the smartest move to stay places for 11, seven years, whatever it might be. But I think my personality is one, they would tell you that I really like to understand problems deeply. I don't join an organization that I'm not interested in their mission. And because of that I really want to understand every aspect of it that I can. And I leave when I've reached the point where I feel like I do understand it and there's nothing more that I can add to it. But until then it's important. One of the reasons that I am the CEO is that I'd kind of reached the end of the rope at leading engineering at UserVoice.
I came to do what I meant to do. The organization was typical of a lot of startups where they had been successful, nothing could stop the success of the company. They had a good idea, they were iterating on it in an interesting way. But once we started wanting to sell into enterprise, we needed some organization, we needed some discipline. That's something that I had a lot of experience with and could come in and set up and I did that and I was like, hey, there's nothing more for me to either add value by or to learn while I'm here. So I spoke with the founder of the company, I'm like, oh, what's next? And well turns out that being CEO E O is next, which was never part of the grand plan [laugh] in my life.
Brendan Jarvis:
So the former CEO E o and founder was a person by the name of Richard White. So it sounds like you kicked Richard Richard out of his job and sent him packing so you could step into it.
Matt Young:
That was not at all how it went. It was more arm twisting. So we had been working on another product and the product that we were working on was meant to facilitate customer interviews. So whether you're a designer or a product manager, even a marketer, you probably aren't spending enough time talking to your customers and then keeping track of all the information that you learned from them. All that stuff, that's a challenge. The initial product we built was set up to solve the, hey, I need to talk to five people. Coordinating that is painful. I don't know who most people tend to go back to the same five people they've always spoken with all the time and they're getting the same point of view over and over again. We wanted to make it so that push the button, I can say, hey set up five interviews for me over the next week.
And we did that and we built it and it was cool and everyone who beta tested it for us really liked it and they thought it was great and we were asking them like, Hey, well what would you pay for that? Nothing. It seems like it should be a feature of UserVoice. And they're like, well okay, that's not really what we're going for. We were looking for new revenue streams at the time. So we dug in a little bit deeper and they're like, well it'd be really cool if you could take the transcription and the notes from that and condense that into an easily shareable thing. And okay, well that fits UserVoices model. We want to take all the feed, there's banks in case you can hear
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] loud and clear. Hey,
Matt Young:
Not now Bob. Thank you. Mail person as expected. So the next thing that people wanted to do was take all the notes from interviews and the transcription from interviews and gather that in cuz it is product feedback. And I remember literally I was out back rich worked on the west coast so he and I would often speak after the close of business my time and while he was still working his time and I was tossing the ball to the dog in the backyard and I said, rich, this product is really nice but product managers and designers, they do five interviews a week. Sales people and customer success people, they're on the phone all day every day and the problem is much more valuable to solve for them. He's like, you're right. And so we took the same software and made it available for sales and success teams, but the investors of UserVoice, they're here to solve product management problems, not sales and marketing problems. So we didn't want to make our cap table confusing to an eventual acquirer or whatever the outcome might be. So that was a point where he is like, I'm going to spin this off into a different company and you are going to be CEO of UserVoice. So there was some arm twisting involved to get me to do that. And the end, the company by the way is fathom.video, it's a free plug into Zoom that lets you do all this stuff. Definitely give it a shot, doesn't cost anything. Mm-hmm
Brendan Jarvis:
Reminding me of my conversation with Teresa Torres about continuous product discovery. Oh yeah. And I know that from what you were saying and how the product first worked, that would've made her very happy. One of the challenges as you're probably aware, which is probably why you were trying to solve it with the product is making it effortless for products teams to actually get in front of customers and make that research happen. But I wanna come to what it was like for you becoming CEO out of that engineering head of engineering role. I was curious, what was the first thing that you changed?
Matt Young:
I dissolved the organizational wall between product management and engineering. Also the physical wall, if I remember right cuz we were still using offices at the time. The reason for that is pretty simple. Typically engineering teams are gold on velocity, bugs, defects, things that are convenient to measure but ultimately don't have that much of an impact on the mission of an organization. Product organizations are often looking at adoption metrics, d A u retention time spent in the application and each of these things are really good for those organizations. But without those two teams having shared goals, they often speak past each other in terms of what they're trying to do and what to get done. That age old engineering tech debt argument like hey no we need time to work on technical debt. I am an engineer so I do want to have nice clean code and all that stuff, but you need to ask to what end, how does that benefit our customer?
And because of that, how does that benefit the company to clean it up? It may be as simple as, well if we don't fix this all we're all going to quit cuz it's a mess. Continuity matters in the employees that you've got, but ultimately if it comes down to we'll be able to develop software faster, it'll perform better. There are some bugs we can't fix very easily without this. Cool. Wanna create a justifiable reason. And if product teams and engineering teams can get together and share the real reason that they're doing those things, it starts to remove some of that tension that often exists between the product team and the engineering team in this case. But there's usually some form of tension between any one team and an organization and another team and an organization.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounded to me like what you were saying about the focus and engineering teams being around reducing technical debt velocity making sure that the codes clean and there aren't bugs present is missing a little bit of the product perspective. That customer focus or am I being unfair to engineering here?
Matt Young:
What you're saying is not wrong, but when you are educated to be an engineer, the outcomes that you are gold with are high quality code that meets a specification. And nowhere in academic education for engineering, at least when I grew up in probably not until the past five or six years where people actually talking about the outcomes that an end user wants to have because of the purpose of the software that you're building. Historically it always been, here's what I want you to build and your job is to go build it as efficiently with an appropriate level of quality as you can and getting engineers out of that mindset. It's not their fault they've been trained to work this way, most engineers are introverts, most engineers historically, this is historically speaking and becoming less and less true these days, which is really nice to see, don't really want to talk to customers, they're a little bit afraid of it.
Now more and more we're getting engineers saying, Hey, can I sit in on these calls? Awesome. That's something that the industry should embrace and invite those people to hear it straight from their user's mouth what they want. It's going to engineers, you have to be smart to be an engineer, there's no way around it. Why not direct that intelligence not just towards the code that you write or the user interfaces that you create, but really solving the problem in the best possible way that you can. So to me it makes sense that engineers should be part of the product team in the same way that salespeople and support people should also be part of the product team. They're getting a unique customer perspective that is really important for the product team to understand. And if a product team is unwilling or unable to take advantage of that perspective, they're really losing on a great source of information that's available to
Brendan Jarvis:
'em. Definitely pockets of design and product people that will be chairing at the thought of getting engineers and people and customer success more involved and in particular customer research. Having that face time with customers, being able to see or hear firsthand what's important to them, what's not working for them in the current product. Give them a little bit of a taste of the impact or the outcomes that their work in engineering in particular is having. It's, and then there's the practicalities of managing with finite resources timelines and resource allocations and budgets and all these sorts of things. And you spoke about the way that people were incentivized. What is it they're actually measured on? How do you integrate a broader set of perspectives like engineering into products without people in engineering feeling like their eyes being taken off the ball and that they're having to play catch up when they actually get back to their regular job and commerce?
Matt Young:
I think I would phrase it a slightly different way in that when you ask engineers, and I think this is true of any division of a company, whether it's sales support, et cetera, when you ask people to work towards a goal that is removed from their area of expertise and as an example here, growth is the thing that any business probably cares about more than anything else. Through a combination of retention, new business expansion and upsell. When you say to an engineer like, Hey, I need you to worry about growth, they might view that as you not appreciating the difficulty of what they do or the expertise that they bring to the discipline of engineering. And so it's important not to, those metrics are important for engineering, like defect counts and velocity, however you might use it, it can be a good tool to help you figure out how to make for a more efficient engineering organization.
But all of that is for not if it doesn't contribute to the company's goals. So it's an adjustment for sure. And the way that I try to do that is to start by making sure that the company and the first thing that I did was tear down the product and engineering wall. But that caused me to realize very quickly that hey, we don't have a clearly articulated shared set of goals across the entire organization. So setting those up and setting them up in a way that's relatable that any person on the team, no matter what level they're at, can actually draw a line between what they do and that goal. It's challenging but it's really important. And by doing that you can create an environment where people really understand the impact that they're having in their job. Going back to the research subject, it is really a good thing to be able to get support success on board with doing research and all that stuff.
But one thing I always try to bring our team back to is let's also please be very respectful of our customers time. We're asking them for this information, they don't wanna have this conversation four different times with four different people from the organization. If they can have one point of contact, share what's important to them and be done with it. That's the kind of company that you want to do business with. So one thing we also try to do is really get our employees to always think about things from the customer perspective with any decision that we make in any department.
Brendan Jarvis:
You were speaking before, just before about the alignment of people around goals and how they can see from the day-to-day that they're doing how that contributes to the company's growth or whatever it is that you've been measuring at UserVoice. Now I just wanna ask you about something else that you've said here. And I feel like there's a connection here which is you've said as an engineering leader, the primary driver of our work has always been the product team. And if there's one complaint engineers might give you, it's not having enough justification for why an engineer is being asked to build something for a product team. So that justification, that challenge of providing that to engineering, is that a challenge that has made easier since you've been able to implement these company-wide goals that people and various teams can see how they're contributing to
Matt Young:
It? It does make life easier because everyone's singing from the same songbook when they want to challenge whether something is a good idea or not, they can relate it to the same goals that we're all trying to get to. It gets people rowing in the same direction to use the awful cliche that everyone uses all the time. But earlier I said that most engineers weren't trained or aren't interested in thinking about what the solution ought to be and then on the flip side they'll complain to you they're not involved as much as they want to be and what the solution ought to be. And there's definitely, I, I'm sure that you and I, we've all been in this situation where you're kind of low key judging the job that other people are doing, wishing you had more influence over it. But be careful what you wish for.
Everyone else's job is hard and you may not understand it the way that they do. You get a variety of different personality types. There are some people who are really leaning into like, yeah, I'd love to be a part of listening to what customers say and sure bounce these solution ideas and other people in engineering are more comfortable and just tell me what to do and get outta my hair. I just want to go write code and all that stuff. So really there's no one right answer to this. You have to assess the team you've got and who's comfortable doing that stuff and who isn't and you're, you're never going to win. You're always going to have someone who doesn't like the balance that you've created. But I think the proof is always in how long people hang around at your organization. And if it's a long time, we tend to have people who stay at UserVoice a really long time and that's kind of the only real verification that you get that you're doing the right thing for the team as a whole.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, making me remember my conversation with Matthew Holloway, who I think the mid two thousands was charged at sap to implement design thinking globally. So he was based out of the office of the C E O and he was telling me the story of how they were, I think they were in Germany and they were taking an engineering team out to meet with customers to try and more directly connect the inputs with the outcomes. And one engineer that engineering lead, incredibly intelligent, super gifted person just didn't want to go. So basically locked themselves in the bathroom and refused to come. Wow. Even at the threat that the chairman would hear about it. So yeah, you do have to, I suppose, balance the needs of different personalities. It's not going to suit everyone to be face-to-face in a customer conversation. So the nature of the exposure or the involvement has to be calibrated.
And while we're talking about personality, I want to come to something else that you've said which is, if you asked my team what's the most annoying thing about having an engineering person in the product seat, it's how logical we are. And a lot of product management is driven by passion and emotion. So being self-conscious of that is very helpful. So you've seen both sides, you've seen the engineering side and now you are responsible for not just letting the company but also the product that is the company in some respects. When is the right time to deploy passion and emotion and when is the right time to temper that with logic,
Matt Young:
I can't change my personality, logic will always win. It's just the way I'm wired in the end. So ultimately it's not when are you logical and when are you passionate, it's when are you logical and when do you delegate because there are other people who are going to think more emotionally, more maybe gut level. But on the flip side, I think the marriage of those two is really important. I think most people would tell you that if you're going to grow a business, you need to have really good data, you need to analyze it, you need to understand what conversion funnels might look like, what your growth can be projected as. And that is a logic thing and you need to make sure that you keep emotion outta that mix so that you don't falsely convince yourself that you're onto something that you're not, that you have product market fit when you don't, that you have this great idea and it's going to be world changing but you haven't tested it and you haven't figured it out.
So that logical sanity check is always important to have. But I think most really good ideas start with some gut level of creativity that comes up. So you don't wanna squash that. I think the UserVoices are product feedback platform. So a lot of people make the assumption that we just do in order the most popular thing top to bottom or that we would suggest that people do that. Absolutely not. We would not suggest that people do that. A lot of the ideas just come from rampant brainstorming of what should happen there. There's no conflict. I think a lot of people think about the objective sides of product management where you're doing surveys looking at analytics data, et cetera, as being at odds with the creative and innovative aspects of product management. And I don't think they are at all. I think that the data is the smoke that you sniff and find where there's interesting stuff and that's when you put your thinking cap on and think about. Cool. Okay. I think that I have validated that this is a real problem of value to solve for people. How might we solve it in the best possible way that we can?
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like you are cautioning against binary thinking.
Matt Young:
It's a very paradoxical question. You've asked me to make an either or decision on an either or question
Brendan Jarvis:
Logician in you coming out.
Matt Young:
Horrible paradox for a computer scientist. Do I say unequivocally that you can't think in a binary way?
Brendan Jarvis:
I suppose what I'm saying is that it sounds like you are not suggesting that logic, compassion and mutually exclusive. It's a question of how you combine them, how you integrate them when you deploy them, when you get your sanity checks and when you let people run with an idea before squashing it or it being at the risk of squashing it by applying too much logic,
Matt Young:
Think it doesn't take you too long whether you work in design or in product, realize that perfection is unattainable. So you have to get to the point where you're happy with the outcome and think that it will meet your goals. So never and always are two words that we just try not to use because that limits thinking as well. But the unfortunate thing is that if you're a perfectionist, you're kind of stuck without ever being able to achieve that and you're going to have to settle for what's good enough and hope that that can be actually great. One thing that I try to, especially new product managers, good enough can be perfect because you didn't waste time that we could spend bringing other areas of what we do up to a higher level, et cetera. So fine thinking is pretty dangerous in this area where if you're thinking this is the thing that we have to do, it's the one thing that we have to do and it's gotta be perfect and if we roll it out and it's not perfect, we'll never get a second chance. That is a trap and one that it's hard to avoid just the nature of most human beings, but it's important to avoid.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, certainly as a trap and you can go down that rabbit hole and spend far too much time when good enough like you said could be perfect. Now you are someone who's leading the evolution of a product that is for other people who also make products to better understand what their customers think of their efforts. Does that give you some sort of unique and special insight into the challenge that product companies, these B2B SaaS companies are facing, whether it be to achieve or maintain product market fit?
Matt Young:
It does. We are fortunate to get to speak to a lot of different product organizations at companies who are just getting started all the way up to giant multinational enterprise businesses. And I think the one thing that I see across most product organizations is a lack of consistency in how they do their work. Unlike sales where there's a few known ways to sell software products and unlike engineering where you're either going to do Scrum or conbon or one of the agile methodologies, there aren't really agreed upon product management methodologies yet when it comes to how to do research, how to evaluate the potential of features or changes to the product that you might make. And so a lot of people go about that in very different ways and seeing all those different perspectives is really interesting. But our job as developers of software tools for product managers would be a whole lot easier if we could all agree upon a way to do it. But I think it speaks to the nature of the difficulty of the thing. If you're a designer, I think it's easy to articulate how subjective design can be. I think the same holds true for product management. That's why a really nice framework hasn't fallen out and there are bits and pieces that you can use. There are scoring methodologies, there are a bunch of different ways that product managers do their job, but there isn't a cohesive way to glue all that together that people commonly use.
Brendan Jarvis:
So how much of your work then is involved in helping customers to understand how to make sense and how to apply the things that are being captured in UserVoice so that they can make more informed or better, however you want to define that decisions about what they should do and why they should be doing it?
Matt Young:
One of the points of pride that I have in our organization is that people come to us asking questions, not just about how to make sense of your feedback or what you should prioritize or how you should evaluate, but they ask us about product management in general and they ask us about culture after they, they've been a customer of ours for a long time and they develop a good relationship with their customer success manager or they've spoken to our product team cuz we speak to our customers quite a bit. They will start asking us like, Hey, you know guys are chugging along happily. It doesn't seem like you have tension between your success team and your product team. We're seeing some of that. How do you do it? So I kind of view our job as UserVoice as half software solution provider and half armchair psychiatrist for product teams around the globe. That is arguably the more fun part of what we do. Not to say that we have all the answers, we develop our own product and have our own challenges and developing it and all of that stuff, but we get this perspective where we get to see all the different ideas that people are trying and see what piques our interest and try some of those things out.
Brendan Jarvis:
One of the adages about product management is that it's a role without authority, it's an influence without authority type position. What are the most successful ways, maybe internally but you know, spend a lot of time talking with other product people out there, what are some of the ways that you've seen customer feedback be influential in shaping the thinking of executive leadership who sometimes can have very strongly held opinions, not necessarily supported by data as to what the product should be and how it should work?
Matt Young:
I think this is a dramatic oversimplification, but executive leaders are usually in one of two camps. They're either data driven and everything must be justified by reams and reams of data or they are the passionate, I don't know where this idea came from, but I'm going to hold onto it to my dying day cuz I'm right and I'm the leader and there's that. So two different approaches depending on what kind of leadership team you're working with. If you're the data team, well-crafted what people are saying and here's segmentation data around it. I know what they said, I know who they are. I know that they are a valuable customer to us or could be a valuable customer to us because they're in our target market. I followed up with them and asked them and verified this stuff and learned that yes, if you build this it increases the likelihood that we're going to stay with you or increase our spend with you or whatever it might be.
On the flip side, if you've got the passionate leader using the qualitative feedback is the more convincing thing to do. Take the people who are the most impassioned in the way that they explain how much they hate this thing about your product or how much they would jump for joy if you did this thing. And that's the thing that's going to push their button. So a little bit of a personality analysis on whoever holds the keys to your decision making can help you present the information in a way that's probably going to be the most impactful. I do think that the data-driven people are going to make the better decisions because they're looking more objectively at what's going to happen. But that qualitative data, the passion behind what people say, that's the kind of thing that can really rally your individual contributors around a goal.
If you share direct quotes from customers, especially after you release something, we just released a big UI change to our user interface and there were some people who hate it because they were used to what was there before and you move this and I don't like that. And that stings, you read that stuff. Our designer, she's amazing. She bent over backwards, did all the research in the world. You're never going to please all the people. So of course she focuses on that stuff and she's like, what do I do about this? But other people are like, oh my gosh, this is phenomenal. I love how you did this. I love how you did that. H how often do you get a real pat on the back like that from an actual customer when you're an internet away from them? It doesn't happen very often. So if you're privileged to be in the line of fire when that stuff comes in, share the positive stuff, please. I know everyone's going to share the negative stuff because that's what you're going to react to and build plans off of, but it, it's without the positive stuff, it's just demoralizing. So giving that feedback to more passionate emotional leaders is really influential to them. The best businesses I think operate on the data and the segmented stuff to make their
Brendan Jarvis:
Decision. You're a hundred percent that the negative feedback, and particularly for in design and also in product. Again, I don't wanna oversimplify here, but that it can cause people to obsess and to focus on that and to feel down about it. And that having the positive feedback also there to support the changes that have been made is really important in maintaining morale. The UX researchers in particular and organizations that have them can often feel like they're, particularly with evaluative research, the ones that are always the bearers of bad news, all the deficiencies and what it is that we've done been doing. If, I don't know if you have visibility over the entire sentiment across all the feedback that's that's captured in UserVoice. But if you do, I'd be curious to know roughly what the percentage is between positive feedback and negative feedback, feedback that's submitted through the
Matt Young:
Platform. The unfortunate thing about selling the product that we do is that we're selling you a bad news machine. [laugh] people rarely take time outta their day. No, everything's great, love it, keep doing it. People don't do that. They come to tell you how it could be better. And you can see, I can physically see when we demo the product to people, the conflict in their head, this would be great to know, but I don't need that bringing my day down [laugh] like,
Brendan Jarvis:
I don't know. Are you suggesting that ignorance is
Matt Young:
Bliss but it isn't, right? I mean really do you not want to know what's in people's head about the work that you're doing? You have to know what's in their head to be successful with it. As an anecdote one of the pieces of feedback that we got about the UI update that we did, it was by and large neutral to neutral positive, which is what I expected. The first iteration of a major change you make, people are going to be wrestling with the fact that you change something that had been the same for quite a long time,
Brendan Jarvis:
Challenging their competency. They feel like they
Matt Young:
Were good, something they're going to be skeptical about it. So we had some people who loved it. We had some people who hated it, but most people were kind of in the middle and that make a big change. You're going to have to iterate on it right away and take some of that feedback. Two of the critical comments, one was exactly what you want. It was, hey, you moved these filters behind us, slide out menu and now I have to do this extra click to do something that I was used to making these changes right in line all the time. And so it's made it more annoying. I have to click all this stuff. And when you read that you feel badly that you made this person's life a little bit worse. Your best intentions were there, you researched it, et cetera. You beta tested it, you did all this stuff, this didn't come up yet, but you release it broadly and here's someone telling you you did something that made the software worse for them.
You don't feel good, but you have empathy and this was practical feedback that you can act on. It's really nice. Another piece of feedback that we got was someone who just said a mess and our designer reads that, and of course you, you're going to zoom right in on that. I was like, look at these two pieces of feedback. Which one do you care about? Someone thinks it's a mess, you don't know anything about that person. Their point of view. The good thing is we got that feedback through UserVoice. So I knew who it was. I know that they are not in our target market. I know that they use us for a use case that is kind of a shoehorned use case that we don't really support. So it's easy to say, Hey designer, let that roll off your back not from a source.
That really, really matters. It's helpful when we can say that bad feedback is a good thing because it's something that we can act on. Critical feedback is a good thing badly formed feedback is not a good thing for us. That's just a distraction. But when people are critical, the fact that they took the time to tell you something means that they care about what the outcome is. It gives you an entree to go talk to them more. Like they basically invited themselves for an interview. That's really nice. I think when you can speak face to face to them, they realize that there are human beings that really care about the software that they're producing and the products that they produce and they want you to be successful and they're disappointed that they made life a little bit worse for you. So they want to jump to it and figure out what that is that turns into a net positive in the end. It's like, yeah, hey, you made a misstep, but I know that you are trying to make it better. And then in the end you, you're going to come out way ahead. I think there's probably a curve when you do major interface changes where you probably do make things a little bit worse right away, but you need to do that to make them much, much better in the
Brendan Jarvis:
End. So it sounds like what you're saying is there's good bad feedback and bad feedback.
Matt Young:
Yes. There's even bad good feedback. There are people who if you focus on it too much, make you believe that you're doing all the right things when in fact you probably aren't.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you've spoken about the conversation with the designer in this case about those two pieces of feedback and you juxtapose them to her so that you could then talk to what the reasons were behind why one was actually more useful than the other. And through doing that, it sounds like in that role you were helping her separate the signal from the noise. And what this is making me think about is this challenge. You spoke about bad good feedback of actually being able to separate signal from noise when it comes to what we should be doing. So I'm curious to understand from your product leadership position, how do you not overweight the importance of what some customers are saying to you and therefore develop the product down a direction that isn't actually necessarily in the best interest of most people or in the company's best interests. Is this a case of quantifying the demand somehow for a certain direction? Or how do you think about and how do you approach this challenge?
Matt Young:
Yeah, it depends on your business. Not all businesses have enough customers where they get the quantity that quantifying it would actually help. And in those cases, maybe it is appropriate to really lean into what one customer says because they're part of a book of business of 10 big enterprise customers that you've got and they're indicative of what you wanna get. But in most companies that are trying to make their business grow on volume, then quantitative is a good way to go about it. Rolling back. I think one mistake that a lot of companies make is having their product teams, which includes design and engineering in my head be very oriented around solutions and all of their conversations around features they might build changes, they might make interface improvements. That's the way that they talk to their customers, et cetera. And I think most people are aware of jobs to be done and being focused on problems, but developing that discipline of really staying oriented around problems is difficult.
And I think all that goes back to the way that you ask the question in the first place. So if you're getting product feedback through any channel that might be a tool like ours, it might be anecdotally from what you're hearing from your successor support team, you may be watching how a demo goes and how people respond to demos of the software. We try to take all of that information and see if we can detect an overarching problem from it. What is the problem that people are trying to solve? Why are they complaining about the lack of this feature or a missing integration or something being clunky? What are they trying to do? And make sure that we understand that the more that I can get a salesperson while they're doing a demo, to not have the knee-jerk reaction of saying, well, I needed to integrate with this in a very non accusatory way to say, tell me about that.
What do you do with that in your business? How does it help you? Et cetera. So it's not about the feature or the lack of the feature, but really taking that opportunity to get to an understanding of the problem that they're trying to solve. We always take all of the feedback that we get, whether it's through UserVoice or other channels, make sure that we roll it back up into a problem and then go back down and see what of that feedback is relevant to that problem. And then what gaps do we need to fill in by talking to people more about those problems. And we spend a lot of time trying to develop really good interview skills with our team to make sure that we are asking open-ended questions that aren't leading, that let people just talk when they need to. One of our favorite things to do is to put up a prototype or put up a problem statement and just say, tell me what you see, and leave that uncomfortable silence for a really long time until they're just done talking and you'll get them to open up really quickly. If you do stuff like that and people like talking about themselves, it's a good
Brendan Jarvis:
Thing. Yeah, it's often very cathartic for the person who's doing the talking to be invited to have a conversation about something that they obviously care about. Maybe it's a tool, in this case, a product that they're using on a regular basis and being able to just air that sometimes dirty laundry or just to be understood, just to be heard and to feel understood. One of the things that you've spoken about previously is this fear that some organizations have for product teams have about opening the floodgates to those types of conversations and the expectation or the anticipated expectation that might come with that from customers to actually implement what it is that they're telling you they need solved to scratch that itch to solve that problem. So how do you invite customers through as UserVoice? How do you invite them to have these conversations about their problems and maybe to evaluate solutions as well, make them feel valued in that space that you've created, but not go so far as to make them feel like you've committed to follow through to the letter with what it is that they've told you.
Matt Young:
Yeah, it's pretty simple. This is where blunt Matt shines [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
Here we go.
Matt Young:
We just tell people exactly what we do with it. Hey, we're having interviews with about a dozen people. We're trying to determine if this has market viability for us and here are the criteria that we will use to evaluate that. So thank you for telling me how important this is to you, how passionate you are. I've heard from you that this is critical that this for you is a must have. You're the first person I'm speaking to. So I common sense says to me that other people will probably share your opinion, but I don't know that yet. So we're going to go find out and I will let you know what we learned. So you wanna make sure that they feel heard, you wanna make sure that you understood what they said. And I was like, try to play back to them. Here's what you're wrestling with and here's where we go.
And I think over the years people really understand that it's software development. People know how that goes now. People know that every company does not have the resources to do everything that everyone wants. They can't possibly do it. That's becoming an easier and easier conversation. And I think if you are oriented around the customer's success, it lets you in a non snarky way. If someone comes to you and says, well, if you don't do this, I might have to look at competitor X. Then you can say I agree with you. If we don't do this, that might be a better fit. And it's not meant to be that passive aggressive. Well sure, go ahead and use them. It's like, no, you're really trying to figure out what's going to serve their needs the best. And a competitor might be the answer in that case, but that's where having overarching company goals are really important.
We as humans, we wanna make sure that we can solve problems for people, but if people are asking you to do something that's just completely outside the mission, we should be pretty clear that wouldn't be a good use of our time. So we're not going to do that thing. Getting comfortable, being blunt with people about stuff like that is uncomfortable for people. But we talk to product managers more than any other persona. And it's always surprising to me how when the tables are turned, every product manager becomes kind of a typical customer in a lot of cases. Like the well, how come you won't like, I don't know, you're a product manager, how it goes? You shouldn't have to explain this
Brendan Jarvis:
The way that you framed that response to the customer that was demanding that something happened or they might shop around and go elsewhere. That also just reminds me of the loss aversion bias that can kick in when you agree. I mean you have to be willing to lose the customer here, but you are basically saying to them, I agree with you. You should go elsewhere if this doesn't happen. Which my reaction when I was listening to that was, oh no, but now I wait. I don't want to actually have to necessarily follow through with that decision. Yeah. So you're almost playing some interesting psychological experiment there with just how passionately they do want that thing that they're asking for. And that's reminding me of something else that I wanted to ask you about, which is when you are out there and you're actually in the solution space now and you're sitting down and you are doing these evaluations of whether it's a prototype or whatever else that it you're putting in front of customers to try and understand demand and mm-hmm value perhaps willingness to pay those sorts of things. What are you looking at if aside from what people tell you outright, which can sometimes not be reflective of the whole truth? What other cues or signals are you looking for?
Matt Young:
Yeah, we usually ask people at the end, tell me your thoughts about what you saw. They might say something like, this is great. That's not a very good reaction even though the words this is great is there, I'm looking for things like when are you going to release this? Can I be in the beta? How soon can I have it? Will this cost more? Et cetera. If they're not saying stuff like that, they're a passive on the NPS scale at best about the thing.
Brendan Jarvis:
What do you say just on that? What do you say when someone says, will this cost more? Where do you go after that?
Matt Young:
It depends on whether or not we've made any decisions around that. If we have made decisions, we'll be frank and say it will, it's not included in the plan that you've got, but we haven't decided what the price point is and then that opens the opportunity to do the, and I've heard the four question test on pricing. At what price point do you think this is a bargain? At what price point do you think this is fair? At what point is it too expensive and at what point is it so cheap that you question quality? We'll do that with people to try to figure out what they would pay for it. And then obviously you make a note for your sales team that that's an opportunity for them to pursue in the future. When they ask a question like that. In my head, I'm kind of pouncing on the teed up free opportunity that's been put right in front of my face to do additional research that I wasn't necessarily intending to do right in this call right now.
Yeah. Also, I mean I look for body language. I look for if people ask about something else. So if you're there to show off your prototype and they say, yeah I think this is a really good solution and we would use this. Hey, when are you going to do blah, blah blah? They've instantly told you that what you just showed them is dramatically less important to them than the thing that they asked about. So even though the solution might be a good fit for the problem that you're trying to solve, it isn't the most valuable problem to solve
Brendan Jarvis:
For them. That's really interesting and that's quite insightful and it's very easy to get wrapped up in what you are there to show them and mm-hmm feel like you have to fill that space with what it is the original intent was for that space but I really like what you're suggesting there, which is you actually have to leave your ears open for those tangential opportunities to explore things and be willing for a session to be hijacked by something that may be more valuable.
Matt Young:
Yeah, I heard in an early prototype review we did a few years ago that someone said, yeah, it was just hard to keep them on task. I'm like, well, you didn't need to cuz you already got your answer from them. They didn't want it and didn't care about it. That's the wrong person to ask whether the solution is correct because they don't care about the problem. So your time is better spent either asking about what they do care about or moving on to someone else in the end. And yeah, I think that's one of those things that sure you might be not making progress towards the goal that you were trying to make, but free learning opportunity
Brendan Jarvis:
Take it. You spoke about the 80 20 principle earlier and so far as 80% is good enough and might even be perfect. Now this might be a tricky one to quantify, but take this wherever you want to go with it. How do you know when you've reached the 80%? Yep.
Matt Young:
We work in a kind of unusual methodology and product development. We use Shape Up which Basecamp developed. It does this interesting thing. Instead of assigning estimates to projects, you place bets on an appetite for how much you're willing to invest to solve the problem and it's either two weeks or six weeks. There is no in between. There's no five weeks, four weeks, one week, one day. It's either two weeks or six weeks. And the reason for that is you can do something small in two weeks and you can do something big in six weeks. We do our research upfront to decide that it's worth investing either two or six weeks on a thing and then we spend two or six weeks on a thing and then we measure at the end how people react to the thing that we've done. If people have a lot of feedback about it, it tells us two things.
They gave us a lot of feedback so it matters and it's not done cuz there's a lot of feedback. It's not at 80% yet. If you get crickets you might have solved the wrong problem or it might be terrible. It's very rare that you don't wanna make the assumption that you just nailed it. That's usually not the right assumption to make unless you're getting very strong signal, we love this, this is amazing, it's perfect. Usually with that someone will have an idea for an improvement so it's a good way to know that there's some room to improve, but what we usually do is we'll work on it for two weeks. We'll let it sit for two weeks and gather feedback about it and then make a decision like, hey, hey we got a little bit of feedback but it seems like it's good enough. Or Oh we got a lot of feedback, feels like people are passionate, we should invest some more.
So it's kind of this nice cycle of recurring feedback that tells us whether we should invest more or not. A lot of people make the mistake of looking at feedback that's years old or something like that. They're accumulating years and years and years of feedback and thinking that they've got this to-do list that they need to jump from thing to thing to thing. People don't have memories that are that long. Take the topics that are here now and critical and keep working on them until that if the problem is worth solving, it's worth solving until it's at 80% or better. So do that and only then move off onto a thing that makes some product teams really anxious that there's this other backlog of stuff to do. We don't have a backlog, we got rid of the whole thing, deleted it all. Literally all of it gone overnight.
Brendan Jarvis:
How did that feel?
Matt Young:
Fantastic. Oh my God. The psychological impact of that, especially to an engineer who's looking at there's no way we're going to get through this. There's seven years of work to do and that's not going to stop people asking for more. That forces you to really be agile. What is the most valuable thing to solve right now? Not what's the thing from forever ago that we all know that we should get to? Well maybe shouldn't. Things have changed quite a bit over the past couple years. Maybe that problem isn't important anymore.
Brendan Jarvis:
How does agile factor in the way that you're approaching the development of the product?
Matt Young:
I would argue that most teams that think they're being agile are not being agile. They're using a framework that's labeled as agile, but they're not really sticking to the radical required to be truly agile, to build something and be willing to just throw it out cuz it didn't work. Or to recognize that hey yeah, I know that this customer was barking in my ear 12 weeks ago that they were going to churn unless we did this thing. Are they still jumping up and down? Did we check again? So I think that the way that we develop product is the closest to what the goal of Agile is and always has been where a lot of companies have unfortunately taken Scrum or Conbon and just fallen into what really is waterfall. But with two week iterations on it and it's hard to be agile, it's hard to basically it feels like you're operating without a net at some time at some points. But I mean competitors are growing weeds. It's easier than ever to build software. It's easier than ever to design a great interface overnight with the proverbial two people in a garage. Why do you want to saddle yourself down with years of history and take away or give away that advantage to another company? Shouldn't
Brendan Jarvis:
Do it. It seems to me that we sometimes conceive of what we are doing as being of permanent use, a permanent contribution where everything that we are doing in software is so temporal. What we are doing today and maybe in a year's time may not even necessarily be in the product. And being more comfortable with operating without that safety net as you are talking about that seems to me to at least a rationally, seems to me to be a more sensible way to operate in a highly competitive environment, but
Matt Young:
We're also shelf life of software is just ever decreasing. The amount of time that your solution will survive is just going, it's not getting any longer. You're going to have to keep iterating
Brendan Jarvis:
On it. That tie though to backlogs and feeling like you need to work agile in a certain way that's not necessarily in the spirit of how it was conceived with being able to throw something out if it doesn't work. We are scratching at quite deep psychological biases we have here sunk cost fallacy. So in terms of your company culture at UserVoice and the fact that we can all fall victim to this, I know that I certainly have, what does that conversation look like? How do you help your engineers who have committed sometimes maybe hundreds of hours collectively to a certain thing, design product managers that were really passionate about this thing as well. How do you help them to feel better about letting things go?
Matt Young:
We try to celebrate it. That might sound marose maybe, but if you were an engineer and you saw that the sales team was struggling by using a sales methodology that wasn't working or marketing was struggling by advertising to an audience that wasn't responding and that marketing team said, Hey, we dropped this campaign, you'd be cheering. You want the company to be successful, you want the best possible outcome to happen and if you put it in that light, hey, the marketing team doesn't need you to hang on to this software to yeah, we're all sorry, we built it. We're trying to learn where we went wrong in the discovery process. How did we fail to be iterative in this? Also, the bigger the investment, I think the tighter people clinging to it. But if we weren't doing a couple of weeks of work and then testing it and making sure that our goals are being met and all that stuff, then we were just weren't operating in the right way.
So we definitely have a culture of experimentation and in that culture of experimentation, failure needs to be celebrated not, I hate the expression postmortem because it's a very negative way to look at a huge learning opportunity. And so I want people to operate without fear. I want you to try something rather than ring your hands over is it the right thing or is it not the right thing? And if you can build a culture where failure from which you can learn is something that everyone is applauding, then that's a good thing. And if we're making good decisions on the heels of that failure, then I think that's the best way that you can grow quickly as well.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I've got a potentially terrible sailing analogy here. Not being a sailor, I actually have no idea whether or not this
Matt Young:
Is at, well me neither, so this is going to be great,
Brendan Jarvis:
Was speaking to me of scraping the barnacles off the bottom of the boat. That's a way in which you frame your ability to let go of some of the things that they may have accumulated, but they're actually at risk of slowing the ship down. So we do actually need to clean those out on a semi-regular basis and not feel bad about doing that. Like you said, you celebrate that at UserVoice. Now you've said one of the things that most product companies avoid is the notion of removing a feature or a barnacle, in my terrible analogy. Yeah. Everyone is deathly afraid. If just one person uses that feature, they're going to be really annoyed by it, but it's distracting. You have to support it, it's part of your code base. So sun setting features is just as an important part of managing product as adding features. So how do you know when it's time to kill a feature to scrape that barnacle off the bottom of the boat?
Matt Young:
If you can convince yourself to be really objective, then you can set yourself a threshold. You can say whether you're a daily, weekly, or monthly active usage software tool, what is the number at which you open the conversation and what is the number at which it's gone because you don't wanna do it suddenly. And if you give yourself some objective measures and those objective measures should not be, I think in most cases I'm trying to decide if I'm going to say the right thing here or not. I don't think it should be an absolute number. It should be a percentage of your user base. What's the percentage of your user base when it drops below this percentage, we are going to put it on the chopping block and start making plans about its potential sunset and at what point is it going? So if you have those two lines, then you can start getting your teams prepared for, Hey, what happens when we get rid of this?
Who's going to pitch a fit? Who's going to churn? Let's do the analysis of that. We can make exceptions if our largest customer who's an outlier in terms of what they spend, and it would put us into financial trouble, uses that thing all day every day. Sorry, it's not going, that's a fair decision to make. But if we have a customer and that customer's particularly cranky and you're saying to yourself, oh, I'm going to hear from Joe about this thing, he's going to yell at me. That's not a reason to keep this thing around. The costs are incredible support documentation, the tickets that you get, the code base that you have to maintain the tests around it. The fact that someone might come outta the woodwork and start using it that wasn't using it before. And then you're stuck even longer with the thing. So try to give yourself, here's the criteria by which we'll decide whether or not something needs to get into the red zone.
And then that's when we'll have a discussion about it. And so everyone's a little bit more comfortable. We have had time to get used to it, the whole team is aligned around it. And the same way that we're sharing, hey, here's what we're thinking about building, we're also sharing, hey, here's what we're thinking about getting rid of with the whole team. So it's not a surprise, it's not something that people haven't had a chance to get used to and everyone can get more comfortable and then it becomes this breath of fresh air like, oh wow, nice. We don't have to deal with that anymore.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, sounds like a really healthy framing for everyone that's working to understand the addition and also the subtraction of features over time. It's also, you're making me remember when I went through and changed my business and essentially got rid of all the cranky clients that I wasn't having a lot of fun with servicing as the agency when we were doing agency work. And it was such a great feeling when you were able to realize that life is just way too short to be putting up with some certain behaviors and that regardless of the dollar figure, as long as it's not fatal, that it's actually such a boost to team morale and also to your own sanity when you're able to be strong enough to say, actually this isn't working anymore. And take that stance. Yeah.
Matt Young:
We had a deal that we signed not too long ago where we closed the deal and we started onboarding with them. And our onboarding is pretty hands on with people. We try to get people steeped in best practices, help them configure everything, all of that stuff. And on the first call there was a, Hey, you told us that the software would do this, how do we do that? And our software doesn't do that. And so the first thing that we do is have this panic attack of did one of our salespeople promised something we couldn't do. So we went back and looked at all the calls and all that stuff and we didn't do it. And we went and told this person like, Hey, our software doesn't do this. We know that you asked the question during the demo and we kind of pride ourselves on being very transparent about what our tools will and will not do.
And we told you that it doesn't do that. And this person came back and said, well it, it's got to or this just won't work. And so we said, okay, then it won't work. And even though you'd signed an annual contract and even though you'd paid us, we refunded their money and said thank you cuz I don't wanna sign up for when we talked to 'em about renewal in 10 months, just going to be a drag on the morale of the team on God forbid we might even say to ourselves, God, should we just build this to keep them quiet? That would be the wrong thing to do too. Not my job to make the world good purchasers of software. I wanna solve the problems that we solve for the people that's appropriate to solve them for and make sure that they love what we do and love their interactions with us. And if you don't fit into that bucket that's taking away from time, I have to meet those other goals and the time I can spend with the customer base that can see value in the products that we offer.
Brendan Jarvis:
So true. And Matt, you've said something else recently that I've also come to accept as being true. And I'll quote you for one last time today in our conversation said, your life is not your job. To me the most important thing is the positive impact you have on earth. And the time that you were here, most specifically the people around you, what was it that made you realize that,
Matt Young:
Oh, this is maybe getting a little, it strikes a nerve a little bit. I'm a pretty shy person naturally. Although I, being a shy person, being an introvert doesn't mean that I can't speak confidently about the work that we do and all that stuff. But I always viewed work as this safe space for me. It's a place where I'm confident, it's the place where I feel like I deliver value to others around. But there come times when I overinvest my time in work and I realize that I am not being the best friend that I could be using that as a security blanket to get away. And every time that I choose my friends over work or a vacation over work or helping one of my employees ahead of spending time doing something for myself or whatever, I feel better. And that's for a lot of type A people.
And especially in technology, there's just this grind, grind, grind culture. And I just turned 50 last year and you know, realize you're well beyond the midpoint of your life. You have fewer days ahead of you than you do behind you. You better make sure that you get out of your life what you want out of your life. And I like to work and I like the stuff that we work on and I like working with the people that I work with and I like having this conversation with you and talking about it. But there's my dog back here that I like too. And there's the other job I have DJing in a club that I love and I love playing pinball machines and fixing them and restoring them. And I like going on roller coasters and I wanna do all those things, so I wanna do those things too, but I'm never going to be the guy that gets in your way or forces my views on you and all of that stuff. And that's one of the areas where I wish society would take a breath and be a little bit more kind to one another.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a really important message to end on. Don't let the grind grind you down. Right?
Matt Young:
Nah, it's not that important. I mean, how long does software last a year? I mean, if I were to drop dead tomorrow, every professional trace of me would be gone within five years. Just the nature of the business. Not a testament to the quality of work that you do. Should your legacy be a piece of software? No,
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a good question. That's a really good question, Matt. This has been such an enjoyable and wide ranging conversation. I feel like we've certainly, you've given me plenty to think about and hopefully for the people listening to you, also people who are listening, we've given plenty to think about as well. Thank you for sharing your stories and your insights with me today.
Matt Young:
Yeah, this was a load of fun. Thanks very much for having me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, you're most welcome. It was definitely my pleasure Matt. And hopefully it's not the last time that we get to speak. If people wanna find out more about you, about UserVoice and the things that you've been doing, what's the best way for them to do that?
Matt Young:
Yeah, our site is UserVoice.com and whether or not you're interested in our software solutions, we try to share most of what we learn through blog content. I'm not a big believer in like thinly veneered marketing content as thought leadership content. So hopefully you can find some interesting stuff there. We post on LinkedIn, all that stuff too. I would be a huge hypocrite if I didn't also accept feedback about what we have to say or product management in general. So by all means, if you want to chat about product management or anything I've said you violently disagree with or violently agree with [laugh], drop me a line at [email protected] and that's always a welcome reception.
Brendan Jarvis:
Awesome. Thanks Matt. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Matt and UserVoice and all the great things we've spoken about. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe and also pass the podcast along just to maybe one other person who you feel that would get value from these conversations with these leaders at depth. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brenda Jarvis, or there's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.conz, that's thespaceinbetween.co nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Matt Young

Using Customer Feedback to Make Better Decisions

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