I just realize that everyone is just a product of himself. To make your product the best in the market, you have to actively seek feedback and improve yourself continuously.
#1. NPS Score.
A month ago, I talked to a colleague from the Customer Success team. He said our NPS score is going down recently and he’s struggling to fix it. I was like, what the hell is the NPS score?
It turns out the NPS score, which is the abbreviation for Net Promoter Score, is an index that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others.
This score going down means you’re doing something wrong with your product, the customers are not satisfied and they’re leaving you. This NPS score is crucial for any business.
#2. The Feedback Loop.
When you build a product, it’s important to get feedback from your customers about what is great and what needs improvement. After that, you fix what needs to be fixed and keep up the features that make your customers happy. Then you continue getting feedback from your customers again.
This is called the Feedback Loop.
Have you noticed that before you leave the restaurant, they often ask you if there is anything that they could have done to improve the service you received?
Does your company have a monthly happiness survey which asks you how are you happy at work, so that they can help you have a better working environment?
After purchasing a product, do the seller ask you if their product meets your needs?
They’re getting your feedback to improve their products and services. They are executing step 1 of the Feedback Loop. Then they will analyze that feedback, take action, and make their products or services better.
#3. I didn’t get promoted the last time.
Looking back, I wish I was aware of the importance of feedback.
Every company has performance reviews once or twice a year. You receive many reviews from your peers and managers, which decide if you will be promoted or not.
If you’re lucky to have good managers and peers, they would have already given you feedback while you’re working together during the year. With their feedback, you would have already been updated and improved. Now your review will have full of recognition, achievement, and complements. You’re about to get promoted.
However, not everyone is that lucky. Most managers are bad. You’re most likely not receiving any feedback from your colleagues because they don’t care about you. Maybe they care, but they would still hesitate because giving feedback is hard and they don’t want to hurt you.
You have to actively ask for feedback.
You are your own product. Customers don’t give you honest feedback unless you ask them actively and sincerely.
You have to do the Feedback Loop. You have to seek feedback. You have to analyze it. You have to take action and make a better version of yourself.
#4. Build my personal feedback tool.
Better late than never, I started creating a survey and send it to my coworkers. I built a form with Google Form, which asks “On a rate from 0 to 10, how is my performance this month?”. It was exactly like the NPS survey.
Then I used Slackbot to schedule it to send to my colleagues at the end of every month. All the responses are organized into a Google Sheet, where I can analyze and build charts to have a better understanding of my performance over time.
The result was quite good. Some of my colleagues started doing it too. They also collected feedback from their friends and even their wives.
But soon we feel that the way we do is quite manual and there’s something that cannot be done with it. For instance, we cannot send a recurring survey for our friends or wives since they don’t use Slack. There must be an app that helps to collect personal feedback somewhere on the internet.
I tried searching on Google, ProductHunt, and BetaList to see if anyone already built an app like that but all I found are apps for collecting customer feedback, not personal feedback. So I decided to create one and named it LacBee. It has all the features you would need and some advanced features like anonymous follow-up conversations and bullying prevention.
It’s currently in beta. If you’re interested, subscribe to be the beta testers here or leave a comment below and you will be the first users to try the app. I appreciate your time and would like to offer you 1 YEAR OF FREE UNLIMITED usage of the LacBee app in exchange for your valuable contribution.
It’s 2021, the world is changing crazily every day. You have to change fast to adapt to it. You do it by getting feedback, improve yourself and become a better product.
Be disciplined. Good luck!
P/s: Please give me feedback for this story. Thank you so much!
