Hey, I’m relatively new to the role & am the first PM at the company, so I am setting up the structures as well as running them. There has never been any customer engagement & I’ve started doing customer interviews, which is absolutely awesome & revealing so much! But I’m finding it hard to remember to follow up efficiently or schedule future contact at a regular cadence to keep the conversation going. It’s all a bit hit & miss & disorganized! Any advice on tools or techniques to use to help this would be very much appreciated 
11 Likes
I tend to go with a goal and hence related questions to customer interviews. I also use otter.ai to record and transcribe interviews. That way I am not distracted by note taking plus it’s so easy to go through the transcript and highlight information later (Otter is a awesome). Then I would create categories of information for example - User goals, user challenges, user wishes. Overtime patterns will emerge that can become ideas. Add those ideas to idea backlog that will eventually be reviewed for product roadmap.
11 Likes
@DonovanOkang, Ah! spent the day praising Otter! Thanks for that, it’s awesome!
10 Likes
With the GDPR and other high-privacy user concerns in my segment of the market, I pushed through the formal initiative that if we don’t have a wide disclaimer of privacy policy acceptance by participants, we don’t send interviews to transcription services, automated or not, doing them internally instead. We also provide a detailed disclaimer as to how we don’t link any personally identifiable information to the interview data and delete the audio after doing the transcript.
Something to consider, it’s not just Facebook that loses confidential files.
10 Likes
Very valid points! We as a company, are going very secure, so that’s a great angle to remember! Thanks 
9 Likes
Is most of the stuff covered helpful to you?
8 Likes
@AhmadBashir, not necessarily. Context helps hence the notes but only somethings go in idea backlog. More than idea backlog, these conversations paint good picture of the user and customer, which overtime helps build the intuition.
8 Likes
Setup a clear process you follow. For example, interview > notes > review and key learnings > decisions. Productboard can help you capture those notes and the insights from them but sounds like your issue is more of a process one. I’ve done this simply with a calendar for interviews and tasks/reminders for followup. Calendar you can book regular times or recurring meetings and keeps it easy. You can also farm some of this out to an assistant or member of your team to help.
7 Likes
@FelipeRibeiro, Hey thanks, yeah, I’m using ProductBoard to get the insights out but I’m maybe not using it enough to store customer information like this. I agree, it’s a process thing, maybe more a CRM thing that I need, that will remind me to book follow ups, or set a cadence of contact…not quite sure! Coming from SWE, I’m not used to managing so many different threads of things!
7 Likes
Anytime @NatalieSmith. It can store customer information as part of each note — company, user, email. For sure lots happening.
One approach might be to use Productboard insights tab in the feature board to see and download the list of customers that have related notes. Then reach out to them over discovery and solution efforts, then use portal to keep them up to date on progress.
Then you can focus on who best to talk to vs. a cycle of feeling like you need to speak to the same people over and over.
7 Likes
That’s really great advice, thanks so much! We haven’t made use of the portal yet at all - still getting to grips with all that productboard can do!
7 Likes
Hey, @Felipe, is there a particularly strong tutorial or class for Productboard that you’d recommend? My company doesn’t use it, and I’d like to have a deep understanding of it to be able to make a knowledgeable recommendation.
7 Likes
@JesusRojas, check out on-demand and live clinics here: Productboard Academy as well as support materials: https://support.productboard.com/
And of course, a trial can get you in and using it as well. Hope that helps.
6 Likes
Otter is awesome! But also derive insights out of each interview right after you do that. Add that as a summary on whatever your document repository of choice is teams, confluence, google docs etc.
We run a large excel backlog of customer problems that is derived out of that insight summary
6 Likes
@RohitKumar, That’s great advice, thanks. It’s amazing how quickly stuff falls out of your head & gets forgotten!
5 Likes
Productboard might be worth checking out.
May be more than what you’re looking for though.
5 Likes
@RisaButler, We’ve got ProductBoard & I use it for tracking to insights, but not for the full interview data & follow-ups or tracking of these interviews. Am I missing something that ProductBoard already does??
4 Likes
You could easily put the full interview data into Productboard (and they have integrations with tools like Gong if you use them to record interviews), then extract insights. But you’re not missing anything that would let you track and schedule follow-ups. We share that with the PB support team though, could be an interesting idea.
4 Likes
Dovetail
3 Likes
@MariaWilson, Whoa, that’s awesome! 
Just had a quick look on the site, does it have calendar syncing or reminders for follow-ups?
2 Likes