1. Be prepared to ditch your roadmap

There’s a lot of thinking out there on when, how, and what kind of product roadmaps can be useful for different types of companies. If you work at a company that insists on detailed, quarterly product roadmaps, this is a great opportunity to revisit that. Perhaps you rearrange things. Perhaps you de-scope a feature so you can get the core of it out, or perhaps you ditch it all and test to replace it. Just remember, it’s easy to move with the current, but that won’t always bring you to shore.

But if you think you are going to send this out to all of your customers, think again. Does your customer survey actually pertain to all of your customers or just a portion of them? For instance, if your survey is about your latest product, make sure you don’t target customers who have not used it.

Segment your customer list to only include those customers who have used this product. This will give you a better response rate and better data (and keep you from looking foolish in your customer’s eyes).

If you are not able to segment your list (or even if you are), use screening questions at the beginning of your survey to disqualify customers who the survey does not pertain to. Disqualifying logic will exit a respondent from the survey if they don’t meet your criteria. This will keep you from wasting their time and skewing your data.

If you are using an email campaign to distribute your survey, the From Name and Subject Line are key factors to a higher open rate. For more details about best practices for online survey invitations be sure to read this article, Building Better online Survey Email Invitations.

Take the time to set up a reminder several days following the initial survey invite. It will improve your overall response rate.

2. Use multiple test techniques

The traffic your product is receiving has likely changed and may not currently reflect your target market. So how do you improve without statistical significance? Triangulate! Internally, at Small Improvements, a B2B HR tech company, I call these “signals.” In essence, it’s about combining two or more testing techniques to validate a direction. For example, run a survey and a qualitative low-fi prototype test. Or combine virtual customer interviews with value prop landing page tests. Or add a hi-fi prototype qualitative test to an A/B test with low numbers. If both tests point you in the same direction, go forth!

3. Remember your “good enough” principle

Unless you work in a high-security industry (and then, sometimes even if you do), I’ll remind you to follow a good enough policy in your testing work. Remember that the point of testing is to learn. Your test only needs to be good enough to learn what you want to learn. With different restrictions, from limited audiences to limited resources, it’s incredibly important to stay focused on your learning goal and not put unneeded time into pixel perfection or edge cases. This can be an extra hard challenge for y’all with design backgrounds. But if you are testing “right,” you’ll iterate on everything anyway before it’s rolled out broadly. So don’t stress over perfection, stress over gaining confidence! Which leads me to…

4. Test it again and again and again

Remember your basics here. Make incremental investments that match your confidence level. Don’t build shippable, scalable software for a product or feature that regular testing hasn’t validated is worth that investment.

Start small and test the tiniest thing you can to learn if you should pursue an idea. This is where qualitative testing shines. Draw it on paper. Take photos. iLoyal regularly put drawings into UserTesting’s Human Insight Platform to see if an idea warrants more investment. It’s fast, easy, and most importantly, allows us to learn enough to decide if we want to invest more time into it. If we decide to invest more time, we’ll likely use a series of no-code prototype qualitative tests until the results show that we’ve nailed a solution to our defined problem. This saves us time because we build with confidence.

5. Second “first impressions”

Many of your customers might be taking a break from using your product or using it a lot less regularly, now. This is scary, but it also creates a great opportunity to create a second “first impression.” Or to put it another way, while in the short term you may lose the opportunity to delight your customers on a regular basis, in the medium/long term you’ve gained an opportunity to really wow them.

When they come back, will they view your product unchanged, or will they be delighted that it’s so much better than they remember? Take advantage of a returning opportunity to remind your customers why you’re the best.