June 1, 2023
Internal Feedback Tool
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Managing a product is a challenging task and releasing anything without tapping into user feedback is a bold and risky move. As product managers, we always keep our customers in mind when collecting feedback. But there’s another important demographic to listen to - your own team members.
Internal team feedback can be massively helpful when prioritizing and building new features for your tool. They’re the ones interacting with the product daily, using it often to the point of breaking it. And before you start looking for any user feedback tools, let’s show you how internal feedback is collected - and how FeedBear can help.
What is an internal feedback tool?
An internal feedback tool is a software that allows different departments and employees in your team to give feedback about your product. Using an internal feedback tool, they can leave qualitative and quantitive feedback about their experience with the product.
In most cases, you won’t find a dedicated internal feedback tool. Usually, it’s a general tool for customer feedback that can be adapted and used internally, with more or less success. One such tool is FeedBear, which can be used for your customers and your own team just as easily and successfully. But more on that in a minute - let’s answer an important question first.
How do I collect internal feedback?
Getting product feedback from your customers isn’t as difficult as it seems. There are different ways to get started with the practice, and for most of them, you don’t have to start using a completely new tool.
Using internal communication tools, e.g. Slack. It’s super easy to create a new Slack channel just for product feedback and leave it open for the entire company. It’s easy, quick, and transparent. The downside - you don’t have a way to categorize or prioritize the feedback.
Using email. It’s pretty simple - once an employee has some feedback about the product, they send an email to a dedicated inbox. Simple and cheap but you’ll have to find a way to sort through it. Unless you’re a Gmail wiz or have a dedicated email plugin, this can be a chore.
Using project management tools. If you’re already using a PM tool such as Asana, Jira or Trello, you can create a separate board for internal feedback. This is a great way to get started but you’ll quickly find out that it’s lacking some key features, such as voting on feedback and turning bits of feedback into a product roadmap.
Using FeedBear. With our tool, you can create a private, internal feedback board where your employees can add specific feedback and vote on the features they want the most. They can create feedback entries and vote anonymously, which can be incredibly motivating for the more introverted crowds. In the end, you can create an internal product roadmap to keep your entire team in the loop about what’s coming next.
In short, there are some good ways to capture feedback internally but the best way is to use a dedicated feedback tool like FeedBear. The best of all is that you can also use it for customer feedback, so you get two great tools for the price of one.
Benefits of using an internal feedback tool
It may sound like another complex addition to your product tech stack, but there are actually quite a few perks to using a tool for internal feedback. Here are the most important ones.
Gets everyone on the same page. It will give your employees the chance to listen to the entire company’s feedback on a feature that you’re building. Getting information from the developers about the latest sprint can make a world of difference to a marketer. In short, everyone gets the perspective of all the departments in the company - not just their own.
Embrace a holistic approach to product development. Developing a product means taking constructive feedback from all stakeholders. Your employees’ voices count just as much as your users’ - if not even more in some cases.
Gets a deeper level of understanding of your customers’ needs. Your internal team uses a different set of features compared to your customers. Another difference is that they can much better explain why they need a certain feature and why the current setup is lacking for them.
Allows you to correct mistakes on the go. If you’re launching a new feature, it can take months from the first line of code until it makes it to the customers. Collecting feedback internally means testing on the go so your team can spot bugs and fix them way ahead of the official launch date.
FeedBear internal feedback features - 3 features you need to know
With FeedBear as your internal feedback tool, you get all the cool features that your customers can use. This includes feedback boards, voting, product roadmaps, custom domains and more. However, there are some cool features that you need to be aware of so you can “sell” FeedBear to your team.
Navigation: how to group feedback and organize navigation
The way you structure your internal feedback board depends entirely on what your goals are and how you want to accomplish them. However, this is the default layout that you get when you start a feedback board - which is the first screen you see in FeedBear, where people submit ideas:
- Needs Your Opinion
- Planned
- In Progress
These are the 3 main columns to start from, and you can add cards under each one. Note that you can customize these statuses to anything you wish.
Voting on a feature is as easy as clicking a + icon, so you get an accurate representation of your team’s priorities.
Feedback thread layout: my feedback request as one thread of messages
One of the biggest advantages of FeedBear is that the feedback that you get is perfectly structured. Instead of a random string of messages, each entry has its own card.
Within that card, your employees can leave messages which are sorted in the order of creation. But that’s not all - the messages are threaded so you can see all the replies on a specific comment. It’s a super-easy way to organize all the communication around a specific piece of feedback.
Anonymity: the option to send feedback anonymously
Using FeedBear, your employees have the option to add to your internal feedback board anonymously. When creating a new entry in your feedback board, your employees can do so anonymously. This will eliminate any fear of backlash from their coworkers and give room for constructive feedback.
FeedBear - your new best friend for collecting feedback internally
There are quite a few ways to collect and manage feedback internally. FeedBear is the best choice if you’re looking for a single app that can be used both for your customers and your own team.
You can try it free for 14 days and together with your team, find out why collecting feedback internally matters and how much of an impact it can make on your product development.
And when you’re ready to get serious about managing feedback internally, you can opt for the paid plan which gives you ALL the features at a flat $49 per month. Sign up today to get started!
