Rainbird hosts 'fly-in' events, bringing customer groups (like architects or contractors) to its headquarters. These events include an 'innovation lab' where product managers showcase early-stage concepts under NDA. This institutionalizes customer feedback, making it a predictable and recurring part of the development process.
Related Insights
Instead of guarding prototypes, build a library of high-fidelity, interactive demos and give sales and customer success teams free reign to show them to customers. This democratizes the feedback process, accelerates validation, and eliminates the engineering burden of creating one-off sales demos.
Embed engineers directly with customers to hear feedback and ship solutions, often on the same day. This radical structure eliminates layers of communication (Product Managers, Customer Success) and scales the 'founder energy' of talking to users and immediately building what they need.
Instead of treating consulting and product as separate, CNX uses feedback from services projects to inform new features. A requested customization is often built directly into the core Valence product, benefiting all customers and creating a tight feedback loop.
The trust you've built with current customers allows them to share raw industry insights and market intelligence that prospects won't. This feedback loop is invaluable for product development, competitive strategy, and identifying new opportunities.
For 10 years, Red Wing has maintained "The Crew," a consistent group of 20 loyalist customers. They connect monthly via calls with product and marketing teams, providing ruthless and authentic feedback that directly shapes strategy, far beyond what traditional focus groups can offer.
For its new B2B irrigation product, Rainbird briefs specifiers like landscape architects 3-4 months before launch. This 'rolling thunder' approach ensures the product is already designed into future projects when it becomes available, creating immediate demand and bypassing the typical slow ramp-up period.
Your audience will dictate your product roadmap if you listen. Porterfield's evolution was a direct response to customer feedback. They finished her webinar course and asked what to sell. They finished her product course and asked how to market it. The path to her flagship product was paved with their questions.
Rainbird live-streamed customer focus groups back to its engineering team. This allowed engineers to hear feedback directly, eliminating skepticism and creating immediate alignment on necessary design changes without requiring them to travel.
Gamma compresses the product development cycle into a single day. They generate an idea in the morning, build a functional prototype, and use platforms like Voice Panel to run user research studies in the afternoon, yielding actionable feedback by evening. This operationalizes rapid, pre-build validation.
Even at SpaceX, many engineers first heard from customers during a company all-hands. This feedback revealed the setup process was a huge pain point, leading to a dedicated team creating first-party mounting options. This shows that fundamental user research is critical even for highly technical, 'hard tech' products.
