When 5-star surveys contradicted high product return rates, Microsoft created a prioritization framework. They use an AI model to surface high-quality feedback that is also critically linked to a core business KPI, such as 'cart completion', ensuring that they solve problems with real business impact.
True personalization at scale is not about customizing every touchpoint. Microsoft's strategy is to focus AI models on optimizing for high-intent customer actions, such as 'add to cart'. This ensures that personalization efforts are tied directly to measurable business impact instead of creating noise.
After running a survey, feed the raw results file and your original list of hypotheses into an AI model. It can perform an initial pass to validate or disprove each hypothesis, providing a confidence score and flagging the most interesting findings, which massively accelerates the analysis phase.
True problem agreement isn't a prospect's excitement; it's their explicit acknowledgment of an issue that matters to the organization. Move beyond sentiment by using data, process audits, or reports to quantify the problem's existence and scale, turning a vague feeling into an undeniable business case.
To manage immense feedback volume, Microsoft applies AI to identify high-quality, specific, and actionable comments from over 4 million annual submissions. This allows their team to bypass low-quality noise and focus resources on implementing changes that directly improve the customer experience.
To avoid getting lost in data, PMs should first define the decision they need to make (e.g., improve ROI, increase usability). This goal then dictates which data to gather and from whom. Patterns should be grouped by desired user outcomes, not feature requests, creating a more strategic path to delivery.
Instead of manually sifting through overwhelming survey responses, input the raw data into an AI model. You can prompt it to identify distinct customer segments and generate detailed avatars—complete with pain points and desires—for each of your specific offers.
Raw customer feedback is noise. To make it actionable for Product, organize it along two dimensions: impact and frequency. This simple framework separates signal from noise, distinguishing high-priority, high-impact issues from niche requests and creating a clear basis for roadmap decisions.
Personalization often begins as an isolated experiment. Microsoft successfully integrated it into their core operations by using AI to manage the complexity. This transformed personalization from a side project managed by a few people into an embedded, company-wide capability driving measurable results.
Provide an AI your primary business outcome (e.g., increase sales deals 20%) and a list of all current marketing activities. Ask it to recommend where to focus and what to cut. This creates an objective, data-driven thought partner to overcome founder or sales team bias and align the team on impact.
AI can move from diagnosis to prescription. After identifying an underperforming metric (e.g., low close rate in a city), it can generate a specific action plan, frame suggestions by effort and impact, and even calculate the projected revenue impact of reaching the performance benchmark.