Hi!Feedback is a double edged sword. It’s good in the way that it can validate your ideas, spawn new ones, and in general revitalize your energy in regards to what you are working on. However there are times feedback can catch you and completely overwhelm you.
Last night the NY Lean Startup Meetup Group held a Feedback Round-Robin session where we practiced getting feedback on our respective products. Lee Hoffman of Veritocracy (Veri.com) organized this specific event and provided some great insight on how to conduct use test/feedback sessions. For me I wasn’t so much concerned with the feedback I was getting, but I was more focused on how I was conducting my feedback session and learn how to steer less.
Through the week I had been getting feedback from a bunch of great people and also viewing the results of multiple split tests I had done for various sections of the site. Although I was focusing more on how to conduct a feedback session, the results felt a bit overwhelming.
One moment I was elated with the feeling of validation, but quickly the feeling of suffocation started to settle in about what I envisioned lay ahead of me. All the feedback I received quickly added up to multiple pages of “things to do” where a majority of them were labeled as “URGENT”.
I realized I needed to defuse, so I simply went home and “turned off”. No coding, no blipping, maybe some reading or tweeting, but largely no “productive work”. I did spend some time thinking about the feeling of suffocation and what I could do to change that because my list wasn’t going to go away, but I didn’t do anything about it since I realized I wasn’t in the state of mind to do anything productive.
When I woke up this morning I realized I could look at my “To Do” list as something other then a PM styled task list. I looked at it as small fragments of proposed solutions to problems I am trying to solve. So instead I decided to make a smaller list that identified and grouped the user problem I am trying to solve.
I then ignored the original task list and wrote down next to each problem how I propose to solve that problem. This felt a lot more manageable and helped me align my product vision to the problems I am trying to solve.
