Welcome to Mise en place, an interview series where we explore the ingredients that make up Rainbow’s main dish–BOP for restaurants. 

Today Morgan, Rainbow’s Marketing Manager, chats with Kelsey, Principal Product Manager, about continuous user feedback in Part I of a two part series.

Morgan: You’ve mentioned how passionate you are about continuous user feedback. What is continuous user feedback?

Kelsey: Continuous user feedback is the weekly habit of customer interviews, as evangelized by Teresa Torres. It helps us connect what we’re learning from our research activities with day-to-day product decisions.

Morgan: Was there a moment where you realized how necessary continuous user feedback was?

Kelsey: I started my career at one of Canada’s “Big Five” in the banking industry. Working there gave me the opportunity to gain exposure to different financial services and importantly, learn to deliver them at scale.

In 2015, I decided to pivot into technology. I joined an early stage fintech start-up as their first Product Manager and was immediately faced with a new challenge – taking a product from pre-launch through to problem/solution fit.

By embedding weekly customer interviews into my product practice, I was able to ask open-ended questions and explore what I didn’t know, I didn’t know – helping me both learn about users’ goals, needs, and context at the time as well as learn a critical skill for being an effective product manager.

M: Can you share an example from your experience where continuous user feedback or lack thereof had a significant impact on the success or failure of a project you managed?

K: Continuous user feedback is especially important during the early stages of a product or company because it’s critical  to optimize for speed, learning and focus, as taught by Ash Maurya in his book, Running Lean.

If you’re going fast, staying focused, but not learning, you’re expending a lot of energy unproductively.

Continuous interviews are one of the simplest things we can do to test a hypothesis – and it doesn’t require any code.

In the past, I’ve found this tool incredibly helpful for paring back an idea to the smallest thing possible to learn – whether that be narrowing the initial target customer, reducing variations from many to few, or something else.

Next week, on Part II, Kelsey shares how she applies continuous feedback at Rainbow, balancing feedback, advice for Project Managers, and more. Stay tuned!