How to respond to reviews about your product?

Over the last few years I was completely convinced that being as close as possible to the users (due to Minimum Valuable Product — MVP, feedback mechanisms, etc.), greatly increase the chances of product success.

However, once you have a decent user base, you are faced with another problem — what to do with all these reviews? Proposals that you get, you start to quickly outpace your ability to respond to them, and obviously you don't need to respond to all of them whatsoever.

Of course I have no panacea to this problem, but I want to say that the model is aimed at meeting the proposals that received the most votes, and work on them in that order, may not be the best solution for any situation. Should be taken into consideration:

Small changes can cause big changes. At my last company we performed tests on the significance of changing just one word and some changes have led to incredible increases in our funnel.

Small changes lead to big changes, are often not obvious. That is, a large number of iterations, similar to mountain climbing, before you get caught good luck.

Adding new features can lead to chaos in the interface.

Polished product is a non-linear effect. If you achieve a perfect UX, it will cause a viral effect.

In other words, you are often faced with a real choice, taking into account that your resources are limited: you can go the way described by saying "for two hares chase — you will not catch any" (creating many small viable features, about which you ask users); or you can go the path of working on one or several features.

Both strategies are definitely viable (despite the negative connotation of the saying), as evidenced by numerous success stories. And I believe there are different situations when either one or other strategy is more justified.

However, I have a hunch that many startups fall into the first category, almost by accident, because they lack the will, desire, vision, perseverance or something else to seriously take up work and to go the second way. That is, they do not make informed choices, and ultimately this decision may not be the best.

The reason is that work on features, about which you ask people, the path of least resistance. Not the fulfillment — it requires that you consciously ignore (or at least politely defer) a large number of obvious queries about the features and diligently to concentrate on things that seem much smaller and to the untrained eye is irrelevant.

And this is the key. Are these small things really are insignificant or they are part of a strategic vision of where you need to be with a really polished product. It is often difficult to say exactly, sometimes it is just a probability bet. You really never know if I can achieve the ideal of experience (*user experience) yet it will not succeed.

It is an illogical strategy, and often requires work on features that no one will even notice, but will make them experienc more smooth; or on a series of "advanced" features, each of which will be useful 5% of your users, but the overall series of features will be useful to all, which means almost everyone got smoother experienc.

This strategy is as illogical as it seems, so harder to compete with other companies. You don't add more features to General list. But it is not easy to understand that small changes are much more difficult to copy, since you made a bunch of small decisions that others will not be able to implement the same method, and thus, will end up with very different results the funnel.
Coming back to the product reviews, you should not ignore the "one" — be it a suggestion or comment — only by the fact that it is one of many. Perhaps it is a real piece of the puzzle.

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Article based on information from habrahabr.ru