Product Listening: How to turn raw feedback into real product influence
Originally published in Product Marketing Alliance on February 23, 2026. Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.
Picture this: You’ve got the opportunity to gather product feedback as a product marketer. How do you make it valuable without the whole exercise devolving into a stream of customer feature requests?
I’ll share an A to Z product listening guide that walks you through the absolute essential steps from initial formulation of the effort to the final presentation of insights that’s worked wonders for me. I fine-tuned this process over the years.
Let’s unpack what the barebones yet effective listening tour that punches above its weight looks like in 5 steps.
1 / Get crystal clear on the north star
Here’s where you address the WHY and the WHO.
Start by listing the project goals before you go any further. Why do you want to undertake this exercise, which usually lasts 4 to 6 weeks? You’ll have to get your reasons straight and secure the approval of your team leaders. Some of the common reasons why you want to go on a product listening tour include,
Product Feedback
It’s your chance to identify gaps in the product - ex: use cases, features. An opportunity to dive into unmet needs and find areas of improvement, especially when the same issues keep popping up consistently.
Roadmap Prioritization
You may be well on your way to making your roadmap for the upcoming quarters a reality. This tour lets you validate or invalidate what you have on the roadmap and uncover new opportunities to prioritize depending on what you find.
Relationship Building
It’s never a good idea to chase after your customers only when you want them to renew. Keep those ties warm even during the non-renewal months. Product listening tours offer product folks an opportunity to get closer to users.
Now to the WHO.
Who should serve as the primary audience for product feedback? Note that this doesn’t have to be a monolithic audience. You can create a cross-section of stakeholders you can reach out to with completely different characteristics. But ensure that you have a method to the madness. For example, are you looking at your top 20 merchants, partners, or agencies? Figure out your criteria. Again, it can be a mix of stakeholders.
Once you’re done with that, you need to carve out specific contacts within each customer/stakeholder. For product feedback, you’re talking to users, and hopefully you have at least one or two people identified at each company. Lean on your sales reps, customer success managers, solution architects, partner managers, among others, to find the appropriate people. Collect basic details on their role, location, email, current engagement terms, and recent product activity.
2 / Draw the boundaries for the endeavor
WHEN and WHERE will this qualitative research occur? That’s the question you want to answer in this step. Since you’ll likely have to execute within a compressed window and reach people in different time zones, I’d say go with online interviews to remove any complexity. Opt for 30-min online interviews to make it easy for anyone to participate.
One side tangent: where possible, as your budget permits, I’d suggest scheduling a few in-person conversations with customers, assuming you can find them in clusters in specific cities. You’d want to aim for 1-hour interviews in this scenario. Finally, in the off-chance that you’re unable to talk to your preferred people in certain companies, you can opt for async feedback via survey using the same questions that we’ll talk about in the next step.
Before we jump to it, you might be thinking about how many interviews would be ideal for each customer type. There’s a ton of research on interview sample size. I subscribe to the rule of thumb that 8 to 10 interviews uncover 70 to 80% of what you need to know on any topic. See “The Voice of the Customer” paper to understand the thought process. You’re bound to see clear trends emerge from these many interviews. Feel free to schedule additional interviews if that’s not the case.
3 / Shape the questions and ‘officially’ recruit the folks
It’s one thing to find time in your schedule for feedback, but a whole different ballgame to execute it right. The remaining steps cover this execution process, starting with the type of questions (WHAT) you have to ask.
The process I use to hone in on the vital questions is called the backward market research exercise. It’s a simplified process to let you ask the least number of questions to get to the answers that help you make the decisions you care about. You can read more about it here, but the following is a rundown of the major steps.
STEP 1
Start with the decisions you want to make: What will the information help me do? How can I apply these results?
STEP 2
Figure out the right, minimum number of data points to make those decisions.
STEP 3
Build the appropriate questions to uncover those data points.
STEP 4
Use the most effective sources to answer those questions.
You don’t have to worry about STEP 4 in our current scenario, since it’s all interviews, which also brings us to the next action: recruitment. You’d approach recruitment differently if you met the contact in person, but, as established earlier, this write-up will focus strictly on online interviews.
A couple of caveats for the email you want to send out.
Reach out to the sales/partner/account rep first if there’s one for the company where your contact works. Validate any sort of communication with them first. After that, what matters are a clear subject line that includes your company and team name, an email message that’s not too long and indicates the goal of the project, and, finally, a simple booking link before you sign off, so every contact can pick a time slot that works for them. Keep the booking link active for about 2 weeks while you send these emails with options for days spanning the duration of this effort. Close the link after that!
4 / Build an interview workflow that’s sustainable
Let’s now focus on the HOW of conducting online interviews here and think through everything you do before the interview (pre-interview) and during the interview.
Pre-Interview
Hopefully, with all the scheduling efforts from earlier, you’re able to get the right folks to the interview. You may, in certain situations, end up with multiple folks from each company on the same call, and that’s fine.
The pre-interview work is mostly about learning about the company and each interviewee. At a high level, what’s their business model, current state of business, their experience with your offerings, specific needs, use cases involving your product, engagement history, thorny issues, topics to avoid, standout projects, etc. Try reflecting on what pieces of the roadmap you want to share with them and how you want to share them. You may want to disclose parts of your roadmap or share it in full for feedback. Either way, make a call.
Finally, consider NDAs and related concerns if you’re worried the roadmap may spill beyond this conversation. Be clear right from the get-go that it’s confidential and can only remain within this interview.
Actual Interview
You’ve got one more chance to tweak your questions from the backward marketing exercise. Make it specific to each company/interviewee, knowing what you know about their experience with your product so far. These interviews are not meant to be rigid. Consider these questions a map, and while you get through them, balance organic feedback with targeted follow-ups as applicable.
Suggest that at least one of your PMs join the interview to give themselves another option for hearing the ‘voice’ of the user and buyer. The PMs may be handy for answering any unplanned technical questions you get from the customer. The same goes for the customer success lead. If there’s a dedicated lead for the company, get them to join the call to further nurture their partnership with the customer.
Onto some edge cases.
What if the interviewee has way too many questions for the PMs/PM team? Schedule a separate follow-up deep dive to cover those topics. Don’t derail this conversation. Stick to the goals. What if the interview has gone through multiple rounds of reschedules? You may entertain async feedback by giving interviewees the questions ahead of time and letting them offer detailed responses.
On Interview Notes
Record EVERYTHING, including details like the names and roles of the attendees. Obviously, inform the interviewees that you’ll record it strictly for internal analysis and that it won’t be public. Record the video of the call and enable the transcription option. Incorporate the AI notes option (ex: Gemini in Google Meet, Otter, etc.) You’ll thank yourself later during the analysis. The AI notes also let you get a quick TL;DR summary for every interview. Recording the video of the call lets you capture anything your interviewee shares about specific use cases or issues they encounter with your product.
Even if you let AI take notes, I strongly suggest you write down your OWN NOTES too. I know. I know. It sounds like a lot of work, but you have much more context for the conversation. There may have been nuances in the conversation that you're privy to. Capture those too. Figure out your own structured note-taking process, specific abbreviations for your thoughts, follow-up action items, follow-up questions within the call, certain quotes, points of emphasis, and more.
5 / Analyze the results deeply and distribute regularly
Think of this post-interview analysis and distribution step as a combination of four major activities: collecting all your key artifacts, conducting the analysis, deriving final insights, and evangelizing those insights.
On Artifacts
Be diligent about collecting artifacts after every single interview. At a minimum, try to collect these for every interview: detailed transcript, video of the interview, evidence (where applicable) on product issues, comments, shared items from the interviewees, executive summary of the interview, and feedback from the interview aggregated into themes, inclusive of relevant quotes from every attendee.
On Analysis & Presenting Insights
I can write a separate essay on analysis methods, and you can expect one sometime in the near future. In the meantime, consider a top-down and bottom-up approach. Aggregate all interviews first to analyze themes across them. And then look at each interview individually to do the same. What are the common themes vs. outliers? Analyze overall responses to each question.
Let’s talk briefly about structuring insights. You’ll find out what works for your team. But here’s my suggestion on how to approach it. You want to touch on 3 areas: top 5 themes, feature request lists, and finally, PMM action items.
The top 3-5 themes are fairly self-explanatory. What are the top 3 to 5 themes (for ex) that you’ve uncovered across all the interviews? Add context and depth as you see fit. Call out specific quotes that further add context to each theme.
Moving to feature request lists. Here’s an area where AI and some due diligence will come in handy. What are the different feature requests you heard about during your interviews, and can you classify them into themes or product areas? The classification also helps you assign product owners for the eventual feature prioritization and development effort. As always, include quotes to support these feature requests.
It’s been all about the product team (PMs) so far. I also want you to focus on what PMM can do with this treasure trove of insights into gaps, issues, and behaviors. Here’s an area where I want you to shift your thinking. Look at product marketing as the discipline of shaping behavior: not just generating awareness or usage, but identifying and resolving what stops someone from taking action. It’s easy to jump to tactics, but ground your work in behavioral science frameworks (see: COM-B model) and layer it into the PMM workflow. Ask yourself, keeping in mind the audience of interest,
QUESTION 1
What’s the behavior to change?
QUESTION 2
A behavior won't change if any of the following are weak or missing: capability, opportunity, or motivation.
Capability = Can they take the action?
Opportunity = Can they access the action?
Motivation = Do they want to take action?
QUESTION 3
What does it impact on your end? (think KPIs, drivers, outcomes)
QUESTION 4
What are your prioritized (PMM) tactics in light of all these?
That shift helps you design more focused and creative PMM tactics, whether it’s getting developers to adopt a new API or getting partners through a migration. It makes the PMM work more strategic, more diagnostic, and more impactful.
On Distribution
This one’s CRUCIAL: Find how insights spread across your teams. It’s pointless to do all this great work and not let it shine for others to build on it and do their own great work. Figure out how you can squeeze these insights into existing rituals. Can it be part of all hands? Can it be highlighted by specific leaders in Slack channels? Can you record a video to share with folks while you evangelize other artifacts alongside it? Do everything you can to make the noise and draw attention to these valuable insights. One final touch: reach out individually to team leads and members to share your insights and make sure they didn’t miss it!
A few additional thoughts…
You have the opportunity to create a reinforcing loop that begins with a listening tour at the start of every calendar year. You can use it to reflect on the past year (ex: product feedback, PMM initiatives) and shape the year ahead (new initiatives, product roadmap). Aim to formalize the path from interview to insights to PMM tactics. This should turn into an annual listening ritual. A couple of things to consider on how you can formalize a yearly ritual:
Aim to start with a short survey to expand the voice beyond the top 20 for your target audience.
Use the survey to figure out who’ll be well-suited for a deep dive conversation. Include a few returning interviewees.
Test your existing messaging by audience as you go through the tour.
Shape the year’s narrative: be it value props, pain points, or personas. Understand market shifts. Challenge core assumptions.
Help inform the PM roadmap: proof points, feature requests, and direct new development.
Share with the widest audience: think of the impact on other teams.
One last point!
You want to leverage the listening tour to offer the quintessential ‘voice of [audience of interest]’ resource. Use the yearly listening tour to: (i) extract quotes, insights by theme, (ii) inform GTM, campaigns, case studies, social, webinars, (iii) feed copy that resonates across assets, (iv) provide ‘meatier’ messaging for launches, (v) identify early adopters for future releases, (vi) inject new case studies across your audience of interest, and (vii) revisit progress around mid-year for reflection and re-anchor your product as applicable on the back of the insights.
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