VoC Meeting Retrospective #2 — Building a Product Users Love
In part 1, I shared the story of how VoC Meetings were born at DelightRoom. In this post, I’ll introduce exactly how these meetings are run, the lessons we’ve learned from them, and the direction we want to take to improve them going forward.
7 Months After VoC Meetings Settled In
Before we knew it, a chilly November rolled around, and it's already been over two quarters since our weekly VoC Meetings took root. During that time, the meeting itself has grown in many ways. (A company where even meetings grow...) Let me show you what form it has settled into.
Establishing the Purpose
During our initial discussions regarding the Good Morning screen, we went as far as defining action items and assignees. However, we found that getting bogged down in decision-making tended to make us lose sight of syncing on the actual feedback, so we established our core purpose as aligning the temperature differences between teams regarding user feedback. We decided to leave the final decision-making to the respective teams and only discuss concrete action items when necessary.
Attendee Lineup
At first, only those involved with the Good Morning screen attended, but eventually, key members from every group started joining. As of November 2021, hosted by the POM group, attendees include our CEO, leads from the engineer group & design group, PMs, and Data Analyst (DA) members. This happened because of:
The POM's need to properly deliver the user's voice to the team to improve the product,
The PM's need for honest product evaluations and seeds for improvement,
The designers' & engineers' need to understand and fix user pain points regarding product behavior/design,
The DA's need to get data analysis seeds from user voices,
And even the CEO's need to encompass all of this and check if Alarmy's value is being delivered to users
Thanks to everyone's needs perfectly aligning. 🙌
Meeting Content
To avoid skewing too heavily toward niche issues from reading raw text, we also added quantitative data. We aimed to analyze even the reactions of users who didn't submit direct feedback by looking at rating trends, highly upvoted store reviews, and the number of feedback tickets per topic over the past 7 days. Through this, even without specific incoming feedback, we could spot potential problems by correlating ratings and review upvote counts with recent changes.
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How to Make VoC Meetings Even Better? Let's Run a Retrospective!
Well over two quarters have passed since we started running weekly meetings in this format. We've been charging ahead to hold them every week unless there was a holiday or a special event, but since 6 months had gone by, we felt the need to look back on the meetings so far and find ways to improve. So, to mark passing the two-quarter milestone, we all gathered and ran a retrospective.
Retrospectives at DelightRoom take various forms depending on the team or individual, but we usually approach them by dividing into 🙂 What Went Well and 🤔 What Could Be Better. Based on this, we hash out action items on how to maintain and amplify the good parts, and how to improve the parts that fell short. We ran the VoC Meeting retrospective following this exact framework.
Since we covered a lot of ground in the retrospective, I'll show you the neatly organized highlights ;)
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🙂 What Went Well
We managed to reduce the temperature difference between teams regarding various issues.
It relieved the worry of "What if it's just me (or my team) thinking this? I need to persuade them, but where and how do I even start?"
By gathering to talk about each other's opinions, we could hear everyone out efficiently.
Priorities for both big and small issues were clearly synced up.
Going a step further, we were even able to get some simple solution ideas.
We got one step closer to our users.
Compared to receiving feedback in language refined by the POM group, directly facing the users' rough, unfiltered words helped us empathize and immerse ourselves much more.
It feels like DelightRoom's user-centric product culture has been strengthened.
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🤔 What Could Be Better
It would be great if the seeds and insights each team can take away were better organized.
Since we currently record opinions on topics weekly, the logs of our discussions are scattered. It's inconvenient to view accumulated past discussions alongside older records.
It would be nice to have an easy way to revisit topics when thinking, "Wait, hasn't this come up in a VoC Meeting before?"
It would be great if topics with a low ticket count but consistent volume were handled more systematically.
Thinking back to when the meetings felt the most effective, it was when we synced up and defined action items on undervalued topics. Drawing from that, tackling the parts we're currently missing would likely amplify the meeting's impact.
Since we look at the last 7 days of data, we end up discussing high-volume topics, leaving low-volume ones (like 1–2 tickets a week) unaddressed. But even if the volume is low, if it comes in consistently, an important seed might be hiding there. It would be good to cover these as well.
In particular, there seems to be a blind spot where ambiguous R&R causes things to be skipped over. It would be nice to gradually address these areas too.
There's a massive dependency on a specific member, and we should solve this.
There is a major dependency on Chan, who hosts the VoC Meetings. For example, depending on Chan's schedule or workload the day before, the raw ticket sheet gets shared at slightly different times. This means meeting attendees have varying amounts of prep time each week, making scheduling and mental preparation difficult.
On top of that, it seems like a burden on Chan himself, so it would be great if this issue were resolved.
It's uncomfortable having to cram reading a large batch of tickets once a week.
It would be better to shorten the sharing cycle, like once a day, so we can get them in a timelier manner.
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🚀 Action Items
Create a method to systematically organize the seeds generated in the meetings.
- We had a method early on, but it died out because it was hard to maintain → Let's use this as a lesson to build something better.Regularly check the cumulative number of tickets per topic to find discussion seeds.
Reduce Chan's resource drain on ticket monitoring.
- Find areas that can be automated to save manual resources.
- Hire more headcount.Create a way to share ticket statuses and raw text more frequently/continuously.
Create a way for members who don't directly attend VoC Meetings to also receive meeting notes and raw tickets.
Building a Product Users Love
In Y Combinator partner Kevin Hale's "How to Start a Startup" lecture "How to Build Products Users Love", there's a section on user-centric culture. The gist is that to build products that users love, it’s not enough to just listen to the users' voice—all members need to be aligned with it. To build this culture, when Kevin Hale was running the service Wufoo, he had every single member take turns handling customer support. He made them hear the users' voice "firsthand."
Looking back on our VoC Meetings, I gained confidence that DelightRoom is heading in the right direction for "building a product users love." The very fact that our members crave hearing the raw, unfiltered voice of the user is proof of that. It’s not just lip service to being user-centric—we mean it for real! I felt deeply grateful for this company and its members who try to stay close to our users and hear them out. I'm proud of DelightRoom for actively pursuing this culture, and as a POM member standing on the frontlines of it, I felt immense pride in my work. ❤️
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After wrapping up the retrospective, the POM group set a goal to make VoC Meetings more impactful while simultaneously blending them into the daily routines of all members. Running a meeting on a short, 1-week cycle can get exhausting, and I often worried whether we were making the most valuable use of everyone's precious time. But through the retrospective, I realized once again just how valuable this meeting is, and I was fired🔥 up with the determination to establish it as an indispensable, essential part of our daily work.
If you're reading this and you value your product and your users, I highly recommend checking how much empathy every member in your organization has for your users. A truly user-centric culture is complete only when the entire organization—not just the CPO, planners, or those directly making the product—cares about and listens to the users. 😉
DelightRoom will keep running ahead to build a "product users love," and I hope you can run alongside us and exchange lessons along the way.