This month, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi announced she was stepping down from her role. As one of the few female CEOs of a Fortune 500 company, I’ve followed Nooyi, and grew to appreciate her hands-on approach with consumers, and how she brings a new meaning to the design thinking philosophy by trusting her own instincts as a consumer.

For example, Nooyi took her executive team to a small grocery store in Chicago and asked the grocer if men or women shop there more frequently. The grocer answered women. With both hands, Nooyi picked up and dropped a 34-pound case of Aquafina water, and turned around to her executive team to ask, “Do they bring a guy to carry this out?” It was a valid, and obvious point, about the pain in purchasing the PepsiCo product for their target consumers that was overlooked. One that she saw by trusting herself as a female consumer. In another example, during a meeting about declining soda sales, Nooyi observed how most of the attendees were drinking a sparkling water instead of soda. If her own team was not drinking Pepsi, she questioned, why should anyone else?  

Often times, as marketers we look to customer feedback, focus groups and other channels to gain the insights needed in order to create campaigns or design assets; however, Nooyi highlights the importance of valuing your own opinions as a consumer.

Your Customers are Lying to You

While design thinking is not a new concept, more and more companies are embracing the customer-centric approach to user experiences as a way to better serve their customers. The challenge in turning customer feedback into awesome products or experiences is to ensure you have a diverse mix of methods to gather feedback, and understanding how to put customer feedback in context.

One of the most popular ways to gain feedback is through focus groups, which uses a facilitator to gather insights from a small sample size of people on a particular product. Focus groups can be a quick way to gain qualitative feedback and verbatims; however, research has found that feedback from focus groups is not always to be trusted. Studies have shown that a variety of factors can influence the feedback from a focus group, including moderator bias and the personality composition of the members of the group. For example, some members may be hesitant to share opposing feedback if it contradicts the feedback of the most vocal person in the room. Focus groups also create an unnatural setting for users to interact with your product or experience, influencing the results and the unconscious interactions that a customer may demonstrate when exposed to the product or experience while not monitored or in their natural setting. In the blog, “Focus Groups Don’t Work,” writer Eva LaMere explores the many reasons why focus group members give dishonest feedback including: misaligned motivations for participation, misunderstanding of their unconscious motivations and preferences, a desire to project a certain image of themselves, lack of psychological safety and established trust within the group, and lack of time to make educated judgments. In addition, focus groups tend to be an expensive way to gain feedback.

Using Your Employees to Make Better Products

When launching a new campaign or product, marketers are quick to put a beta on the market to gain initial insights from customers before rolling out a product at wide scale. Bringing in your customers throughout the process is a great way to get preliminary feedback and continue to iterate on a product to provide a customer-centric experience. However, often times, companies fail to bring in some of the most important perspectives: themselves and their employees.

Many leaders assume that all of their employees regularly use the products from their employer, or that employees would feel safe to speak up if they found opportunities to improve the product; however, without a formalized program to encourage employees (and yourself) to share feedback on products as a regular user, employee feedback often is forgotten to be collected. Similar to Nooyi’s experience about picking up a 34-pound case of water as a female shopper, your employees can be the first line of defence for catching bumps in your user experience.

There are few easy ways that leaders can encourage and operationalize employee (and your own) feedback on products and experiences:

1. Cross-Functional Beta Testing. In large organizations, various teams work on different products and create betas that are given to third-party beta testers. One easy way to include your employees into this initial feedback phase is to create a slam team of cross-functional employees who are beta testers for products that they do not work on. For example, include members from Finance, Legal, Marketing, and Human Resources on the latest product line to get preliminary internal feedback on the user experience. By using employees in this phase, you can leverage their understanding of the company strategy and product positioning to identify where the product does not hit its intended goals, or isolate unintended benefits that you can capitalize on. These employees can also provide a more in-depth knowledge on historical products or find synergies between products, which the team can build upon or repurpose across the organization.

2. A/B Testing and Other Experiments. A/B testing is a great way to gain insight into unconscious behaviors from consumers, as they are given a limited set of variables to interact with. You can start your A/B testing with employees to identify any flaws in the test, or evolve your test to narrow in on the variables you want to test with your customers. Employees are also more open to participating and providing feedback on early experiments, understanding how product life cycles work and wanting to positively contribute to the company’s success.

3. Dogfooding. By finding ways to incentivize dogfooding within an organization, leaders can not only have a more engaged workforce, but also identify bugs and opportunities to improve their products or experiences more quickly and on a recurring basis. Dogfooding, or encouraging employees to regularly use the software (or products) they develop, is a great way to constantly iterate on the product to make enhancements, and also perform a quality control to ensure everything is running smoothly.

While the tough love is that not all of your employees are going to participate in these programs, it is important to ensure that you see yourself and your employees as a part of your target audience to test products and experiences. Not only does it teach your employees to have empathy for the customers you serve, but it provides a great opportunity for everyone in the company to provide feedback and drives higher levels of engagement to the organization.