Effective communication between product teams and customers is essential for successful product development. The key to successful product development is to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page. By utilizing multiple modes of communication, product teams can ensure that everyone is kept up to date on the progress of the development process, and that any issues that arise can be addressed quickly. Creating a small community of your customers around your upcoming product launch is a key ingredient to your Go-To Market strategy. If you think maintaining all these tools and processes is cumbersome, we agree! Stomio is built to make this process much easier for everyone involved.

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See how all 3 modes of communication can be done quickly and easily in Stomio

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There are a number of different ways for product teams and their customers to communicate effectively during the development process. By utilizing these different modes of communication, product teams can ensure they’re capturing voice of customer effectively at a meaningful scale and their customers are interacting with the product team in an engaging way. The 3 main modes of communication are one:one, one:many, and many:many.

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One:One

This is the most common mode of communication between product teams and customers. Email is a popular and easy way for product teams and customers to communicate 1:1. Customers can provide feedback by sending emails to the product team, and product team members can use email to keep customers up to date on the progress of development. Another way of utilizing 1:1 communication is scheduling video calls.

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One:Many

Most often, product teams want to create customer development programs during product development. Those can come in many forms (e.g. beta programs) and under different names (e.g. customer advisory board). Product team needs a representative sample of their customer base to validate hypotheses before launching to broader market. During these programs, the product team needs to communicate in mass with those customers. This could be a broadcast message to provide a status update or a group message to a sub-set of those customers to follow up on a specific item. Product teams will most likely use email for this communication mode.

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Many:Many

Once the product is more baked and ready to be tested in a customer environment, the frequency and depth of communication between the teams accelerate. Product teams will see a need to share information with their customers at mass and enable those customers to help each other forming a small community around the product being developed. Online forums are a great way for product teams and customers to communicate in this mode. Customers can post questions and suggestions to the forum, and product teams can respond and provide updates. Additionally, online forums can provide a platform for customers to share their experiences with the product, which can help product teams better understand their customers use cases.