New Insights from Feedback Loop Reveal More Brands Are Relying on Consumers to Make Critical Product Decisions

Feedback Loop, the agile research technology company that delivers continuous consumer insights so brands can make critical decisions quickly, today released its 2021 Product Management Insights Report. This year’s report is the seventh annual from Feedback Loop, and reveals that most brands are continuously running critical product decisions by groups of hundreds or thousands of consumers before making decisions to forward, iterate, or even scrap products completely.

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“Successful brands aren’t just customer-centric anymore, they’re customer-led”

Feedback Loop’s 2021 Product Management Insights Report is based on survey responses from over 500 product management professionals over a five week period between January and February 2021. The new report shows the main responsibilities of product managers, the challenges they’re facing in their roles and their key objectives and goals for 2021.

Feedback Loop’s research revealed, among other things, that over the past year brands have relied on more frequent communication with their customers to help chart their courses, and product managers found they had more ways at their disposal to do so more easily.

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Key findings include:

• The number of brands that spend the “perfect amount of time” speaking with customers has more than tripled over the past year. Nearly half (47%) of product managers said they’re spending the perfect amount of time talking to customers in 2021, compared to 11% of product managers reporting the same in 2020.
• The responsibilities of product managers have shifted to focus on the consumer. User/consumer research was named by 51% of product managers as their main responsibility, bringing it to the top of the list of responsibilities. This is a shift from 2020, when product strategy and setting (84%) and the product roadmap (83%) were named to the top of the list.
• Product managers are spending more time studying consumers, but less time on designing the research and generating feedback themselves. Product managers are spending more time every day on user/consumer research (up 17% YoY) and product design (up 7% YoY). They’re increasingly looking to tools to manage research design and generating feedback, with product managers reporting less time spent designing quarterly research studies/tests (down 19% YoY) and recruiting users/consumers to generate feedback (down 48% YoY).
• The lack of internal research expertise is preventing time spent on research. The top missing factor preventing product managers from spending more on research was internal research expertise (29%). Other missing factors include lack of budget (22%) and results taking too long to receive (19%).

“Successful brands aren’t just customer-centric anymore, they’re customer-led,” said Rob Holland, CEO, Feedback Loop. “We’re seeing a new trend where brands are proactively establishing de-facto boards of consumers to evaluate their decisions in real time. Only through this continuous conversation with consumers can brands align products and services to their needs and wants.”

Feedback Loop will be hosting a webinar with Anuraag Verma, Host of This is Product Management and Ben Wilson, COO at Olea Edge Analytics on Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 1pm Eastern Time to discuss the report’s key findings.

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