AI is Giving You the Opportunity to Design How You Work

Finding Signal in Feedback

The company where I work has used a particular customer feedback tool for many years now. It is very similar to other tools in its space: people can post an idea or request for how the product should work and other contributors can upvote their idea. The tool works fine, but I have had a difficult time incorporating it into my work process. Ideally, whenever we’re planning our work, I should be looking at the feedback in this tool and finding opportunities to incorporate the best, most impactful ideas into what we’re doing. However, I find it difficult to look through and utilize the giant list of feedback, mostly because:

• It isn’t designed to work in the same way my brain works
• It’s a point solution that sits outside the rest of our toolset
• It lacks any kind of rich analysis features

Instead of having a tool that fit my process and how I worked, I was trying to fit my process around this tool.

So a couple of weeks ago I had the thought to export all of the feedback and ideas out of the feedback tool and utilize an AI tool to run some analysis on it. Even some general grouping of ideas into common themes would have had a big impact on my work.

I was stunned when I discovered that exporting my data was a paid feature. My jaw hit the floor when I saw that the first product tier that allowed exporting would cost me an additional $1,000.

$1,000! I couldn’t believe the audacity to hide such a basic feature behind such a steep paywall.

Instead of paying the money or trying to negotiate with the vendor, I tried a different path: creating my own tool for feedback collection.

Building Our Workflow Around Existing Tools Has a Massive Cost

For the length of my career, I have had a difficult time fitting into the tools and systems that were utilized at my places of work. I struggled with them for the same reason I struggled with this feedback tool:

• The way in which they work doesn’t match my mental model
• The decision to utilize them often comes down to cost and/or convenience, not robustness of feature set
• I was forced to build my work around how they work, regardless of how effective my own methods were

For me, this has meant spending countless hours trying to satisfy a system that seemed to have taken on a life of its own. It was a petty god that I was required to sacrifice to while receiving nothing in return. If I refused to work inside these tools and systems, I could be reprimanded or even fired, regardless of the quality of my work or the effectiveness of my process. If I learned a new or advanced way of completing a task, I had to pray that it would eventually be incorporated into the toolset I was already using.