166: The Art of Listening and Gathering Product Feedback with Matt Young
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Send us a text) Matt Young) is the CEO of UserVoice, the first (and we think best!) product feedback and research tool for software companies around the world. Matt started his professional career as a software developer, right when web browsers were released. He developed innovative solutions on the web well before SaaS and Product Management were the ubiquitous terms that they are today.   Over his career, he has pushed for better ways to build software. And through all the changes in development methodologies, he has put the customer at the centre of everything his teams have built. This is what attracted him to UserVoice - an opportunity to make sure that teams building complex software solutions have direct access to the intended users - to make sure that the problems any company or development team are solving are actually worth solving.   Questions  

• Could you share a little bit about your journey with our listeners, in your own words?
• Could you tell us a little bit about UserVoice? To the average listener that's listening to this podcast, a little bit about the company, what does the company do? And what types of businesses do you primarily service?
• What about tips for improving feature request responses?
• Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business?
• Can you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had the biggest impact on you? It could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you've read recently that has really impacted you in a great way.
• If you could choose the best customer service or customer experience tip to give to our listeners who are business owners, what would be the most important tip that you would give them to ensure that their business is successful?
• Could you also share with us what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people.
• Where can they find you online?
• Do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge you'll tend to revert to this quote, it kind of helps to get you back on track if for whatever reason you got derailed or you got off track.

  Highlights   Matt’s Journey   Matt shared that he had a pretty ordinary software development career starting off as an individual software developer, and then moving into management. The thing that he had experienced while doing all that was that he would notice that product teams would ask engineering teams, which are big and expensive and complicated to build things and didn't really have a good way to justify the reasoning behind that. He was really interested in hearing why customers thought what they were being asked to build was important, why it was an important problem to solve, why the solution they had in mind was a good one for them. And he just was really passionate about companies being connected to the users that they serve.   So, that's kind of what brought him to UserVoice. He started out as the VP of Engineering at UserVoice but over the years, they've spun out a couple of other products and other companies, so the original