First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
Like many companies, we have had to adapt to deal with Covid. But fortunately, it hasn’t significantly impacted our business operations because we’ve always been a remote company. We work in the software industry, so we’re used to working with change, and I’m proud of how our team just took things in their stride and continues to support each other.
Tell us about your career and how you founded or joined this company?
My name is Jon Tobin, and I’m the Co-founder and Head of Growth at Userback. I’ve worked in the software industry for over a decade, and I guess you could say I love technology. I’m passionate about how technology can be used to solve real-world problems. In a previous role where I dealt with web agencies and software designers, I saw firsthand how there was no easy way for these companies to collaborate and efficiently collect feedback from their users. That’s when Userback was born.
How does your company innovate?
We’re on a mission to help software teams build better products driven by user feedback. While collecting customer feedback is by no means a new concept, we’re innovating and changing the game by making it easy for software users to provide feedback visually with annotated screenshots and video recordings. Using our tech, software companies can collect better quality feedback that helps them resolve bugs faster, understand what their customers want, and collaborate more efficiently within their teams.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
We’re an agile software company, so it’s in our DNA to respond fast and pivot when required. As soon as it became clear that Covid was here to stay, we reviewed our product roadmap and asked ourselves what we could do to help our customers adapt to the changing landscape. We realized that workplaces were transitioning to remote operations, so we prioritized developing new collaboration features in our product to make that transition easier for them.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons?
We’re a fast-growing tech startup, so difficult decisions are always made. It’s just the nature of things. At the core of it, though, we’re a feedback company, and I guess the lesson that we learned, and the one I would encourage everyone to take on board, is that you 100% need to listen to your customers. I don’t just mean asking for feedback.
I mean listening to your customer’s feedback and understanding how you can exceed their expectations and help solve their problems in new ways that are better than your competitors. Cause I think if you can do that, then making those difficult choices in your business becomes much easier!
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
We rely on tools like Slack and Jira to collaborate and manage our day-to-day tasks as a remote team. This will sound like a sales pitch, but the truth is that the most important tool we use in our business is the User back. As a software company, we use User back for bug reporting, user feedback, feature requests, etc. We’re probably our #1 customer! This has served us well because it’s helped us deeply understand how software companies can improve and build better software by collecting user visual feedback.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
When we first started Userback, the main use case we were solving was to help website designers collect feedback on their websites. Today, many competing products do this same thing. So as we’ve grown, we’re made a conscious effort to expand on the use cases we solve, which is why Userback is now loved by all software teams, including designers, developers, product managers, and more. We’ve grown from a point solution to a fully-featured visual feedback platform, and we’re not finished yet!
Your final thoughts
If there is one constant in life, it is “change.” Covid and how this has changed the world is a perfect example. The last 12 months have made us more resilient and willing to experiment, innovate, and be better for business owners worldwide. But as things change, some things remain the same. Valuing customer feedback and putting your customers first is as important today as ever.
- Spokesperson: Jon Tobin
- Company: Userback
- Website link: www.userback.io