10 User Feedback Questions to Validate Your New Feature Idea (And Why They Matter)

You’re preparing to develop your SaaS product’s newest feature. You’ve gone through the idea stage, gotten stakeholder buy-in, and even have a prototype. Now, it’s time to validate your product to ensure it meets the needs of your users. The best way to go about this? Ask your users for their feedback.

Validating through customer feedback steers your team directly toward what your users need. However, the specific questions you ask will impact the information you get back. So, what are the “right” questions to ask?

The best user feedback questions prompt your customer to reveal their pain points and show how they’ll use your features. Gathering specific, detailed answers to the most important questions you have for your users gets you on the same page with what they need—and reaching that understanding will help you create a more valuable product.
How User Feedback Impacts Your Product’s SuccessGathering user feedback is a critical part of product validation, but simply asking for user opinions may not be enough to guide your team. The way you ask your questions matters, and when you ask questions designed to elicit clear, actionable responses, feedback becomes the direct line to your customer—their problems and preferred solutions. If you don’t know enough about your customers’ needs, your new product feature won’t improve their overall experience.  

Try to ask the right questions while following best practices:

• Encourage honesty: Leading questions will give you poor information. Instead of limiting answers to positive feedback, ask for honest answers, even if they’re negative.
• Be clear and brief: Write concise questions. Extra details may confuse users, which will impact the quality of responses you receive.
• Tackle one point at a time: Try to keep your focus on one talking point at a time, so your users are able to offer their feedback without getting sidetracked on another topic.
• Make room for diverse answers: Add an “other” option in multiple-choice survey questions.
• Include open-ended questions: Give participants a chance to explain their thoughts in their own words.

This process ensures that you’re creating valuable, customer-centric products—and building customer loyalty and retention. Focus your questions on the key points you’re trying to validate, like whether your customers are utilizing a feature the way you intended them to. Try to keep your feedback surveys and respondents directed toward answering those crucial questions so you can collect the metrics you need to move product development forward.

Questions to Learn More About Your Target Market and Their Pain Points

If you’re developing a feature that addresses a new problem for your users or you’re expanding into a new market, conducting market research and determining your target audience’s pain points can help guide your development. Ask questions that will give you a clear look into your users’ current experience. These questions can fit within a survey, where you would typically format questions as multiple choice, or you can ask them as open-ended questions during an interview or focus group.

1. What Is Your Job Role, Industry, and Company Size?

Gathering demographic information lets you compare and contrast different segments when you analyze your user feedback results. For instance, someone who works in sales won’t use your product in the same manner that someone in the customer success department will. Consider questions that focus on the user’s title, industry, and job duties.

2. How Do You Currently Complete Your Task?

Asking users about their current habits helps you get a picture of how they solve their problems so you can identify their pain points. It’s good for checking your understanding of what your customers do right now, and it can reveal opportunities for your product to solve users’ problems more effectively.

For example, if you’re developing a new feature for your budgeting product that lets users upload receipts directly to their records, asking how they currently track expenses helps you assess their steps. Do they manually enter information and upload a scanned receipt as a backup? Can you reduce their steps by automating the process?

3. What Problems Do You Face While Completing Your Task?

Asking this is a powerful way to get valuable insight into your users’ needs because they tell you, in no uncertain terms, what their pain points are. If your users say their current process for inputting receipts “takes too long,” there’s an opportunity for you to create a faster solution.

4. What Do You Like or Dislike About Your Current Process?

This question allows you to identify specific opportunities where your product can add value for your users. If the participant uses a competitor’s product, it’s also great for uncovering weak spots—what doesn’t your competition provide that users wish they did?