No one knows what your customers need better than your customers; that's why their feedback has never been more critical to the success of your product. Product managers have long used customer feedback to ensure their products work well. But with a dramatic uptick in digital commerce, supply chain disruptions, and other influences of a global pandemic, companies have even less wiggle room for error.

One negative experience with a product or brand can be a dealbreaker for customers, and they have plenty of channels for making their displeasure known. Meanwhile, cultivating positive product experiences — like seeing a piece of feedback addressed and incorporated — are huge strides toward promoting loyalty and brand evangelism.

As a product manager, you need reliable processes for validating products and features with your target market to deliver loyalty-generating experiences. But user testing can be incredibly frustrating to execute when time is limited and your bandwidth is full. That's where delta testing comes in.

Delta testing is user testing automation. It's a way for product managers who run user tests to delegate the manual labor of engaging testers, getting even more feedback, understanding what it means, prioritizing what surfaces, then circulating those actionable insights throughout the organization.

Here are three key ways that delta testing and its vital outcomes are helping product managers become more effective at connecting with customers and improving their products.

Delta Testing Makes User Testing Approachable

User testing is a necessity, but when it doesn't give you clear and reliable insights from your target market, it won't empower you to create crowd-pleasing products. Delta testing takes the sting out of traditional beta because it runs on automation, best practices, and templates. This ensures you're easily and consistently delivering reliable insights from user testing — which is a lifesaver, especially when you're a part-time test manager who's got other responsibilities to manage.

It equips you with a project space for easily recruiting and communicating with your testers, plug-and-play test planning that builds out your project schedule for you, and engagement automation to keep feedback flowing in. Meanwhile, industry-proven processes are built right into the bones of the delta testing system. This combination of automation and a process-built framework takes away the guesswork of running traditional beta tests, making it easy for you to set benchmarks and start optimizing.

Delta Testing Prioritizes Your Roadmap for You

You know how essential it is for product managers to prioritize their roadmap and deliver the features and experiences customers care about most. Delta testing provides a simple and effective way to help you prioritize where and when to take action using feedback automation.

Feedback automation does more than triage the issues, ideas, and praise as they're submitted by your testers (though that alone is incredibly handy). It uses a prioritization algorithm that takes high-priority features and product experiences identified by you and your stakeholders, weighed against the popularity and severity of incoming feedback.

What this gives you is an automated, impact-ranked list of issues to fix, ideas to consider, and praise to share with your team. What it doesn't give you are headaches and time crunches as you struggle through spreadsheets to manually calculate what delta testing does automatically. Feedback automation frees up the time you need to focus on your many other responsibilities.

Delta Testing Unifies Your Stakeholders

Increasing departmental alignment and getting everyone to play nice has never been easy. It's even harder now that many offices are remote.

Delta testing uses reporting automation to help you rally departments and teams around what's really important: your customers and your product. It puts KPIs about the health of your project, the impact of incoming feedback on your product, and the overall impact of your user testing efforts into a single dashboard. You can stay in that high-level view or drill down — but you always know whether or not you need to take action.

Delta Testing Breaks Down Silos

Delta testing aligns your teams by breaking down silos and granting real-time visibility into your program. With a delta testing tool like the Centercode Platform, you can invite contributors from different departments into the project and keep things organized with easy-to-manage permissions and levels of access. Integrations ensure feedback and other customer insights are getting to other teams via tools they're already using. And with customizable, automatic reports, every contributor stays connected to the user testing insights they need to see.

Between reporting automation and access to customer-validated insights, delta testing makes it easier than ever to quantify your efforts and garner the support and involvement of your stakeholders.

Made for Product Managers

Every product manager could use a little more time in their pocket to optimize their processes and push toward their goals. That's why delta testing tools like the Centercode Platform are purpose-built with the features and functionality product managers need.

Centercode lifts the burden of test planning, tester engagement, feedback triage, and reporting off your shoulders so you're less preoccupied with getting feedback and more focused on using it. See what Centercode can do for you.