Launching the first self-organizing feedback hub

Building products is literally the greatest thing ever, but then you get your first users and you're stuck having to deal with… users 🤷‍♀️

If you do want to build something for actual humans to use, dealing with those users and their feedback is really the whole ballgame. And it's a huge stress point, because you want to spend hours on every piece of actionable feedback and really connect with your customers, but the more time you do that, the less time you have building the damn thing.

Understanding feedback is critical to build great products. Not only it helps figure out what to ship but it’s also the best way to develop product sense and build loyalty with customers. Yet feedback tends to be scattered in many different places and product teams don’t have time to deal with this mess.

Enter Cycle: the fastest way to capture feedback and share customer insights – without the busywork. For many product folks out there, manually processing feedback used to take several hours every week. Now it's all on autopilot with Cycle.

Set up your automations for each feedback source (Zoom, Meet, Slack, HubSpot, Intercom, Zapier, etc), and voilà – the AI will take care of the rest:

An autopilot, not a copilot

The future of AI is autopilots, not copilots. Yes, autopilots: AI performing tasks and generating insights – all by itself.

Sounds great in theory, but in practice won't autopilots just generate tons of useless things? And if so, won't users simply switch it off?

That's a valid fear. But there's a solution (beyond increasing the relevance of whatever your autopilot generates). It's called: "AI-generated, user-verified"

That's our approach to AI at Cycle App. It boils down to three principles:

1. What's generated on autopilot should have an "AI-generated" tag
2. It should be possible for users to (bulk) verify or discard AI-generated things with one click
3. It should be easy to filter any view by the AI tag – do you want to see all data? only user-generated data? only AI-generated, user-verified data?

There’s even more. As Cycle is real-time, we also needed a way to let you know when AI is performing tasks on an object you’re looking at. In Cycle, whenever you open a doc on which AI is currently doing work... you'll see a nice little toaster informing you of what the AI is doing.

Little big details ✨

A future proof data model

When Salesforce launched, they had two built-in tabs: "accounts" and "contacts".

But very early in their journey, they decided to offer a way for folks to type in tab names that directly corresponded to their line of work. Car services could track "drivers" & "vehicles" and nonprofits could follow "causes" & "donors".

Even though they had opinionated default tabs, they provided every user with a customized experience. "Flexible yet opinionated" at its finest!

Cycle is no different. We're opinionated by default, but flexible under the hood. By default, everyone has access to "feedback", "insight" & "feature" objects. But we created a way for users to customize these objects to their individual needs.

Below you can see an example of a setup in which a user has created 5 different objects: "goal", "need", "feature", "dev" & "design".

There's more. You can actually customize the relationships you want to have between your custom objects. In the example above, "goals" can be broken down into "needs", which themselves can be broken down into "features". We basically allow for multi-level nesting across objects. That's our custom hierarchy feature. Definitely the most powerful aspect of our data model.

There are as many ways to ship products as there are product teams (hence flexible) yet we do have strong opinions on how to help you do it well (hence opinionated).

A delightful writing experience

If tech is about writing code and design about creating visuals, what's product management all about? I'd argue it's mostly about writing docs.

Writing is crucial for product management as it allows for clear communication of product requirements, user research, and release notes. It's key for collaboration across teams and keeping everyone aligned⁠.

Nailing collaborative writing experience is the only way a tool can pretend to create the future of product management. We've seen it in the design space: a tool that doesn't let designers do their core job (ie designing) can't become the reference for all things design (R.I.P. InVision).

Our first product decision was to build Cycle's atomic unit as a natively collaborative doc as opposed to a task or an issue. It didn't make our life easy (no kidding, building an extraordinary real-time editor editor is no joke) but it was a statement: we're here to create a true system of records for product folks. A system in which they enjoy spending time doing their core job: writing.

After 4 years sweating every detail of Cycle's editor, I'm finally confident to state that we've built one of the most delightful writing experiences out there 👇

🤝 Collaborative: Co-write with your team in real-time, gather feedback through inline comments, and mention colleagues for input

✨ AI-powered: Looking to translate, rephrase or summarize a user research note? Just ask Cycle

📝 Rich-markdown: Enjoy features like tables, toggles, a table of contents, code blocks, and an audio/video player

⌨️ Quick Access: Use the "/" command for quick options and "Cmd+K" for app-wide actions

🖇️ Integrated with your favorite tools like Linear, Figma, GitHub or Miro.

No wonder why product folks spend an average of 2 hours and 30 minutes per day in Cycle 🤯 They just do their job. They write 🤗

Wrapping up

Ok, enough rambling. Start your free trial today: https://www.cycle.app/

If you have any feedback, please share it with us so we can close the loop with you at each release 🤗

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