A structured initiative for collecting, organising, and acting on user feedback.
A feedback program is the structured system a product uses to solicit, process, and act on what customers tell it. It covers the channels that bring feedback in, surveys, request portals, advisory boards, and the machinery that turns the raw stream into decisionsDecisionStrategyA recorded decision with context, rationale, and consequencesView reference →. The distinction that gives the concept weight is structure. Ad-hoc feedback arrives whenever a customer is annoyed enough to write; a programme decides what to ask, of whom, and what happens to the answer.
The modern practice consolidated under the banner of Voice of the Customer, the discipline of systematically capturing and acting on customer input (SurveyMonkey). The most consequential shift arrived in 2003, when Fred Reichheld introduced the Net Promoter Score in the Harvard Business Review, giving programmes a single, comparable loyalty metricMetricStrategyA unified metric that measures progress, health, or behaviour across the productView reference → built from one question about likelihood to recommend (Help Scout).
What turned a metric into a system was the loop. Bain and Company, where the score originated, framed closing the loop as the central element of the practice, splitting it into an inner loop that returns individual responses to the customer who gave them and an outer loop that feeds aggregate patterns back into the product (Bain). Without the loop, a programme is a listening exercise that produces reports; with it, the feedback drives change the customer can see.
The field has since widened from periodic surveys to always-on collection: in-product request portals, continuous NPS, and standing advisory groups running in parallel. The throughline holds. A programme is judged less by how much feedback it gathers than by whether the loop actually closes.
A mid-market SaaS company replaces its scattered feedback intake, a shared inbox, a stale spreadsheet, occasional sales notes, with a programme. Three channels feed it: a quarterly NPS campaignNPS CampaignCustomer FeedbackA Net Promoter Score survey campaignView reference →, an in-product feature requestFeature RequestCustomer FeedbackA user-submitted feature requestView reference → portal, and a twice-yearly advisory board.
In one quarter the portal collects 340 requests. Tagging clusters them into eleven themesThemeProduct SpecificationA strategic grouping of related featuresView reference →, and one theme, "bulk editing," accounts for 64 requests and skews toward the lowest NPS responders. The team ships bulk editing the next cycle and runs the outer loop: every customer who requested it gets a note that it shipped. The inner loop runs too, with detractors from the NPS campaign called within a week. The point of the programme is that none of this depended on someone remembering to chase it; the structure routed feedback to a decision and the decision back to the customer.
In the Unified Product Graph, a feedback program sits in the Feedback region as the organising hub for customer input. A product connects to it through product_has_feedback_programfeedback_program_collects_feature_requestfeedback_program_runs_nps_campaignfeedback_program_identifies_feedback_theme
Type-specific fields on BaseNode
program_typestringHow frequently feedback is collected
collection_methodstringMethod used to collect feedback (e.g. "survey", "interview", "widget")
idstringrequiredUnique identifier (UUID)
typeNodeTyperequiredDiscriminator for the entity type
titlestringrequiredDisplay name
descriptionstringOptional detailed description
statusstringLifecycle status
tagsstring[]Freeform tags for filtering
4 phases — initial: planning
7 edge types connected to this entity.
product_has_feedback_programfeedback_program_collects_feature_requestfeedback_program_runs_nps_campaignfeedback_program_identifies_feedback_themefeedback_program_hosts_user_advisory_boardfeedback_program_has_beta_programfeedback_program_measured_by_metric