There are countless benefits to having a successful user testing program. Being able to confidently bring new products to market and mature existing products is where the key business value lies. But showcasing that value and generating buy-in across the organization is just as important.

The effort you've put into building an established program is worth celebrating and sharing your user testing results within your organization. Beyond the obvious, there are additional benefits to sharing the fruits of your labor that you may not have previously considered.

Sharing the right information and testing metrics with other teams can lead to “ah-ha!” moments that immediately build the value of your testing program. Executives are kept in the loop, the teams deeper in the mix have a prioritized working list, and the teams on the front-end know where the product stands - all tying in directly with what you're promoting and sharing.

Here are a few different groups that you should consider sharing results with - as well as how to present your user testing results to highlight what they're likely to focus most on and how their experience can impact your role.

Sharing User Testing Results With Marketing & Sales - Capitalize on Buzz

Amazon's Prime Day is an absolute shopping spree - in 2021, consumers spent $11.2 billion on Prime Day deals. What some people don't realize, though, is that there are actually a handful of requirements to be featured as part of the Prime Day bonanza. Your product needs to have at least three and a half stars to be featured, to ensure consumers are spending their money on products that meet expectations. Knowing your product meets that requirement before launch builds confidence, boosts morale, and provides critical product data for the marketing and sales teams.

These teams need the user testing results in order to capitalize on opportunities like Prime Day.

So, how should you present your test results to sales and marketing teams? A common best practice when running delta tests is to collect satisfaction scores from users when they submit their feedback on key product features. This allows you to realistically predict the success of the product when it goes to market.

You'll also uncover what people love about your product (typically captured via Praise), which directly translates into key messages for sales and marketing teams to promote and share, as part of the product description, on social media, or sometimes even on the physical box (if it's a hardware product).

Sharing User Testing Results With Development - Ensure Real World Stability

Quality assurance and development teams generally focus on stability as their key metric for success - and there's no reason to try and reinvent the wheel. Stability is important, but what may be overlooked is just how important your user testing program is in verifying stability outside of the typical QA environment.

You may have an incoming list of known issues or improvements that exist and are pending within your product. The "easy win" here is leveraging your testing program to confirm the accuracy of this list, and assess the importance of these issues and ideas in real environments. However, it's important to keep an open mind and leverage deeper metrics like Centercode's impact scoring to prioritize how important existing flaws or new features actually are to your target market.

For instance, when kicking off a testing effort, it's common to hear from engineers "We know about X - it's in the backlog and will get fixed eventually, but we're good to go for now". What engineering can’t confirm is how impactful this particular item actually is beyond their own assumptions, and more importantly where it ranks among anything else that is encountered during your test. That additional perspective is a unique benefit of your testing program, and something you should wear proudly.

One snippet to keep in mind: it's important to focus on what matters most. Using a metric like impact score lets you prioritize your efforts to ensure you're investing resources in addressing the areas that are having the largest impact on your product. A feature like Centercode's Product Success dashboard lets you dynamically adjust how much effort you want to put into addressing work items, to achieve the most efficient (and hopefully large) impact.

Sharing User Testing Results With Management - Proving the Value via Key Metrics

It feels great to do a good job, and it feels better to be acknowledged for it. Maintaining a high quality user testing program leads to higher quality products which directly benefit your organization, and as a larger part of that success, your testing program deserves acknowledgment.

Management and executives care about the success of their initiatives and investments; maintaining a solid return on investment across the board is critical.

Centercode's dashboards and delta metrics (like Health, Success, and Impact) are a perfect example of the type of high-level test results worth bubbling up to this level. They minimize the moving parts surrounding a testing program and let higher-ups zero-in on the key results and metrics that ultimately matter and help prove the value of your efforts.

For example, sharing a low Delta Success score with a product team lead could be the push they need to dive in and start addressing key issues with the product before launch. Additionally, making stakeholders aware of a high Delta Impact score is likely to increase their buy-in and investment in your testing program.

Another great example is sharing the scrum-style updates from Ted, Centercode's virtual assistant. These are bite-sized, concise, and give a peek behind the curtain without getting too nitty-gritty.

Tying It All Together

There are many ways that different teams can benefit from your testing program results. Each team is likely to care about a slightly different piece of the pie, but the overall picture is always important.

These benefits can only be realized if you start sharing user testing results with these other teams, so get out there and prove your value! You're already doing the "work", and Centercode is here to help make capturing and sharing those results a breeze.