How Madden Analytics works with customer feedback

In this episode of Datadrivet, Petter Flordal of Madden Analytics talks through how a young company keeps customer feedback at the centre of its product work. Madden Analytics is a tool that helps e-commerce retailers plan their inventory, and at the time of recording the company had been running for under two years.

The origin story is a useful one for any product team. Madden started by helping e-commerce businesses understand their sales data across different retailers. Working close to that data, they spotted a sharper pain underneath it. Retailers were struggling to forecast how much stock they actually needed, and most of them were trying to do it in spreadsheets. That observation became the product. Customers now describe the value in plain terms: finally they can forecast inventory needs and avoid sitting on overstock.

What Petter keeps coming back to is the habit of asking. Madden gathers feedback continuously rather than in occasional bursts, and they ask about two different things. The first is the products customers already use, so the team knows what is working and what is friction. The second is new ideas the team is considering, so they hear the reaction before they build. That close, ongoing dialogue with the user base is what lets a small company iterate quickly and refine the product without guessing.

The takeaway is simple and hard to do well. To build the right thing you have to understand what customers want and why they want it, and the only reliable way to know is to stay in steady contact with them. Madden treats that contact as a standing process rather than a one-off research project, and uses it to decide what to build next.

Listen to the full episode of Datadrivet for the full story of how Madden Analytics turned close customer relationships into a forecasting product retailers rely on.