Tools of the Trade: Using Pendo to Manage Customer Requests

Product teams are often flooded with ideas from customers, stakeholders, and their own discovery work, and need a way to capture them without derailing their workflow. In this Tools of the Trade interview, Teresa Torres talks with Leann Schneider of Plum, who describes how her small team uses Pendo's feedback tooling to collect structured requests from customers and internal staff. The setup asks submitters for the underlying problem, blockers, and current workarounds, which helps the team judge severity and find discovery participants. A recurring review cadence sorts requests into strategic and quick-win tracks, and automated status updates keep submitters informed. The approach shows how transparency and structure can reduce ad hoc interruptions while still honoring customer voices.

01Key takeaways

• Give feedback submitters a short template asking for the goal, blocker, and current workaround to surface the real problem.
• Review incoming requests on a regular cadence rather than reacting to each one as it arrives.
• Split requests into an outcome-driven track for discovery and a quick-win track for small, low-effort improvements.
• Use upvotes and submitter details to find customers worth interviewing when a request becomes strategically relevant.
• Automate status updates to requesters so the team gets transparency without spending time on manual follow-up messages.

02Key sections

Who Plum is and the feedback problem

Leann introduces Plum, an assessment company, and her role on a two-PM team overwhelmed by feedback arriving through meetings and Slack. The team wanted a way to streamline that intake.

Structured feedback collection

Plum embeds a feedback widget in its product, available to clients and internal staff, that asks for the goal, the blocker, the current workaround, and submitter context. The questions are designed to uncover root problems rather than solutions.

Reviewing and consolidating requests

Requests are reviewed monthly by a product operations manager with the PMs, who sort by votes and status and merge duplicates. Volume has dropped over the years, from weekly to roughly monthly.

Two tracks: strategic and quick wins

Requests tied to quarterly outcomes go to discovery or voting, while small changes are routed to designers or engineers as quick wins for backlog slack time. Non-urgent items can also recruit interview participants.

Closing the loop with stakeholders

Status changes trigger prewritten, customizable emails to submitters and upvoters, reducing manual Slack follow-ups. Leann notes this relieves PMs from defending ad hoc requests in meetings and builds transparency.

03From the post

“When you’re building a product, you can easily get overwhelmed by ideas. There are the ideas your product trio comes up with based on your discovery work, the ideas that come from your customers in the form of specific requests, and the ideas that come from stakeholders within your”

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.