You wouldn't give this to marketing, but make the decisions data-driven where you try as hard as you can to get a sample of what your average user is doing, and whether they're being hindered by bugs or some features.
This is easiest with hosted SAAS. It's why companies like Google care so little about user feedback. They can e.g. do an A/B test on their UI and find from their data that moving some button makes it easier to find (fewer false clicks), no matter what the minority of users who contact them and swear up & down that the new UI sucks say.
With self-hosted or desktop software this is harder. You might have some phone-home feature that sends aggregate statistics, or simply pro-actively contact a random segment of your userbase. "Hey, you use our product. Does it mostly work for you, or are you being hindered by issues? If so which?".
That's still a huge selection bias (people who care enough to respond to a survey), but still beats the even bigger bias of people filing bug reports.
And I'm saying this as exactly the sort of person who'd be annoyed enough to file a very detailed bug report against some piece of software I use.
Moving the button around the screen is the kind of thing that will drive you to a local optimum and dump you there, with no sense of purpose or direction to a better place.
Direct user feedback shakes you out of that dead-end, and towards a newer, much better dead-end on the path to success. Maybe the button is solving the wrong problem, but users latch onto it as the first thing that comes to mind. You can't find that out unless you interrogate your customers, and most engineers wouldn't do it unless their back is against the wall. Happened to me last week - spent an hour on the phone+hangouts with a customer, and it turned out they needed something other than what they asked (and we didn't have). Happens all the time.
[BIG-CO] employees are just talking to each other, and then A/B testing their way to success along the nearest promotion-worthy metric. The courage, or the necessity, to overcome the aversion of the users is a competitive advantage for a small company.
EDIT: want to add that I am enjoying our conversation here, thanks for joining.
This is easiest with hosted SAAS. It's why companies like Google care so little about user feedback. They can e.g. do an A/B test on their UI and find from their data that moving some button makes it easier to find (fewer false clicks), no matter what the minority of users who contact them and swear up & down that the new UI sucks say.
With self-hosted or desktop software this is harder. You might have some phone-home feature that sends aggregate statistics, or simply pro-actively contact a random segment of your userbase. "Hey, you use our product. Does it mostly work for you, or are you being hindered by issues? If so which?".
That's still a huge selection bias (people who care enough to respond to a survey), but still beats the even bigger bias of people filing bug reports.
And I'm saying this as exactly the sort of person who'd be annoyed enough to file a very detailed bug report against some piece of software I use.