The Graphite Guide to Product Feedback: Turning Power Users into Product Partners

The best product feedback often comes in unexpected forms. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tomas Reimers revealed how Graphite turned their most demanding users into product development partners, leading to innovations they never anticipated.

The Power User Paradox Most companies view demanding users as a challenge. But for Graphite, they’re an asset. “A joke we make on the team is you don’t need to get it right because our users will tell us when we’re wrong,” Tomas shares. “We mean that sincerely.”

From Criticism to Collaboration What makes Graphite’s approach unique is how they handle user feedback. Instead of just collecting feature requests, they embrace user-created solutions. “We have users who have written Chrome extensions to edit our site to be exactly what they want, and then they send us that Chrome extension,” Tomas explains. “They’re like, ‘hey, you guys did it wrong, but it’s good. I fixed it for you.'”

Building Trust Through Transparency Rather than getting defensive about feedback, Graphite maintains radical transparency about their technical challenges. As Tomas puts it, “Listen, here’s the technical challenge we have when working with GitHub or we’re working with some technology. We’re welcome to brainstorm with you on ways to solve this, but this is what we’re facing.”

The Team Mentality This collaborative approach has transformed their relationship with users. “One of the success modes for companies that work with us is that they just view us as another team,” Tomas notes. “Like, oh, this is the Code Review team. And the Code Review team is a team at this company like any other team at this company.”

Early Access as Quality Control To maintain this level of engagement, Graphite carefully controls access to their platform. “For us, at least at the scale that we’re at, growth is not the major concern,” Tomas explains. “Instead it’s more like education and adoption of okay, pretend someone does sign up. Do they understand our workflow? Do they understand our tool? How do they react to it?”

Learning from Mistakes This careful approach came from hard-learned lessons. “We have some users who we let on a little too early,” Tomas shares, “and what happens is… we’ll do interviews with them, we’ll be like, ‘hey, we noticed that you don’t use this feature, it’s broken.’ They’re like, ‘yeah, it breaks in this way.’ We’re like, ‘we fixed that like twelve months ago.'”

Building for the Long Term Their approach to feedback aligns with their larger vision. As Tomas describes it, “What we really want to do is we want to bring the speed that these big companies can iterate and develop with and the safety and quality that they get from that too… and provide that to everyone.”

For B2B founders, Graphite’s experience offers valuable lessons in user engagement. By treating feedback as collaboration rather than criticism, maintaining transparency about technical challenges, and viewing users as team members rather than customers, they’ve created a product development ecosystem that continuously improves their platform.

The results speak for themselves: with approximately 2,000 weekly active users and a growing waitlist, Graphite has shown that turning power users into product partners can be a powerful strategy for sustainable growth.