At Buffer, we’re very lucky to obtain a whole lot of characteristic requests each month. Our neighborhood is keen to assist us enhance, and it’s an absolute blessing.
We’ve experimented with totally different processes for incorporating person suggestions and concepts into our product and preserving our neighborhood knowledgeable of real-time updates, however it may be difficult to do this properly.
Within the spirit of transparency, it’s necessary to us that we let people know when their requests are being labored on, whether or not their thought is technically attainable, or if there are different issues we have to prioritize.
In the present day, I’m excited to share the following evolution of constructing along with our neighborhood, Buffer Solutions.
Learn on for the backstory of how we received right here and why we’re so enthusiastic about our new suggestions hub and clear roadmap.
Our first clear roadmap
Practically eight years in the past, we launched the primary model of our clear product roadmap.
It was a public Trello board with product ideas from customers organized by stage of improvement. Anybody may vote and go away feedback on a suggestion.
To submit a suggestion, you’d should fill out a Typeform that was embedded on our web site.
We related this Typeform to an inside Slack channel in order that we may control all submissions and have discussions about them.
Lastly, if we determined to discover a characteristic request, we might add it to the clear roadmap. Due to the quantity of requests we obtained, solely a really small share of requests would make it to the roadmap.
It wasn’t one of the best course of
This method of amassing and managing characteristic requests labored pretty properly, however over time we began to determine some flaws.
Duplicate characteristic requests.
As a result of we did not publicly share each characteristic request, we ended up getting the identical request from totally different individuals time and again.
Figuring out who requested the characteristic.
When contemplating whether or not to construct a brand new characteristic, it’s useful to know who the characteristic is for. At the moment, there was no manner for us to attach a characteristic request to the person who shared it, past manually wanting up their e mail deal with in our database.
Protecting customers knowledgeable.
After submitting a characteristic request, the person didn’t obtain any comply with notifications to allow them to know in regards to the standing of the request. Did we see it? Is it being labored on? Has it been declined? With such numerous requests, it was just about inconceivable to maintain everybody posted on how their request was being dealt with.
A renewed deal with neighborhood and a brand new process pressure
This 12 months, we recognized our neighborhood as a precedence for our workforce.
Why?
Now we have a small advertising and marketing funds and no salespeople. Subsequently, we rely closely on individuals having constructive experiences with our product and our workforce after which recommending us to their mates to others.
Caring for our neighborhood and ensuring they really feel related to us helps construct a greater product, develop our model, and it’s additionally simply the suitable factor to do.
Our CEO, Joel Gascoigne, is without doubt one of the leaders behind our renewed neighborhood efforts. To get issues rolling, he created a brand new undertaking and taskforce to revamp how we acquire and work with characteristic requests. The duty pressure included Brandon from our Product workforce, Adam from our Advocacy workforce, Sofia from our Design workforce, and me, from our Advertising workforce.
A enjoyable, cross-functional crew!
The undertaking concerned figuring out and implementing a brand new, clear, customer-facing instrument to switch the makeshift system we’d created utilizing Trello, Typeform, and Slack.
After doing a little analysis, we landed on featureOS.
With featureOS you possibly can centralize, arrange, and reply to buyer requests in a single place. There are a selection of different instruments which can be comparable however we selected featureOS as a result of:
- They had been very conscious of our suggestions. They even constructed a brand new characteristic for us!
- Their pricing felt affordable for our wants.
- They provide a lot of integrations.
- Their product felt intuitive.
With this new instrument, we set about creating model 2.0 of our clear product roadmap.
Probably the most thrilling factor about our new clear roadmap is that it’s, properly, much more clear!
You’ll be able to see each characteristic request that has been submitted by the neighborhood. You’ll be able to vote or remark in your favourite concepts. And, in fact, you possibly can submit your individual. You may as well select to get notified when a characteristic goes from being “Deliberate” to “In Progress,” or “In Progress” to “Full.”
And better of all, you should utilize your Buffer login credentials to do all of it.
Sharing your suggestions and concepts
Anybody can share a suggestion or vote on present ideas by going to ideas.buffer.com. Present ideas are sorted by probably the most upvotes, so the preferred ideas might be on the prime.
You may as well kind by recency, product improvement stage, and votes by you.
All new ideas are routinely categorized as “In Evaluation”. This offers different customers the chance to upvote the request and our workforce an opportunity to think about if and when so as to add it to our product roadmap!
So as to add your individual suggestion to the board, hit the Recommend a Function button and fill out the shape.
Viewing the product roadmap
You’ll be able to see how the way forward for Buffer is shaping up by switching to the Roadmap view. On this view, ideas are sorted into Kanban-style columns. You’ll be able to remark, vote, or subscribe to a publish from this view, too.
Getting notified about our progress
Once you submit a suggestion, you’ll routinely obtain an e mail at any time when somebody feedback on the suggestion or its standing adjustments. You may as well subscribe to different ideas to remain up-to-date with any adjustments.
Over to you!
What ought to we construct subsequent? We would love so that you can assist us form the way forward for Buffer by including your votes and ideas to our new roadmap. We won’t wait to see your concepts!
