At Buffer, we’re very lucky to obtain a whole lot of characteristic requests each month. Our neighborhood is raring 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 retaining our neighborhood knowledgeable of real-time updates, however it may be difficult to do this nicely.

Within the spirit of transparency, it’s vital to us that we let people know when their requests are being labored on, whether or not their concept is technically doable, 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 Suggestions.

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

Almost eight years in the past, we launched the first version of our transparent product roadmap.

It was a public Trello board with product strategies from customers organized by stage of improvement. Anybody might vote and go away feedback on a suggestion.

To submit a suggestion, you’d need to fill out a Typeform that was embedded on our web site.

We related this Typeform to an inside Slack channel in order that we might keep watch over 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 proportion of requests would make it to the roadmap.

It wasn’t one of the best course of

This method of accumulating and managing characteristic requests labored pretty nicely, 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 folks again 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. Presently, there was no method for us to attach a characteristic request to the person who shared it, past manually wanting up their electronic mail tackle in our database.

Maintaining customers knowledgeable.

After submitting a characteristic request, the person didn’t obtain any comply with notifications to allow them to know concerning the standing of the request. Did we see it? Is it being labored on? Has it been declined? With such numerous requests, it was nearly unattainable to maintain everybody posted on how their request was being dealt with.

A renewed deal with neighborhood and a brand new activity drive

This yr, we recognized our neighborhood as a precedence for our crew.

Why?

We’ve a small advertising and marketing finances and no salespeople. Subsequently, we rely closely on folks having optimistic experiences with our product and our crew after which recommending us to their associates to others.

Taking good care of our neighborhood and ensuring they really feel related to us helps construct a greater product, develop our model, and it’s additionally simply the fitting 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 gather and work with characteristic requests. The duty drive included Brandon from our Product crew, Adam from our Advocacy crew, Sofia from our Design crew, and me, from our Advertising and marketing crew.

A enjoyable, cross-functional crew!

The undertaking concerned figuring out and implementing a brand new, clear, customer-facing software to switch the makeshift system we’d created utilizing Trello, Typeform, and Slack.

After performing some analysis, we landed on featureOS.

With featureOS you’ll be able to centralize, set up, and reply to buyer requests in a single place. There are a selection of different instruments which are related however we selected featureOS as a result of:

1. They have been very aware of our suggestions. They even constructed a brand new characteristic for us!
2. Their pricing felt affordable for our wants.
3. They provide numerous integrations.
4. Their product felt intuitive.

With this new software, we set about creating model 2.0 of our clear product roadmap.

Probably the most thrilling factor about our new transparent roadmap is that it’s, nicely, much more clear!

You possibly can see each characteristic request that has been submitted by the neighborhood. You possibly can vote or remark in your favourite concepts. And, in fact, you’ll be able to submit your personal. You can even select to get notified when a characteristic goes from being “Deliberate” to “In Progress,” or “In Progress” to “Full.”

And better of all, you need to use your Buffer login credentials to do all of it.

Sharing your suggestions and concepts

Anybody can share a suggestion or vote on current strategies by going to suggestions.buffer.com. Current strategies are sorted by probably the most upvotes, so the preferred strategies might be on the prime.

You can even kind by recency, product improvement stage, and votes by you.

All new strategies are mechanically categorized as “In Evaluation”. This offers different customers the chance to upvote the request and our crew an opportunity to think about if and when so as to add it to our product roadmap!

So as to add your personal suggestion to the board, hit the Recommend a Function button and fill out the shape.

Viewing the product roadmap

You possibly can see how the way forward for Buffer is shaping up by switching to the Roadmap view. On this view, strategies are sorted into Kanban-style columns. You possibly can remark, vote, or subscribe to a put up from this view, too.

Getting notified about our progress

If you submit a suggestion, you’ll mechanically obtain an electronic mail each time somebody feedback on the suggestion or its standing modifications. You can even subscribe to different strategies to remain up-to-date with any modifications.

Over to you!

What ought to we construct subsequent? We might love so that you can assist us form the way forward for Buffer by adding your votes and suggestions to our new roadmap. We will not wait to see your concepts!