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We are committed and excited to partner with our community to develop a better product. This category is the best place for you to share your ideas and discuss them with other community members and inSided staff. We review all ideas to see if there is a demand or to further investigate them. We will also engage with everyone about their ideas to understand your use cases and needs to help us decide whether we want to pursue an idea.
 

 

Before you submit an idea

Search (please)
We hope you have checked if someone already submitted an idea like yours. 🙂 We sometimes see duplicates here - better to spend your time searching instead of writing out an idea that already exists. :)

Describe your idea with as much detail as possible
Sometimes a screenshot can say more than a million words. 😉 The richer your description, the more likely we and others will immediately know what you mean (and the higher the chances someone will vote for your idea).

One idea at a time
Please do not submit multiple ideas in one topic. Otherwise, it becomes messy and nobody knows which feature people who voted actually want to be implemented. Submitting ideas is free, so don't hold back to submit multiple ideas.

 

 

What is the process we use to evaluate ideas?

When you submit a new idea, it will have the New status. Within 2 weeks the product team will have a look at your idea, and possibly ask you some more questions to make sure we understand the idea. After the first review, we will change the status of the idea to reflect our plans with it.

An idea will get one of the following states:

  • Open - The idea has been reviewed and is open for discussion and voting. This means that we think the idea is interesting, but we are not ready yet to decide whether we want to do something with it. This means that we want to wait for more feedback/votes, it can also mean that this idea does not fit our product strategy at the moment, but is something we might look at later.
  • Added to backlog - The idea has been planned for development in the near future
  • Under construction - The idea is actively being built on by the product engineering.
  • Delivered - The idea has been implemented and is available.
  • Delivered (Partially) - Some aspects of the idea has been implemented and are available.
  • Closed (Parked) - We reviewed the idea and we know we won’t build it any time soon. This could be because the complexity of the idea, the value it might return, or the fact that the idea is not aligned with our product strategy.
  • Closed (Duplicate) - Idea is duplicate we will merge the topics.
  • Closed (Never) - We will never work on this idea, as it isn’t part of our core business/product vision.
  • Closed - We reviewed the idea and we feel it is not an idea. We will comment and either close or move the topic.

 

 

Quarterly Ideation Review

On a quarterly basis, we will review all open ideas to re-evaluate their status. This will also be communicated in a dedicated overview of reviewed ideas (expect those to be published each quarter, so in January, April, July, October).

We choose to leave ideas open as long as we still believe this might be something we pick up in the future. Expect us to comment on your idea once more if it is being reviewed by us.
 

What happens when we pick up something (status: under construction)?

This means that we have started working on this idea and you should expect an update in the upcoming weeks. We will share dedicated updates in the topic.
 

What happens when we park something (status: parked)?

When an idea receives this status, it can have several reasons (which we will communicate):

  • This is not a good fit with our product vision: we need to focus a certain amount of time on our vision, this makes sure we can make bigger, significant improvements in many fields at the same time.
  • Technical limitations: an improvement might have technical dependencies we need to resolve before we can pick it up (e.g. performance).
  • Return on investment: We get a lot of very good suggestions here. Unfortunately sometimes, the time which needs to be invested to realize an idea might be too high compared to the actual gain, or it is simply that we could implement other, more meaningful/requested improvements at the same time.

We hope that you are not demotivated when one of your ideas receives this status. We probably even liked your idea as well! And who knows, it could very well be that the reason for refusal might be reverted in the future!?
 

How many ideas are actually being implemented?

As of August 2019, we were actually able to realize ideas which received 399 votes out of 2068 total votes. We are proud to see that this is a whopping 19%! We do realize that this is also due to a backlog of extremely popular ideas - but we are committed to continue working on on your valuable ideas.

Having said that: It’s still very hard to predict how many ideas will be implemented when, but it’s important to understand that posting an idea on the board does not come with a guaranteed delivery. The ideation board is a tool we use to manage and communicate with customers about ideas, and better understand your challengess with the product. Next to the ideation platform, our team has many other sources for possible new feature ideas (but inSpired is our favourite!)

We try our best to balance ideas that push us towards our product vision with those that are specifically requested by you on inSpired. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and important to keep this into account when managing your expectations. As a result, we have opted to be conservative in changing your idea statuses..
 

Your opinion

We are curious to hear your feedback on our ideation module and processes.

  • Would you like us to handle things different in regards to ideation?
  • Do you have best practices for ideation which you would like us to do as well? there something you do with ideation which we are missing?
  • Did we fail to review your idea?
  • Did you have a hard time finding an idea? Flag it to us!

Of course any other feedback or criticism is all welcome, after all we want you to keep submitting inSpiring ideas! 🙂

It would be interesting to know how InSided prioritises ideas submitted by the community? If number of votes doesn’t make a difference (as mentioned in some ideas), what makes a community idea go top of the list for the product team?

Cheers!

It would be interesting to know how InSided prioritises ideas submitted by the community? If number of votes doesn’t make a difference (as mentioned in some ideas), what makes a community idea go top of the list for the product team?

Cheers!

@Gabolino  In general and I dont know the Insided methodology, #votes although a strong KPI and a primary influencing factor, may not be the default prioritization weightage as the SAAS PMs will look into other data points like, what is the spread (different co.s the voters come from v/s a handful of co.s) and where on the strategic roadmap would the requested idea fit and other factors. That’s why it may take 6months or even 4years to see a requested idea to fruition.

Having said that, it’s the Idea Submitter’s role to craft a compelling usecase v/s a couple of lines around a feature upgrade that is very close to one’s heart. 

Replying from living on both sides of the fence these days :)

Thanks for sharing your view, also for asking that question @Gabolino. I am not involved in handling those ideas since a while now (because my buddies from the product team are trustworthy enough in handing this themselves), but I can try to shed some light on to how we usually do it at inSided. This is to the best of my knowledge and might be incomplete.

The vote count surely plays a big role, we always want to see which features see a lot of demand and review them periodically. We also are checking who is voting on those - not necessarily per ARR, but actually more the spread of customers, or if e.g. all votes are from the same company or if we see a variance in desired use cases.

Another factor is the “weight” of an idea: How much value can we deliver vs. how much time will it cost to deliver. This can result in us fast-tracking a medium-popular idea simply because we can squeeze it into a Sprint but at the same time also do not distract us from a planned, bigger innovation. Some of the popular ideas would force us to make pretty large investments to achieve something that (compared to equally intensive investments) might not be in balance right now. We might be able to deliver something with way bigger impact in the same time. This can cause de-prioritization (more on that later).

A third factor then is our vision: Do we find it is a good fit with what we want our platform to be (right now), are we able to make that step or invest that time at this point of our platform development.

This brings me to the fourth factor: Prioritization. With the mix above, together with our own ambitions for the year, we establish a perspective of which improvements are urgent, important and achievable, and therefore should be next in line. As a result, bigger themes of a quarter could be either customer-driven, major improvements (e.g. recent group improvements), or rather strategic improvements (which of course are also adding value for our customers, e.g. everything we did around customization or Knowledge Base).

This process is constantly evolving, we have come a very long way ever since I was still a customer. We currently have a good track record of constantly implementing ideas with each quarter, the team has a good focus on this (reason that I am also not involved in that any more) and I feel that we can also show that with more and more of those very popular ideas being implemented. But I hope you understand that we cannot follow only the vote count when it comes to roadmap planning, as we have to balance all of these interests, ambitions and ressources. Needless to say we love them all and would also like to get them all in eventually! So please keep on submitting and voting, it surely makes a huge impact!

 

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