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Voices Matter: Building a Better Ideation Process

  • May 23, 2026
  • 4 replies
  • 187 views

erica.kuhl
Gainsight Employee ⭐️

One of the hardest things about community ideation is balancing transparency with reality.

Votes matter. Comments matter. But product decisions are rarely as simple as “top voted idea wins.”

So we’re evolving the ideation process for our Customer Communities to make it more structured and a lot more transparent. 💫

Here’s what you can expect:

  • Votes and comments continuing to serve as important signals for demand and use case
  • Prioritization based on multiple factors - strategic alignment, technical complexity, and customer impact at scale
  • Better communication around where ideas stand and how decisions are being made
  • Internal quarterly reviews with Product Managers to ensure ideas are consistently evaluated

I’ve seen this firsthand over the years building community programs - sometimes the ideas with the most votes are absolutely the right next move. Sometimes a smaller request unlocks something foundational that benefits everyone later.

Neither is wrong. It’s just the reality of building products thoughtfully.

Every idea contributes to the bigger picture, whether it surfaces a widespread pain point, validates an existing direction, or helps shape future priorities.

We’re also taking a broader look at how ideation works across all of our products, with the goal of creating a more consistent, transparent, and thoughtful experience for the entire community.

It’s really hard to do this well. But we’re committed to getting better with every iteration.

 

4 replies

CyJervis
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  • Contributor ⭐️⭐️
  • June 5, 2026

Love seeing this direction! 

Having participated in and managed ideation programs myself, I have two quick tips that might help the CC evolution:

  • Prioritize Focused Ideation Sessions: While open ideation has its place, targeted sessions around features you are actively working on can be incredibly powerful. It invites customers into the design process and allows you to close feedback loops faster. (An excellent potential feature update for Customer Communities!)

  • Give General Ideas a "Shelf Life": Unchecked backlogs can quickly become graveyard spaces. Setting a timeline, like 6 months, for open ideas to gain traction or be closed keeps the community fresh. Adding an encouraging prompt at closure to resubmit allows users to reframe their use case with updated wording and rally fresh momentum.

Looking forward to seeing how your changes unfold. 


revathimenon
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  • Gainsight Community Manager
  • June 9, 2026

Thank you for sharing this, ​@CyJervis. Super helpful!

We've already started addressing the second point, as the backlog was definitely one of the main reasons for slower movement and idea progression.

The first point is particularly intriguing. While we currently use beta programs to gather feedback on features closer to release, the idea of engaging customers even earlier through focused ideation or validation sessions is interesting! 

Appreciate you sharing the tips!


  • Gainsight Employee ⭐️
  • June 10, 2026

@CyJervis Hope you have been doing well! I remember discussing your thoughts and experiences on ideation and you are absolutely spot on.

Currently, we are working out how to identify the right people to keep informed and proactively reach out to for specific product features & themes. ​@revathimenon has a great idea to leverage the “Discovery” status as an indicator, then we can look at votes and engagement on the ideas. There are other data points like subscriptions to content, where you’ve posted questions, answers, and conversations, etc. that we can leverage. The challenge is how best to automate it to pull all of the relevant context together to hand over to the Product team when research begins.

Your ideas around prioritizing focused sessions and giving a shelf life to ideas can be achieved with automation tooling. We are collaborating closely with the Gainsight Community to identify solutions and develop the tooling necessary for creating these experiences and folding our learnings back into the product.

We are working on it and will share more information later this year. Keep the great ideas and feedback coming, that is how we work together to build the best platform we can.


CyJervis
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  • Contributor ⭐️⭐️
  • June 11, 2026

Hey Larry! Doing well and busy prepping for migration into CC from a platform not to be named. 😂

I appreciate your context and know you already have plenty on your plate. I look forward to experienceing the platform transformation you have planned. You know I’m always good for honest yet constructive feedback if desired. 😉

A little off topic but we’ve been running data on the traffic decline on our current platform looking at community analytics, google search console reporting and referral traffic reports to put together an interesting correlation between Google AI search and community traffic changes. Reach out if it is of interest.