Community Digest Email

Sorry for being late to the party, unfortunately I was swamped with different important projects and did not find the time to give a proper response here, which I think it surely deserves.

Now before I start with this, I am not part of the product team so I can only speak from my own knowledge and experience, which is limted in this area. But of course this is a recurring topic since a while now, and it is not the first time that I am thinking about it.

I do not believe that there is anything speaking against such a feature in particular, or that specific data points are missing - it just helps us to form a better informed decision. I am sure many here at inSided would also like to have something like that. It is more a topic of balancing priorities and cost/benefit until a certain degree which can cause an idea to take longer to be realized:

In the 6-7 years that I have been working with this platform, we have come a very long way. Our platform is quite complex, multiple areas with features that are deeply connected. Around three years ago, we started with important infrastructure programs to de-clutter the coding behind the curtains, to free us from many limitations and risks our platform had accumulated over the years.

At the same time, also due to these excercises, we were accelerating our product development massively to improve core aspects of the platform to meet the demand and feedback from our customers. Think for example of all the new modules (Knowledge Base, Product Updates, Events, Groups, also a review / seperate module for ideation) or very handy features (wysiwyg-editor, Customization mode, Self-Service Badges, etc.) that massively improved the experience of you and your users.

Of course producing bigger, completely new features take time and focus. I am proud to say that especially in 2021, we were able to deliver on a bunch of significant, popular and also older ideas.

Nevertheless it always has to be thought through very well which bigger topics we can tackle next. In the context of this specific feature, we know that there are other tools out there that already offer sending email campaigns. Of course this is not an automated digest like described here, but it is a viable workaround.

If you now take into account how much time we have to invest in building a new mailing system (the notification system does not qualifiy for this unfortunately), plus an automated logic that calculates interesting topics (per recipiant), than this means a significant commitment of our ressources.

Knowing the investment needed to build something big enables us to compare this with other, similar important improvements that we can make in the same time. So if we find other, very good and valuable ideas that we want to bring to life as well but can be achieved with less impact, this can result in features not being picked up until we feel it is the right time for it. We are then rather deciding in favour of another improvement than against a certain improvement.

This is just a high-level response, there would be even more I could show and tell you as examples. What I can say though is that we surely try, e.g. did we work for a while on an email-campaign feature (which you could see as a first step towards an email digest functionality), however we also had to halt this due to the sheer complexity and teams running out of time they could invest. Hopefully you will see this as a sign that we actually have made some steps and learnings in the meantime which will hopefully help us in the future to build this.

We are usually not commiting to these things if they will not be worked on in the next 3-5 monthts. This does not mean that there is no likelihood of such a feature coming next year. We are just not at a stage where we can commit to this.

For further information on how we are working with ideas / build our product roadmap based on your feedback, I can recommend this article, also check my latest reply that goes a bit more into detail on the popularity of an idea:

And if you have more questions around this, please let me know!

Thanks for the candid and exhaustive response @Julian, appreciative of your passion from 1 Cmgr to another.

As Cmgrs we can decide to offer transparency if nothing else about the Complexity of Prod Dev. involving so many teams, it’s totally understandable how it is incredibly more difficult to ship features than end users may believe to be.

End users however represent the real world. Real usage and workstyle we have gotten used to over the years, and when we cant get that, we get stranded, it’s like trying to realign ourselves back in time when things were more web program based and less app based.

Given that scenario, as Cmgrs we also are expected to be resourceful to offer hacks to tide over this phase of allowing the tech to mature.

In this case the core problem is:

Unable to stay on top of topical threads on the Community - Ideas, Questions; content in general

So I'm thinking maybe the Tag feed for e.g. Success plans, ingested through an RSS xml, like in the olden days, served to people’s emails? Remember we used to IFTTT specific usages back in the day? But couldn't locate an xml url or an RSS - What good alt. hack can you think of today? Pl brainstorm a bit with me here.

wondering if there has been any further thoughts or developments on this. thanks