Hey Community - I’d like to get some examples of how other communities are handling ideation. I’m looking for details - IE integrations, timelines for responses, etc. I’m working with our products team to do a phased approach, but I’d love to show them how others are handling this. I’ll share a couple examples of ways I’ve done this in the past.

Current Company:

We’re looking to roll our phased feature requests. We use Jira for our feature request process. Right now only employees can open FRs. Customer success managers add their customers to the tickets in Jira, which gives some insights into votes. Customers can’t see Jira. When we release a new version, we say how many FRs we implemented, but there’s no place for all customers to see a full list - they are only notified of the ones they’ve been added to. What I’d like to do next:

Phase 1 - Link Jira and Gainsight so that we are pushing ideas/feature requests back into the community. The 1st phase will just be surfacing the ideas that are implemented with each release. So we’d have a status of “released” and the community could see exactly what was requested and released.

Phase 2 - Continue surfacing all implemented ideas (released). Add any ideas we’ve committed to (planned) for the next release. This will give customers some insight into what’s coming in the next release. We currently do roadmaps through CSMs/products with individual customers. Hoping to do more group roadmaps as well.

Phase 3 - Continue phase 1 and 2 and add ideas that are under consideration, so customers can add their feedback to ideas that are in discovery.

Eventually I’d like to have all ideas managed in the community, but we’re a ways out. This is kind of what I think I can get our product managers to commit to in the near future.

In the past, this was a successful way we handled it:

All ideas were posted in the community and they were pushed to Aha. The ones that were under consideration (or more committed) were pushed to Jira for sprints.

Any customer or employee could create an idea.

Our support team leads had a weekly 1 hour meeting where they reviewed new ideas. They could offer current functionality workarounds or let customers know if the product already met their need, even if in another way. 

Once a month, I had a meeting with the relevant product managers where they responded to and set the status of ideas. I had a list that I brought to them (managed with tags) based on popularity, urgency, or areas I knew we were planning to work around. They had the ability to do this any time on their own, but I found I needed a regular check in to keep things going.

We were SAAS, so with each release, we would mark ideas as released, then move others to in development, or planned, or under consideration. 

It worked, but it was time consuming. We didn’t have parameters around number of votes to warrant a status, etc. although I’ve heard of other people doing that. 

We implemented tons of customer ideas, but really only amounted to 10-15% of the ideas in the community because it really took off. Everything from “save me 2 clicks here” to “completely redesign this form.” Overall it was really positive.

I’d love to hear what other teams are doing!