Hi,
I'm working for a software company, and we recently started using Insided. Before we used Insided we had a thing we called wish website. We had this site for over 8 years. The problem we were never able to cope with in a good manner is expectation management.
See, we do want to know what our customers want, but over the course of 8 years we only had a few handful of customer wishes that really contributed to the growth of our products. We had hundreds of wishes of the category 'nice to have'. And, obviously, some wishes were nonsense.
The first category is easy: do it. The third category is also easy: don't do it. But the second category, the nice to haves, are much harder. Our customers get certain expectations when they are able to add wishes for development, and as a product owner I would like to be transparent in my communication. However: 'I don't know if and when we are going to build your suggestion' is the worst kind of response (I think).
How do you guys respond to these kind of wishes in your community?
How to deal with customer wishes?
Great question Koen!
Firstly, we believe there's no one-size-fits-all solution for handling customer ideas on a community - there's a lot of factors that will influence how you run it, including your development capacity/velocity, the way you structure your roadmap, the kind of industry you're in, buy in from your management team, and many more.
The principles behind how we run our idea board on inSpired:
@mafe.pelaez can provide some additional insights on the way she runs Deezer's idea board?
I've also attached a presentation from our CSM team that provides an intro to ideation/our ideation module.
Hope it's helpful 🙂!
Firstly, we believe there's no one-size-fits-all solution for handling customer ideas on a community - there's a lot of factors that will influence how you run it, including your development capacity/velocity, the way you structure your roadmap, the kind of industry you're in, buy in from your management team, and many more.
The principles behind how we run our idea board on inSpired:
- We (the actual product team) provide a reasonably quick response.
- Clearly communicate that the idea board is not a product backlog - it's a list of ideas. These ideas are inspiration for both current and future product innovations/improvements. Nice-to-haves may provide a lot of influence here.
- Try not to add too much to your backlog if you don't have the capacity to work on the ideas.
- Keep the scope of the idea board 'closed' (for instance - our idea board is limited to ideas for our platform/software).
- Try to identify the 'why' behind each request, if it's not apparent from the idea (e.g. if someone posts a solution as an idea, ask why they're after this solution in particular - what's their problem?)
- Have a topic explaining how the idea board works and what the statuses mean- e.g. https://community.insided.com/got-an-idea-39/create-ideas-with-the-product-team-182?forumid=39
- Try to pick up some low-hanging fruit from time to time - small things that delight your customers 🙂
- Here's a starter guide to ideation from our CSM team: https://community.insided.com/getting-started-33/everything-you-need-to-know-about-ideation-706
I've also attached a presentation from our CSM team that provides an intro to ideation/our ideation module.
Hope it's helpful 🙂!
inSided product alumnus
Whoa @daniel.boon so much info! Thanks, I'll start checking out those topics right away. Meanwhile I would like to encourage other users to post their opinions on this matter. Would love to know how other organisations handle this subject.
I'm going to start creating our own vision regarding idea's from customers, and I'll make sure to post my findings and actions in this topic.
I'm going to start creating our own vision regarding idea's from customers, and I'll make sure to post my findings and actions in this topic.
Hi @Koen Sterken
How are you?
We are trying to set up a process that is transparent to our users and also doesn't promise too much as our product roadmap is changing everyday.
How are you?
We are trying to set up a process that is transparent to our users and also doesn't promise too much as our product roadmap is changing everyday.
- We select the most Voted Ideas and share this with the Product & Development team.
- Product team give their feedback and expected dates when the ideas are added to the roadmap.
- We have implemented one of the most voted ideas! not as the user wanted but it is the first step, you can it see here.
- Some ideas from the forum are already created and some we are definitely not going to happen, this information help us to create the Monthly review.
- One of our super users gave us one idea to be more transparent with them, create a Trello board where we can add the product roadmap, you can see this example from Monzo community. I think is great and we are thinking if we do something similar. Let me know what you think 🙂
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Hi @mafe.pelaez , thanks for sharing your experience! I like your Monthly review! I'm working on a strategy for us, and I'll take a look on how you guys handle this issue for sure!
We have some bad experiences with voting. Just like Daniel said: it is a list of idea's; not a backlog. But we didn't communicate this really well, and had some customers who were 'angry' their idea didn't get picked up, 'because it already has 12 votes!' (we had wishes with 100+ votes).
We received thousands of ideas and developed hundreds, but somehow we managed to not live up to the expectations (of some customers). So my first step is just that: manage expectations.
We have some bad experiences with voting. Just like Daniel said: it is a list of idea's; not a backlog. But we didn't communicate this really well, and had some customers who were 'angry' their idea didn't get picked up, 'because it already has 12 votes!' (we had wishes with 100+ votes).
We received thousands of ideas and developed hundreds, but somehow we managed to not live up to the expectations (of some customers). So my first step is just that: manage expectations.
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