At Buffer, we’re very lucky to obtain a whole lot of function requests each month. Our neighborhood is raring to assist us enhance, and it’s an absolute blessing.
We’ve experimented with totally different processes for incorporating person suggestions and concepts into our product and maintaining our neighborhood knowledgeable of real-time updates, however it may be difficult to do this effectively.
Within the spirit of transparency, it’s vital to us that we let people know when their requests are being labored on, whether or not their thought is technically potential, or if there are different issues we have to prioritize.
As we speak, I’m excited to share the following evolution of constructing along with our neighborhood, Buffer Options.
Learn on for the backstory of how we received right here and why we’re so enthusiastic about our new suggestions hub and clear roadmap.
Our first clear roadmap
Almost eight years in the past, we launched the primary model of our clear product roadmap.
It was a public Trello board with product ideas from customers organized by stage of growth. Anybody might vote and go away feedback on a suggestion.
To submit a suggestion, you’d need to fill out a Typeform that was embedded on our web site.
We linked this Typeform to an inside Slack channel in order that we might keep watch over all submissions and have discussions about them.
Lastly, if we determined to discover a function request, we’d add it to the clear roadmap. Due to the amount of requests we acquired, solely a really small proportion of requests would make it to the roadmap.
It wasn’t the perfect course of
This technique of accumulating and managing function requests labored pretty effectively, however over time we began to determine some flaws.
Duplicate function requests.
As a result of we did not publicly share each function request, we ended up getting the identical request from totally different folks again and again.
Figuring out who requested the function.
When contemplating whether or not to construct a brand new function, it’s useful to know who the function is for. At present, there was no method for us to attach a function request to the person who shared it, past manually wanting up their electronic mail handle in our database.
Preserving customers knowledgeable.
After submitting a function request, the person didn’t obtain any comply with notifications to allow them to know in regards to the standing of the request. Did we see it? Is it being labored on? Has it been declined? With such numerous requests, it was just about inconceivable to maintain everybody posted on how their request was being dealt with.
A renewed deal with neighborhood and a brand new job drive
This yr, we recognized our neighborhood as a precedence for our workforce.
Why?
Now we have a small advertising price range and no salespeople. Due to this fact, we rely closely on folks having optimistic experiences with our product and our workforce after which recommending us to their buddies to others.
Caring for our neighborhood and ensuring they really feel linked to us helps construct a greater product, develop our model, and it’s additionally simply the suitable factor to do.
Our CEO, Joel Gascoigne, is likely one of the leaders behind our renewed neighborhood efforts. To get issues rolling, he created a brand new venture and taskforce to revamp how we acquire and work with function requests. The duty drive included Brandon from our Product workforce, Adam from our Advocacy workforce, Sofia from our Design workforce, and me, from our Advertising workforce.
A enjoyable, cross-functional crew!
The venture concerned figuring out and implementing a brand new, clear, customer-facing instrument to interchange the makeshift system we’d created utilizing Trello, Typeform, and Slack.
After doing a little analysis, we landed on featureOS.
With featureOS you possibly can centralize, set up, and reply to buyer requests in a single place. There are a selection of different instruments which are related however we selected featureOS as a result of:
- They have been very attentive to our suggestions. They even constructed a brand new function for us!
- Their pricing felt affordable for our wants.
- They provide a lot of integrations.
- Their product felt intuitive.
With this new instrument, we set about creating model 2.0 of our clear product roadmap.
Probably the most thrilling factor about our new clear roadmap is that it’s, effectively, much more clear!
You may see each function request that has been submitted by the neighborhood. You may vote or remark in your favourite concepts. And, after all, you possibly can submit your individual. You can even select to get notified when a function goes from being “Deliberate” to “In Progress,” or “In Progress” to “Full.”
And better of all, you should utilize your Buffer login credentials to do all of it.
Sharing your suggestions and concepts
Anybody can share a suggestion or vote on present ideas by going to ideas.buffer.com. Present ideas are sorted by essentially the most upvotes, so the most well-liked ideas shall be on the high.
You can even kind by recency, product growth stage, and votes by you.
All new ideas are robotically categorized as “In Overview”. This offers different customers the chance to upvote the request and our workforce an opportunity to think about if and when so as to add it to our product roadmap!
So as to add your individual suggestion to the board, hit the Recommend a Function button and fill out the shape.
Viewing the product roadmap
You may see how the way forward for Buffer is shaping up by switching to the Roadmap view. On this view, ideas are sorted into Kanban-style columns. You may remark, vote, or subscribe to a publish from this view, too.
Getting notified about our progress
Whenever you submit a suggestion, you’ll robotically obtain an electronic mail every time somebody feedback on the suggestion or its standing modifications. You can even subscribe to different ideas to remain up-to-date with any modifications.
Over to you!
What ought to we construct subsequent? We would love so that you can assist us form the way forward for Buffer by including your votes and ideas to our new roadmap. We won’t wait to see your concepts!
