Concerns about feedback and feature request tracking

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@Oshyan Thank you for starting this thread, I wanted to do it myself yesterday but here you are :slight_smile:

Let me provide my perspective on the topic:

  1. I didn’t see any single tool that is good enough for viable feedback accumulation. I used UserVoice heavily in my previous company and didn’t like it. Canny is very similar so I don’t like it either. The problem with all these tools that they enforce data model, and in Fibery we use quite different data model for feedback management (more on this below)

  2. I don’t like votes, since votes are easy and it takes nothing to click and vote. I do like verbal requests though since they demand at least “some” effort.

  3. The main goal of the Fibery Community is to provide and discuss ideas/problems/issues, and that is what happens here. This is not a place to prioritize features or display what features are more important. That is for us to decide.

How we prioritize features internally?

We accumulate feedback from 3 main channels: Intercom, Calls + Meeting notes, Discourse. As a result, we have verbal feedback that accumulates into a number of references and we rely on this number to identify feature importance. Here is the list of all Ideas/Features/Insights and User Stories sorted by the number of references in the last 6 months:

Screen Shot 2021-04-14 at 10.32.33
Screen Shot 2021-04-14 at 10.32.332440Ă—1712 449 KB

As you see, we do try to work on top requested things. There are some exceptions. For example, permissions improvements were on top for a long time, but we can’t start them since we didn’t have a good conceptual solution. It took use about 6 months to find it and now we are starting permissions implementation. Form View is on top as well, but so far we don’t think this is a must-have feature for Product Teams (maybe we are mistaken, but that’s what we feel right now).

We have the capacity to work on 4-6 major features simultaneously.

That is not all. We also have many small things that have 3-5 references and have no chance to be on top, but they can be bundled into some initiative like “Better Getting Started experience”. People express problems differently, but that is our job to analyze them, generalize them and bundle into features. I’d say this is not what we are doing very good at this moment, we still somehow prefer to work on large missing Features from the image above, but we are thinking about this process and going to improve here as well.

Ideal solution

Ideally, we should just share some parts of Fibery and allow people to communicate on Ideas and Insights, in this case we will have a direct match between our terminology and set a stage where you can communicate more efficiently.

Here is the video how we categorize and prioritize feedback.

However, this is a very hard technical and even conceptual problem and I don’t know at what point we will be ready to solve it.

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