Suggestion: 🛣 Canny or other alternative for roadmap/feature requests

[Illusory]

Hi beautiful Fibery team!

It would be amazing to have a feature request platform for Fibery so voting on feature requests and adding ideas is easier to contribute to for users and assuming much easier to manage for you guys.

Cheers

[Polina_Zenevich]

Hi!
You can share your Feature requests here
Suggest Ideas - Fibery Community - every topic is checked by our team and linked to our current backlog via Highlights

Сommunity feedback is on an equal footing with private intercom chats, interviews, and conversations feedback.

This is how our requests tracker looked a week ago, for example

But this is smth we have now - I’ve noted your suggestion and who knows, maybe someday we will add Feature Voting and will remember, who suggested it

[B_Sp]

Hi, I’m sure I’ll be just the first of my fellow esteemed power-posters in here to flag up the other mentions of this - very glad it is continuing to get support.

Here is the very first request I’m aware of on this subject:

Upgrade Discource Features to include voting, tagging

Love this request @helloitse, was going to in fact post myself something like this and I found it! A lot of the other up-and-coming tools out there allow the ability to vote-up features. Some have it in Discourse, off the top of my head: AirTable Asana Monday And ClickUp famously does this, but in another tool Canny and I think that has gotten out of control more than they bargained for… I agree we have dup requests in here, and may basic requests around things like “recurring Tasks” that …

Which led to a very spirited discussion, and I think a lot of additional support, in this thread, which granted was not initially about this topic (my fault as I started the tangent ). That tangent starts here:

Thoughts on the "Fibery approach to integrations" article?

Michael, it’s always good to see you in here, wish you could find a few more minutes a week to jump in like you used to - it’s always so good to see your comments. And @Oshyan as always appreciate your commentary, I have never been able to take issue with any of what you write! I think this is great to see these items on the roadmap. Really encouraging to see a lot of what I’m looking for in “Green.” And re: your tool for presenting this, I’d go so far as to say you have a re…

You mention Canny, in fact I showed a screenshot of that being used to promote a Fibery integration on Integromat’s Canny board.

I actually plan to write a few more points about this as I owe @Chr1sG and @Oshyan, among others, responses, but on this subject. But just to address quickly re: Canny, I would propose the Fibery team continue on with Discourse and integrate a voting function that is on some other Discourse boards:

@B_Sp

Here is how Monday and Asana, two tools that I’m sure have many, many users who would find Fibery superior, have set up simple voting using this exactly Discourse software:

I will remain hopeful that the team will give this some deep consideration, and thanks!

More to come from me on this subject, but really glad to see additional support!

[Illusory]

Agreed. It’s just a bit difficult to follow feature requests on the forum, without some kind of voting system at minimum. I saw one of the posts you linked above while scanning feature requests, but the title did not immediately indicate to me that it was exactly about my request. So, some clarity and better organization would definitely benefit the community and the Fibery team IMHO.

[B_Sp]

Great point and I think exactly what you’re suggesting with some kind of board would alleviate this.

In Asana’s forums, where I’ve been active, their mod actually will reach out and ask you if you are OK if they merge requests. That is probably a job too big for the Fibery team right now, but if @mdubakov is open to it, I’m sure we’d have some volunteers who are capable in here and willing to do that competently on behalf of the team, @Oshyan can I nominate you . I have seen other communities, such as Atlassian, and I believe Coda, that have given these kinds of rights to power users who aren’t officially employed by the company in question.

Thanks again for good commentary about this!

[Oshyan]

@Illusory

I saw one of the posts you linked above while scanning feature requests, but the title did not immediately indicate to me that it was exactly about my request.

I’d agree that sometimes it’s hard to find if a request has already been made due to wording choice, etc. But I’m not sure how a vote function would address that.

@B_Sp

In Asana’s forums, where I’ve been active, their mod actually will reach out and ask you if you are OK if they merge requests. That is probably a job too big for the Fibery team right now, but if @mdubakov is open to it, I’m sure we’d have some volunteers who are capable in here and willing to do that competently on behalf of the team

Interesting. Yeah, I think this kind of thing would more likely address the “I’m not sure if my request has been posted” thing because active/long-time mods would have a better overview and be able to remember in many cases “Ah yes, a very similar request was made by so and so” and probably be able to find it, even if the wording is different, and then link or merge them. So yes, this is a good idea IMO, if the Fibery team is open to it. I’d help in whatever time I had to spare for it.

All that said, the team has been pretty clear about how they (Michael especially) feel about voting features in particular.

@mdubakov

There are many discussions about Votes, but to be honest I don’t like them. +1 has almost zero info. What I like is real evidence. So we want to export all discussions from this community and link them to Ideas/Features/ProductAreas, etc. Thus we will collect aggregated info from various sources (Intercom, Community, private conversations, etc) and there will be no misleading indicators.

So that point can perhaps be debated with Michael if you wish. But ultimately they have an approach that aims to integrate feedback in the forums, they recognize the importance of it and believe they have a method to handle it. Now that a Discourse integration is happening (and obviously already working internally), it’s certainly clear to me that our discussions matter and are incorporated into considerations. Whether a vote of some kind would be a valuable additional signal is another matter…

[Illusory]

Thanks for the reply and quotes! I’d definitely like to add one last thing then for @mdubakov.

@mdubakov

There are many discussions about Votes, but to be honest I don’t like them. +1 has almost zero info. What I like is real evidence.

I certainly understand where this is coming from. Although voting can help you get a quick view of popular features, it doesn’t give a lot of context or foster meaningful contributions or evidence to the requests.

On that exact note – have you considered Productboard? (I see @B_Sp suggested it as well).

They have voting + evidence/context prompting built-in.

Vote On Features Customers Want Most - productboard

For example, I can go to their public roadmap, I can see everything labeled as so:

Each category then has sections that can be configured:

From here, I can see how many “Upvotes” there are and read the feature request overview:

@mdubakov

Thus we will collect aggregated info from various sources (Intercom, Community, private conversations, etc) and there will be no misleading indicators.

They integrate with Intercom, Github, Jira, email and more… so, I believe you’d be able to integrate conversations. Hell, maybe Fibery can do an official integration and pull in PB feedback to leverage Fibery features.

There are also may be features of Productboard that Fibery can leverage for their internal teams, and/or later implement into their own app.

All in all, I know adding more to the list, means adding MORE to the list, and the system F-Team has implemented is obviously working. More than anything, we’re ecstatic about Fibery and can’t get enough it.

Cheers

[Chr1sG]

@Illusory

On that exact note – have you considered Productboard?

It would not surprise me at all if the Fibery team have plans to create something similar, using Fibery itself.
Wouldn’t you think that they could share access to an app that does the things ProductBoard does, so that Fibery users (or customers-to-be) can be editors/commenters?
It would mean that the Fibery team would eat their own dog food and lots of people would get introduced to all the wonderful features that Fibery offers (if they’re not already signed up).
Given Anton’s great article on prioritising features, I think it’s pretty much certain that they’re trying to do this already internally, just not publicly yet.

[B_Sp]

That is exactly what I was thinking, funny I think @Illusory you have actually outlined exactly what Fibery is trying to offer with this current push for “Product Team” use case that we read about here, on the blog, in Reddit. I in fact think that the Roadmap they teased could become the beginnings of a tool that would in itself beat the likes of ProductBoard, ProdPad, Aha, Roadmunk, Product Plan, Craft.io, and other players in that space. I tried to suggest that in fact:

@B_Sp

And re: your tool for presenting this, I’d go so far as to say you have a really great potential feature of a public roadmap for Product Teams . You should prioritize this! I can easily see with just a few tweaks how this could be right on par with Product Board, Aha, etc. tools that are huge in this space, and highly rely on their “Public-facing Roadmap” feature.

***I wonder if the Fibery team is able to capture these bits of context here and there, ala @Oshyan’s suggestion around using the “Quote” capability here in Discourse…

@Oshyan

I have another idea that I’ve recently found great value in as I work more with Discourse, and would probably help with your need as well (though you may prefer the “extended” quoting as you describe). And that is: quotes but with a button you can click to expand the displayed quote in-line .

At any rate, I have spent a lot of time looking at those tools and a huge issue is you can’t really manage the basic work of a team in those tools - so you are again using “isolated tools” which Fibery aims to “replace and bring everyone together:”

I think Fibery can easily trump those tools as a more comprehensive offering, I’d really like to see those users get in here and see what they would request!

I also think @mdubakov even hinted at Fibery doing what these tools do today:

@mdubakov

You can gently try Jira integration. Import Projects, Versions, Issues, Statuses and Users. The main use case is to do Product Management in Fibery and link Issues from Jira to Features and Products in Fibery

So, “Product Management,” not so much “Project” Management. That is the realm of all those tools…and although I don’t really support Jira integration since I think Fibery should look at that as a competing tool and focus on strengthening Fibery first before building a way to integrate with something that could easily be replaced with Fibery, this integration already looks head and shoulders above the other Jira integrations that each of the tools I listed has in varying degrees. So again, Fibery needs to be in the same conversation as a Product Management tool alongside all the other stuff it can do like CRM, Software Dev, Project Management, Task Management, Support Ticketing, etc. etc.

[B_Sp]

By the way, this was really interesting to see this in action from @Polina_Zenevich.

@Polina_Zenevich

You can share your Feature requests here
Ideas & Features - Fibery Community - every topic is checked by our team and linked to our current backlog via Highlights

Product Board also has a feature that is one of their “biggies” where you can link ad hoc text to issues in their system, but not at the power level of Fibery. My team plans getting started on our feedback management soon here in Fibery, very interesting to see this in action!

[B_Sp]

Hey guys, I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but I continue to think you guys could do with some better publicly-facing way to show users what features are prioritized, and clearly deliver votes. It is very hard to see here in Discourse with the way you have it set up things like:

• what features are actually in progress - you have that added to the titles of some Feature Requests, but not all, and there are some that are deployed that are not updated;

• It’s unclear how you are counting “hearts,” etc.

So I couldn’t help but notice when you wrote this post the other day:

Automate and integrate with Integromat

You actually referred not to your own board, but to Integromat’s Canny board! That makes me wonder - are you counting those 15 votes on their board for that??

Because if you are, you are basically contracting your declaration up this thread that you guys don’t really buy into “naked” votes that don’t have comments around them, which is the way the Canny system - or Discourse Plug-ins that track votes in Asana, Airtable, Monday, etc., work.

Anyway I realize you have a strong opinion here, but I would really like to see some superior system to what we have now…and curious what the rest of the community thinks about this, maybe they think I’m wrong.

And of course, super excited to see the Integromat integration, cannot wait to jump in! I think this is one of the more useful feature releases in a while!