“What tools can I use to keep track of feature requests?”

That question got me thinking about the implications of product managers tracking feature requests as if they were a growing to-do list. Here’s how I responded on Quora:

“Don’t consider them feature requests, consider them customer feedback. Customer feedback can be good or bad – but regardless, it is still useful to understand your target, along with their frustrations, limitations, wants, needs, and ways to improve your product.

You can then use this feedback to better prioritize your backlog. This backlog will include ideas from your team, customers, management, and stakeholders. Of course, you can do much more than just sort by what we call “customer desire” – you can add impact and effort, sort by roadmap, product, tags, and much more – allowing you to prioritize your roadmap and keep focus on your product vision.”

Feature requests often come from a genuinely helpful place, but what are they really? It’s just someone telling you they’d like for you to change something that isn’t working for them. You don’t have to legitimize each and every one. The request is valuable as feedback, but you don’t have to bump it up to the front of the line because it came in as a feature request. 

Customer Feedback

What happens if you simply consider a feature request as customer feedback? I can think of at least a couple of things:

• Empower yourself to choose what gets built – Hey product managers, this is where I want you to get up, raise your arms, and scream ‘yaaaaas!!!’ because this power is exactly what you need to do a better job as a product manager.
• Investigate why they suggested it in the first place – You can take the time to dig into the underlying reasons that a customer sent in a request, and look into whether other users have sent in similar feedback. You can then prioritize feedback as it comes in without over-promising, under-delivering or upsetting anyone.
• Keep the feedback flowing – I never said the customer wouldn’t be able to still influence what you do. When customers realize that you consider all their feedback to help you decide what’s next for your product, you’ll get more of it.  

As a wise woman once told me, “You are not your market.”

Use this opportunity to understand your audience, learn from them, and make actionable changes that improve both your product and keep your clients happy. (And by “wise woman” I am really referring to our CEO Janna Bastow.)  

So what should you do with customer feedback?

So what do you do with your feedback once it comes in?

1. Tag each item that comes in so later you can filter
2. Sort through them to see how many popular an idea is
3. Determine how much effort it would require and how it might affect the product’s popularity.

Once you’ve weighed these factors against one another, you can start prioritizing all this feedback. If there’s a particular piece of feedback that’s just so good you decide you absolutely must consider it in your backlog, upgrade it to an idea. 

From here, you can start developing it into an actionable task. 

Contact the customer(s) that sent that feedback through and find out what led them to leave that feedback, and what their circumstances were, so you can build the business case for the idea with real customer data. (Customers love it when you contact them about their feedback, by the way.) 

Then start spec’ing it out. Convert it into something you could possibly work on and start discussing it with your team. What do they think? What do they want to see reflected in the business case? How much effort do they think it will require? 

Once you’ve completed the spec, add it to your roadmap. 

Final thoughts: Don’t put feature requests on a pedestal

By starting from your pool of customer feedback, you actually end up giving more power and consideration to your customers.

You listen, understand, investigate, and deliver on feedback they gave you – and then you actually follow up on it. There’s nothing as satisfying for a user than when they feel like they’ve had a positive impact on what you do. 

Your customers will feel like you are actually listening to them and that their feedback really is a part of how you improve your product. 

The post Try Not To Be A Slave To Feature Requests appeared first on ProdPad.

Filter your backlog for maximum control

Several different filters can be applied to your product backlog to help you get the most of ProdPad’s idea management features.

• Tags – These are your standard, customizable tags
• Products – Associate each idea to one or many products
• Whether it’s on a roadmap yet or not – Find out what’s planned
• User Personas – Associate ideas to various user segments
• Idea Creator – The person who actually logged the idea
• Idea Owner – The person in charge of taking the idea forward
• Idea Author – The bright person who came up with the idea!
• Status of the idea – Whether it’s in development, done, or anything in between
• Active vs. Archived – You can even dig though the ideas you’ve archived

You can refine your bank of ideas against even as specific criteria as you need by using multiple tags or combining any of these filters. And as always, these filters will work in conjunction with ProdPad’s powerful search. Plus, this razor sharp focus on a particular set of ideas can be applied throughout ProdPad. Your filters remain selected when you want to visualize priority, edit in bulk, or export your ideas. Filters make your backlog more manageable, no matter what you’re doing.

Sort your backlog any way you like

As well as applying granular filters, you can also sort your backlog by a number of relevant factors to bring the ideas you’re looking for to the top of the list.

• Date created
• Effort – This is a quick gauge, out of 100, on how much effort (relatively speaking) it’ll take to pull off the idea
• Impact – Like the Effort field, this measures how much impact the idea will have (top tip: combine with tags to identify what areas of the business will be impacted and improved)
• Popularity – Find out which ideas are most popular (bright red!) versus the ones that are feeling neglected (faded to grey)
• Detail – A rough guide based on whether the idea has comments, a business case or user stories, tags, or other fleshed out parts of the spec.

As always, your feedback is hugely appreciated. If you have any other ideas for how to keep your backlog tidy in ProdPad, just give us a shout at hello@prodpad.com.

If you’re not already a ProdPad user, you can start your free trial today!

The post Supercharged Product Backlog Filters appeared first on ProdPad.

As part of our series of enhancements to help you dig and sift through your product backlog, we’re very proud to launch the latest: A massively improved search tool.

What’s so great about it?

Well, it’s based on elasticsearch, an open source, distributed search engine built on top of Apache Lucene.

But really, we know you care about what it’ll do for you, rather than what it’s running on. Here’s some of the ways it’s better:

• Highlighted search results, so you can easily pick out the terms you were looking for
• Combine search results with filters on Tags, Products, and User Personas
• “Stemming” – Can’t remember whether it was ‘notification’ or ‘notify’ you’d entered in? Search for either, and the idea will surface.
• “Fuzzy match” – Our forgiving search will figure out what you might have meant to type, and find the best matches possible.
• Full text search – We used to only search on the overview of the idea, but now you can search through comments and through specs, such as the business case, functional specs, or user stories.

We hope that these changes will help you and your team find exactly what you were looking for, when tackling your growing product backlog.

So go on, try a search or two! Head to your Dashboard to try.

The post Search on! Surface everything with elasticsearch appeared first on ProdPad.

Clear filter results

The filters have been updated to more clearly show you what you’re filtering by, and now include clear counts of the number of results you can expect with each click. Combine filters to drill down to exactly what you’re looking for.

Re-order your product backlog

We’ve also introduced a set of order options – by default, your ideas are ordered by the date they were created, but you can now order by their popularity or amount of detail.

• Popularity is displayed beside each idea by a ‘dot’ that heats up from a dull grey to a hot red as your team continues to interact with it. See at a glance whether something resonates, or whether an idea is falling by the wayside.
• Detail is displayed by the size of the ‘dot’ beside each idea. As more requirements are gathered and more detailed specs are written for each idea, your dots will grow and grow. See at a glance which ideas have had a lot of thought put into them and which are stubs.

The filters you select will also take effect on your Bulk Edit page, your Visualise Priorities chart, and in your Export Ideas CSV.

We hope you take advantage of these new filters and sorting options, and that they help you better manage your growing backlog.

We’ve got much more to come this month, but if you have any feedback, questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you at hello@prodpad.com.

The post New filter options appeared first on ProdPad.

As your product backlog grows and grows (as these things have a habit of doing…), we’re providing you with more tools to help manage it.

You can now prune and manage your backlog using the new Bulk Edit functionality we released today.

With this tool, you can edit any number of your ideas all at the same time, allowing you to:

• Add a tag to the ideas
• Associate a product to the ideas
• Associate a user persona to the ideas
• Change the status of the ideas to Archived
• Delete the ideas – Tip: this will come in handy if you need to redo your Product Backlog Import!

We’ve also just added Products and User Personas in the mix of things you can filter your ideas by, giving you even better access to surfacing just the ideas you were looking for.

In your ideas list, you can mix and match filters, allowing you to filter by a specific product AND a specific tag at the same time.

Your results will be refreshed in the results to the right-hand side.

Always watching a particular tag, persona or product? Once you’ve filtered the results, bookmark the page you’re on, and it’ll save the filter for you to jump back to at a later time.

As we continue to develop ProdPad, we’ll certainly be adding more filtering options. Got one in particular that would be helpful? Get in touch at feedback@prodpad.com to let us know what!

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