Best Of

Hey @Tmetcalf - thanks for reviving this conversation.

I can start by giving you some more details on how things work here at Vanilla.

Here's the process we generally follow:

1. Ideas are collected in the community
Customers submit ideas and vote or comment on existing ones. This helps us gauge demand and gather additional context directly from customers.

2. Community engagement helps surface trends
Votes and comments help our teams identify which ideas are gaining traction and what problems customers are trying to solve.

3. Ideas are reviewed and triaged
Our Product Team regularly reviews ideas in the community. During this process, ideas may be:

• Clarified through additional questions
• Merged with similar ideas
• Marked with statuses such as Under Consideration, Planned, or Delivered

4. Ideas feed into our product planning process
Ideas that align with product strategy and customer demand are brought into our internal product planning and development workflows for evaluation and prioritization.

5. Status updates close the feedback loop
We update idea statuses and communicate progress so customers can see how their feedback influences the roadmap.

This approach allows us to use the community as a continuous customer feedback channel, while our internal product tools manage prioritization and development.

💡 We also recommend using automation rules to streamline idea management for your Product Team. For example, you can automatically update an idea’s status once it reaches a defined vote threshold (for example from "Open" to "Being Considered"), which helps surface high-interest submissions more quickly. You can also trigger an email notification to the Product Manager when that threshold is met, so the right person is alerted without needing to monitor the queue manually. This helps reduce administrative effort and ensures popular ideas are reviewed in a timely way.

I hope this helps!