How do you close the loop on ideas?

Alex Dunne · 2023-01-18T18:42:56+00:00

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Hello!

Looking for some general advice and best practices on how to close the loop on ideas posted to the Community?

For context, I'm a team of one and I'm trying to find an efficient way to loop back on older ideas once they have been solved/implemented. My current tactic is to make sure all ideas are properly tagged and then cross referencing after each monthly release but it's not ideal and can be a bit cumbersome.

Any advice appreciated!

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PiperWilson

Hi, @Alex Dunne!

I'm unaware of any best practices, but I'd love to come up with an idea or two to help. Can you share more details about your current tactics? It will help me try not to reinvent the wheel.

BrendanP

We're looking to host a Vanilla Connect session in the nearish future on some best practices on how to effectively run Ideation in your community so look out for that.

Is your product team involved at all or are you just communicating the ideas to them? Do you use any specific product management software in the backend that we could look into integrating with?

Additionally, are all ideas in a single Category or are they divided up between different areas of your product?

From what you've shared it sounds like the issue is keeping track of changing all the idea statuses which seems like a good problem to have to some degree. I know in this company we've committed to updating the statuses once a quarter because it is a big process. Maybe your frequency is too high given that it isn't someone from product directly managing these changes?

Some more insights can be found here but I do think this warrants a larger conversation.

https://www.higherlogic.com/lp/managing-product-feedback-at-scale/

Alex Dunne

Hi @BrendanP and @PiperWilson

Yeah, I'm currently a team of one. I present the most common ideas to our Product team once per quarter as part of their planning sessions. Right now, there's some reluctance to integrate ideas with the product management software due to capacity issues.

Our Ideas board is broken up by product area so yeah, it's basically a case of struggling to find a way as a one-person team to make sure I'm closing the loop and communicating back to users once new features or improvements have been released. Ideally, they're all reading our release notes anyway but I know it's not always the case. I'll keep an eye out for the Vanilla Connect session