Facilitating Beta Testing with Product Teams

Hello! I'd love some advice from others in the SaaS industry.

Have any of you created a discussion category in your community for internal product teams to facilitate beta testing with community members?

Here is my current thought process:

Create a discussion category.
Add a role that can access that category.
Give product managers the necessary permissions to manage discussions within it.

Does this seem like the right approach? I'm wondering if there's a way to decrease the amount of manual administrative work for me, as this seems like it could involve a lot of one-off role assignments.

I'm also considering the potential need for more privacy. The way I'm currently thinking about it, the discussion category would be open to all members participating in various beta tests, with discussions on various features (x, y, and z) all visible to that group. However, some product managers might prefer more private discussions for specific features.

Any suggestions on how to improve this process would be greatly appreciated!

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Shauna

Hey @borme — love this topic!

Curious about one factor - does the group of beta testers change with the feature they are testing (i..e, are there x number of beta testing groups per year?) or is it just 1 subset of beta testers that are testing various features?

Depending, the category might be the best approach (and one that I've seen many folks use), but our Groups feature might make more sense here (and a feature that's about to get an overhaul as well!)

borme

Beta Tester will change based on the feature they're testing.

AeRoSpaceman-Oracle

@borme
I'll try to make this short. At my previous company using Vanilla, we did all our product beta testing using Categories. We were testing physical products and software. We had one main Beta category that all users could see and find out about new beta testing opportunities and announcements. We had multiple sub-categories that were role restricted for our tests that were in progress. This worked out great for us and was easy to manage. We would then archive the category after the test was over and delete the roles for that particular beta to keep things clean. Just my 2 cents.

Brett

borme

Very helpful explanation. Thank you!

ChristineN

Yes, we do this with private groups (I guess technically "secret" in Vanilla).

borme

I'd love to know more!