Vanilla's Roadmap 2019+

Hey team,

Our friends at Acer wanted me to write up a little summary of our roadmap for the next 2 years or so, to make sure they want to sign with us for two years (spoiler alert: they do!)

I wrote this up based on what Derrick and Todd shared with me, and they've asked me to share a copy with you!

Here ya go:

Vanilla uses a customer driven roadmap which means that we determine our roadmap based on what features will deliver the greatest value to our customers and their customers.

Our road map is focused on areas where we can demonstrate ROI for support communities — we believe that we can achieve this by listening to and tracking customer feedback to create a customer driven roadmap that will help ensure everyone’s success.

Vanilla Knowledge

In 2019, Vanilla launched Vanilla Knowledge: A community focused knowledge base product to enhance the ROI for customer driven communities. We are very proud of this new product release, but we will continue to invest in its continuous improvement over the coming months. We believe that Vanilla Knowledge will have a huge ROI for support communities and it will continue to be a pillar of our Roadmap going into 2020 and beyond.

Knowledge was a large feature to build and implement, and each new iteration is packed with new code that will allow it to work with Vanilla’s existing features, as well as to add new features as the need is uncovered through our own testing and customer feedback we’ve gathered. 

You can read about our progress on Knowledge in these recent release notes: 

• https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/76-2019-003#knowledge-base-(beta)
• https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/79-2019-004#knowledge-base
• https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/80-2019-005#knowledge-base-features
• https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/83-2019-006#new-knowledge-base-features
• https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/85-2019-007#knowledge-base
• https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/87-2019-008#knowledge-base
• https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/89-2019-009#knowledge-base-analytics-support
• https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/articles/97-2019-010-work-in-progress#knowledge-base

We plan to implement some popular KB feature requests in the coming months such as improved integration with subcommunities and localization. We’ve been gathering feedback on the KB from clients and prospects and will be prioritizing the next bundle of improvements in the coming months. If there is a particular KB feature that is important to you and the team, please let me know!

Analytics

Another feature that will be a focus in the next year or two is Analytics. Many of our customers have had strong (and often conflicting!) opinions on what metrics should be included in Advanced Analytics, but the common message is better, more granular and easily sliced-and-diced analytics, and we’ve listened to you and added this to our roadmap.

We plan to build an analytics feature that will be a 2.0 of the analytics we see today. We want to allow customers to build their own reports and extract them in an easier, more granular and in-depth way. The next version of analytics will also offer better overall control of analytics and associated charts so that each community can have metrics that are most relevant to their particular community and none that aren’t -- this way each community can have an advanced analytics that reflects the KPIs that are more relevant to how their community measures success.

The shorter-term 2.0 of advanced analytics will allow large communities the ability to examine breakdown level details of specific categories, roles, and subcommunities and allow much more granular or vertical analysis. It will also feature the ability to look at analytics at a macro level - this will allow high-level analysis of the big picture and will be particularly valuable for execs.

Looking further into the future, the next step for Advanced Analytics will be data collection of our customers using advanced analytics, which will open the doors to next-level features such as benchmarking, your community’s time to response vs. other Vanilla support communities, and other success metrics like NPS scores. We’re also considering introducing features that will allow communities to more easily and quickly calculate metrics most commonly asked for, such as cost savings, staff vs. non-staff actions to help demonstrate the value of community to the company at large.

Notifications

We recently completed our message queue infrastructure project, which opens the door for various improvements to our notifications.  Some of the big ticket improvements include:

• Grouping in-app (pop up) notifications by discussion.
• Improved per-category notification settings.
• Per discussion notification settings.
• Smarter flood control for notification emails.

Long term, we are also considering adding scheduled emails, email digests and more.

Web hooks

We would also like to implement webhooks in the next while.  A webhook (also called a web callback or HTTP push API) would allow Vanilla to provide other applications with near real-time information.  Webhooks are sometimes explained as a kind of reverse API -- with an API you would need to poll for data very frequently in order to approximate real-time, but with Webhooks, that information is ‘sent’ to you as it happens. In a nutshell, webhooks would deliver data to other applications as it happens, meaning you get data immediately.

Webhooks will make working with Vanilla APIs and integrating Vanilla with outside platforms much easier.  Webhooks will also generally go a long way in helping to make dev work a bit easier.

Webhooks are also an interesting example of our customer-driven roadmap -- very few customers specifically ask for webhooks, but rather ask for features or abilities that require webhooks. While gathering data on feature requests, support requests and pain points, we noticed that webhooks were a common blocker, and so we’ve added it to our roadmap in order to remove this blocker for some very interesting use cases.

Featured feeds

Many enthusiast communities (particularly around gaming) have asked for a featured feeds widget that would allow them to showcase staff or developer posts, and our professional services have built bespoke versions of this functionality a number of times for individual clients. This is a feature that we’ve heard (and built versions of) again and again from many clients and as a result have decided to put this into our core product. 

This feature will allow a special “featured posts” page and widget that will allow users to see all dev/staff/super user posts in one place, either in a list or carousel format. Here is a sneak peek at some wireframes (the x’s represent images): 

Regulatory Features

Like most SAAS companies, our roadmap needs to remain flexible for a number of reasons; one of the biggest sources of unexpected work comes from new regulatory requirements. As an example, the introduction of GDPR created a great deal of customer concerns and needs and we had to act quickly to help ensure that our customers remain compliant with GDPR, which affected other elements of our planned roadmap. 

We continue to monitor the global regulatory environment, and that may result in features that take precedence over other items, especially as the climate of privacy evolves. Every year new regulations and standards crop up and one of the benefits of going with SAAS is that you don’t have to roll your own regulatory compliance.