Product Roadmap Info
Many of you ask me how to stay up to date on product development & the roadmap. Over the last few weeks we've made some updates to our tools & integration to help us better communicate our product development plans. Here's a breakdown of where you can find more info on product development in Product Board.
What is Product Board?
For those unfamiliar, Product Board is our product management tool. It allows us to collect insights from our staff and customers on the various feature requests and pain points they encounter in our product.
- CSMs & Sales frequently submit insights on behalf of their customers via email.
- This is syncing with our Success Community's Product Ideas to capture insights directly from our customers
- We've also recently set up our Github integration to hook into our estimates repo to make sure we capture custom services request as well.
With all this info we're able to determine a user impact score for the features we'd like to build and get a view of all related customer insights. This helps us tremendously with our planning.
With this we've made several different boards for ourselves to aid in our planning and understanding of customer needs.
Where can I see roadmap updates?
- Portal: For a catalogue view of what's been recently launched, what's in progress and what is currently in planning.
- Quarterly Roadmap: For a view of what's going on quarter by quarter as they get planned
- Tentative Roadmap Timeline: For a view of our planning timeline.
- Prioritized Features: This is a view of our features ranked by number of requests. With this we can see which are our features and improvements are most in demand. Todd & I can also use this view to measure the impact of each feature against our goals & objectives.
Please Note -
- These are private boards, customers do not have access.
- These plans are subject to change on a day-to-day, week-to-week, sprint-to-sprint basis as we learn more about our efforts, receive more requests and coordinate between teams.
What do all these colours & statuses mean?
You'll notice that in each of these views, the features are colour coded. Here's what those mean:
- Light blue - Collecting Insights - We are still not certain about when and what we will do to address these requests, but we are collecting customer comments & votes for future consideration
- Fuchsia - Considering - We are seriously considering this feature, making wireframes & reviewing user workflows
- Orange - R&D Review - User stories, ideas & wireframes are being reviewed with R&D
- Dark Blue - Planned - Product & R&D are aligned on what is needed and have a good idea of when they will be able to start working on this feature
- Yellow - In progress - This feature is in active development and/or release planning
- Green - Completed - The development work is done. See Portal for confirmation on what is launched and available to customers, or check out our release notes.
I cannot access these links. Help!
You need to have a product board account to view these boards. If you do not have an account email product@vanillaforums.com and we will send you an invitation to join.
I want to know more about our product vision & goals
We still have our roadmap positioning doc that can be shared with customers.
Comments
-
What does a Red colour status mean?
0 -
Red means there's a Service request for the feature with a pending estimate.
1 -
Update for December 2020. We have some collateral for Sales & CSMs about the roadmap to aid in some of the discussions you are having with customers & prospects. I have presented this to both CSMs and Sales teams and will revisit this with you all as we progress through our roadmap objectives and bring updates to these documents. As outlined in the roadmap doc:
Vanilla’s product mission is to empower businesses to build tightly integrated and engaged customer communities. Our roadmap is centred around this mission, and works to solve real-world challenges and use cases for this space.
In order to build our roadmap, our product management team works with internal stakeholders and customers to better understand the challenges they are facing and the problems we should be trying to solve. This continuous feedback process results in a long list of possible features and enhancements. From there we score and prioritize each item based on customer impact, customer demand and technical feasibility.
Our Product and R&D teams work according to agile methodologies and best practices that promote continuous delivery and a strong feedback loop to allow us to keep a pulse on customer needs as we introduce new or updated functionality. As such, our roadmap is a living, breathing document that will be updated and communicated on a quarterly basis. This roadmap represents our vision for our product as it stands today, and our plan for the upcoming 9-12 months.
As stakeholders you will be updated on this roadmap as things progress. I will have several standing meetings and demos scheduled with Sales, Marketing, Support & CSMs in the new year to keep the lines of communication open and will update this collateral as needed.
- December 2020 Roadmap Slide Deck: This can be used for roadmap discussions. Product Management is still available for roadmap presentations where and when they are called for.
- December 2020 Roadmap PDF: This can be used as a script for your roadmap discussions, or can be shared with trusted clients. if you are unsure, consult with your manager about this before sharing any content.
THIS IS CONTENT CAN BE PRESENTED OVER ZOOM, BUT CANNOT BE SHARED OR RECORDED WITH PROSPECTS.
0