Creating an Idea Board

Milivoje Jokanovic

Hi everyone - looking for insight or examples.

I would love to create an Idea Board where our users could write posts and suggest what features or functionalities would be great for them to use inside our platform.

At this moment we are collecting ideas either via having regular 1-1 meetings with our clients or via email form. That's why we want leverage this to a higher level. It's a win-win solution either for us as a company and to users of our product.

An idea is to give to users options where they can post new ideas or suggestions, but also it would be great if they can vote or give kudos for ideas that have been already posted.

HubSpot is doing a great job with their Idea forum. You can take a look by clicking on the link below

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/ideas

Can you please help me or suggest me what tools are you using or what would be a great solution for this?

Thank you all!

Misha

Ido Barnoam

Hi @Milivoje Jokanovic

Our product team uses Productboard to manage our product's roadmap. One of their features that I love is the ability to have a section where it's possible to allow users to submit ideas, see other users' ideas, upvote them and have a conversation around ideas.

We have implemented that on our website and you can see how it might look like here

The nice thing is that each product manager speaks directly with the users who submitted the idea and can join the conversation.

It's working great for us so far and user-submitted features are getting more presence in our road map since then.

Mike Davis

Hi Misha,

Community and Ideas are a match made in heaven (or at least I think they are). For as long as we've offered a community, our customers having been sharing ideas and giving feedback, even if we didn't ask for it. Over time we began to lean into that more and more, providing a space just for ideas, suggestions, feedback, etc., on our community. And only recently have we started to fine tune it bit and truly bake a process into it both encouraging the use of community for ideation and feedback (there are many benefits) and developing a streamlined process that both takes the burden of CSMs in handling feedback and updating customers and is more transparent and speedy for customers. We also promote ideation during our own annual conference, which has shown great success in getting many ideas shared with lots of votes on what customers want. 

We utilize Zendesk and JIRA heavily in the process of handling the ideas and updating customers. Our CSMs don't have to be savvy in either application as we provide them filterable dashboard views to more quickly find what they are looking for. So far this approach has been working well and offers great time savings for CSMs and greater visibility into customer requests for our engineering teams, and of course enhances the voice of the customer too.

I really like @Ido Barnoam's approach and would like to get there. In general, the more transparent you are and the more info you can share with customers, the better, even if its a "no, we're not gonna do that".

Sophie Quinn

We also use ProductBoard here! It's been an awesome tool. It integrates really well with Jira too so the development team can have a great insight into what the Customers are feeding to us. 

You can also create different views for different people, that way I can collate the feedback from the customers, and the Product team can use their tool to do the analysis on it. 

I agree with @Ido Barnoam too the Portal feature they have is a real asset. It will also allow you to notify customers when their feature is being built or has progressed.