I recall being told a number of years ago “Ignore your customers at your peril”; something that has stuck with me. When building a great software solution, one the most important thing a solution provider can do is listen to their users. Every user will have the “best feature” that you just must put in your solution which presents one of the greatest challenges any product manager has; making roadmap priority decisions that will meet the expectations of all users and all these worthy ideas. As the user base increases, this challenge becomes greater with more ideas, differing opinions on priorities coupled with a finite development capacity.
As a direct result of listening to our customers (and adding more functionality), at Blueshift we were starting to see this problem arise and were challenged on how to best prioritise?
We do take our own advice at Blueshift, so instead of creating a spreadsheet and trying to manage feature requests, we sought out the industry best practise solution. After evaluating a number of solutions we settled on UserVoice.
UserVoice allows our users to make product suggestions in an on line forum open to all our users, comment on suggestions from other users, and finally vote on the ones they like. Blueshift then uses this information to make quantitative data driven decisions to prioritize our product roadmap. This process not only means we are adding the features our users want most, but our process is transparent to our users too.
We see this as another way we are improving the Customer eXperience at Blueshift. Check it out at http://feedback.blueshift.one.