Managing feature requests: Enter the “Big List”
If you are a product company, and you have users, feature requests can become overwhelming. Folks write on our forums all the time, coming up with great suggestions for how to improve FreshBooks. It’s a key part of our business to have this sort of consistent ongoing feedback from our customers.
But as we’ve grown, the pace of incoming requests has far outstripped our ability to execute on them, and so folks are being presented again and again with the standard reply: “We’ll pass that on to our developers.”
I know that sounds like, “Shut up and go away,” but when Grace or Randy or whoever say that to you, they’re actually doing what they say, and I thought you’d appreciate seeing how that works.
We’ve built a custom tool to help us manage feature reqeusts, which is kind of weird since it’s a problem virtually every software company runs into, but nobody has a tool that does just what we wanted done.
What we wanted done was to track incoming requests and be able to accurately assess how many people are asking for them through ALL our communication channels. This is where a lot of “crowd-sourcing” tools fall down — they focus on just one channel. But we wanted to be able to track phone calls, forum posts and emails, as well as our own staff votes for particular items. So now we have such a tool. I’m not always super-imaginative about this sort of stuff and it was my project, so I’ve called it The Big List.
The Big List is just what it sounds like — an enormous list of feature requests, prioritized by two things: how many people ask for them and by how important we think they are. We only implemented the big list a few weeks ago and it’s pretty cool. Here’s a peek at a typical feature: a request to manage partial payments on FreshBooks invoices:
You can see on the right hand side that this entry records nine forum posts about this issue (I know there’s more out there; we haven’t finished entering all the information for this entry yet), no phone calls and thirteen “RT” tickets (yeah, presently we use RT for support issue tracking), and that no staff members have yet voted for it yet. Nine plus none plus thirteen plus none equals twenty-two, which is what the big number twenty-two on the other side of the screen means.
You can also see Myleen added a helpful comment — it tells us that this request is being worked on and that link goes to our work tracking system. (NOTE: we actually rolled this out last week) So if somebody wants to check in with the developer who’s working on this item, they can just follow that link and see the progress. Myleen’s helpful; that’s just one reason we love her so much.
Up in the top right you can see a cheerful button that says “Bump!” — folks can use that to arbitrarily adjust the priority value (currently 22) for the entry. Sometimes we know the priority for a request is high but we don’t have the time to comb through the forums and emails to find references, so this lets us pop something up quickly.
You can see the actual content here is pretty simple; this is a record of stuff folks are asking for, not a complete development spec. If we decide to implement this, there’s a ton of design work we’ll have to do, but we’re not worrying about that now. We don’t need that much detail to know how to prioritize this, and that’s what this stage of the game is all about.
I hope that makes it a little easier to hear “We’ll pass that on to our developers,” and I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse “behind the curtain” to see how we get things done here at FreshBooks.
Copyright © 2000-2009
11:10 am
Good job in building your »Big List« to manage / get an overview on incoming feature requests – but isn’t the step afterwords the more interesting?
How do you guys decide on which features actually find their way into the next release cycle? I’m pretty sure the big number, in this case 22, can’t be the only decision driver? It can be a pretty good indicator, for sure, but in my opinion that’s about it. How do you weight this number in relation to other factors such as usage impact, “nice to have vs. essential new functionality”, ease of implementation, potential feature loops, marketing impact, enthusiasm factors? I’d love to learn more about your fresh thoughts on how to handle this.
12:19 pm
@Julia perhaps I can speak to that. It’s part art, part science. Really all the big list does is help with the science part (ie how many people are requesting what).
Traditionally we have done this using our own internal “pain” meters. For example, for the first 3.5 years I read *every* support email. I can’t afford to do that these days, but the big list gives me an objective window what people are saying is painful.
The art part is more about two things: vision and editorial. I have designs for FreshBooks that will never be properly captured by “the big list” or any other customer request. It’s been that way for over 5.5 years now and as Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse”. It takes vision to give people what they *need* not what they *want* and keep taking them in that direction again and again. The editorial part is important too and it’s about deciding which things you can afford to implement, because if you do everything eventually, you’ll be left with a product that nobody loves.
Vision and editorial take careful consideration their implementation should reflect the spirit of what you are trying to achieve with the user experience of your product (easy to use, time saving, professional in the case of FreshBooks).
I hope that helps.
1:09 pm
Wow, Mike, nicely put, thank you so much! I totally agree with you – we’re walking the same road developing our product.
The feeling you get when browsing through all those user emails as well as your own deep feelings about the product – the »masterplan« or vision – has to be key.
But I keep wondering… there must be a feasible way to combine those »soft« indicators with the measured number of requests as well as some other »hard« numbers such as the time a certain feature will take to implement.
Maybe there would be some interesting options emerging when you would try to use something similar to balanced scorecards? Anybody got some practical experience with this methodic?
1:38 pm
We are also facing numerous feature requests as a relatively new company. I can only imagine what Freshbooks is going through after having been around for 6 years.
Currently we are using User Voice to track our feature requests:
https://clarityaccounting.uservoice.com/pages/general?referer_type=top3
There are several ways we look at feature requests:
1. How many people are asking for them
2. How easy is it to implement
3. How does it fit with the vision of our product
Some people have wanted us to add complex invoicing features to our accounting software, but we are not implementing it because we know this problem can be solved by integrating with Freshbooks.
If the resources are not available to implement a feature request, we make a comment and write back to the client and tell them the truth: “sorry, we are not planning to implement this feature…”
It is actually good customer service to tell people what you will or will not do. This helps them make better decisions with choosing the right software product for them.
Hope this helps.
6:42 pm
So when can we get a copy of this great tool.
5:24 am
Mike, have you thought about open sourcing this nifty little tool?
6:57 pm
[...] Learn how FreshBooks is handling feature requests. [...]
4:28 pm
Was there a reason you didn’t use something like Uservoice? We’ve started doing that with great success:
http://blog.asmartbear.com/2008/10/2000-feature-requests-our-foray-into.html
4:32 pm
Hey Jason
We talked to the UserVoice guys and it’s a great tool — but we really wanted something that hooked into our existing communication channels: our forums, our phone tracking and our emails tracking, rather than create a new channel and ask everyone to use that.
Different problem, different solution.
12:24 pm
Nice, that does sound better. We just wanted SOMEthing to get us started.
2:37 pm
I’m a big believer in getting started.
1:19 pm
THIS is a beautiful thing. May we be inspired for our own product? I promise, Passpack is not a Freshbooks competitor, not looking to stomp on your turf, just appreciating a great solution to a problem we have – and which every software developer faces.
Or – you could launch a spin-off application
Cheers,
Tara
1:20 pm
(sorry, I spelled my own name wrong above… sigh)
2:40 pm
Hey Tara — take all the inspiration you like!
I’m a big believer in getting inspired, too.
4:23 pm
instead of using one of the hundred development trackers or wiki freely available, you built a custom tracker?
would have much rather seen more than ‘tweaks’ on the last few releases
5:53 pm
Actually, we use a system called Trac for our development tracking — THIS is totally different. I looked at tons of tools out there and didn’t find anything that would do what I needed done.
If you must know the story, here at FreshBooks we designate every odd Friday as “Hack-Off” day when the developers get to spend the day working on whatever they want — and at the end of the day they present their work to the company. That’s where stuff like the new Search interface came from — a Hack-Off that we liked so much we polished it up and released it.
So I guess one of the team had gotten so frustrated listening to me complain how there just wasn’t a tool that would do exactly what I wanted, that he spent his Hack-Off day building the Big List. So in fact absolutely NO development time was spent on the List instead of FreshBooks feature development.
While we’re certainly willing to invest time in infrastructure work that doesn’t yield immediate benefits for our customers, but does help to set things up for longer-term objectives, this wasn’t one of those times. This was an unexpected gift of a developer’s free time, and I’m all the more thrilled about it for that.
1:24 pm
I was really impressed with UserVoice, but we’re using Trac for our development tickets too. I can’t imagine having a completely separate list for voting/ranking.
I would love to see something like UserVoice integrate with existing trackers, such as Trac, Bugzilla, FogBugz, etc.
In the meantime, I’ll be looking for “The Big List” on trac-hacks.org
2:31 pm
Hope you’re not holding your breath, there. I did a presentation at ProductCampToronto on the Big List that gives a few details on our design philosophy and approach here:
http://pct.wik.is/Using_a_Big_List_to_Manage_Products
You can see we took a real “hacker” approach to the problem. It works great, but it’s not pretty.
4:36 pm
Thanks for the link! You’ve covered it very well and I will share this with our team.
Of course, I’m not expecting to see the Big List as a product, but it sounds really great!
1:27 am
Here’s for an improvement for The Big List – make the list an actual (but optional) tab in my account.
Show the current list, as it is.
Allow me to “Bump” my own version of it. Let me change the order of items, not the points. So I can’t have two equally important wishes, but must choose. The idea being to show you what I want, vs what I need.
Giving your users a chance to show you their priorities, not just their wishes, would give a more accurate estimate of their pain.
9:26 am
That’s a really cool idea, Timothy. Thanks for the suggestion!
3:00 pm
For a different take on feature enhancements, see http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Forget_Feature_Requests.php .
4:36 pm
Oh yeah. I’m a big fan of Getting Real. But I did want to be able to track incoming information from our customers so I can see at a glance what features and so on are getting the most votes over time. You have to be careful to avoid the “last touched” problem where you prioritize things based on what you last touched — had an email on, a phone call about, or whatever. With the Big List, we can see what MOST people are asking about over time.
7:21 am
This looks like a really cool tool, would be a big bonus if you also dropped this into the FreshBooks offering, not only could I bill my clients and capture my expenses I could also have one central place to see what my clients and staff were really wanting…
7:29 am
It would also be nice if maybe you integrated this into your site, it must take many man hours to go through all the forum posts and translate this directly into votes for feature requests, allowing people to just directly vote for a feature would save you and them a load of time, it would also give you the opportunity to capture there email address and mail them the latest updates from your tracking system to keep them informed of the progress – sure its not to much work to have different types of notes such as internal vs. external so you don’t send anything sensitive out…
3:44 pm
So, um.. not to be too dense here, but where exactly is this “Big List”? What’s the url?
4:54 pm
Hey Bob
It’s purely internal.
You’ll just have to take my word that it actually exists. For all you know, I’m just making this whole thing up.
Jason, yeah, there’s LOTS of optimizations we could make here. But ultimately it’s not our business — our business is helping you to invoice your customers. We tend to be very minimalistic with our internal applications — they’re sophisticated and reliable, but usually just the bare bones.
The Big List is definitely NOT ready for public scrutiny yet.