Comments on: Managing feature requests: Enter the “Big List”

By: Corey Reid

Corey Reid — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:54:16 +0000

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.

By: Bob Vincent

Bob Vincent — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:44:34 +0000

So, um.. not to be too dense here, but where exactly is this “Big List”? What’s the url?

By: Jason Jones

Jason Jones — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:29:58 +0000

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…

By: Jason Jones

Jason Jones — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:21:22 +0000

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…

By: Corey Reid

Corey Reid — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:36:25 +0000

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.

By: Eddie May

Eddie May — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:00:36 +0000

For a different take on feature enhancements, see http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Forget_Feature_Requests.php .

By: Corey Reid

Corey Reid — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:26:37 +0000

That’s a really cool idea, Timothy. Thanks for the suggestion!

By: Timothy

Timothy — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 06:27:46 +0000

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.

By: Brian Sweat

Brian Sweat — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:36:25 +0000

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!

By: Corey Reid

Corey Reid — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:31:24 +0000

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.