[Read Me] What happens with Product Feedback? ๐ค
Afixado
Stephanie Westbrook
You know (or I hope you know) what you do when you wantย new or different functionality in Wrike: you share your idea or upvote an existing idea in the Community's Product Feedback section.ย
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That vote is really when the baton gets handed off to us - so what do we do with your votes?ย ๐คทโโ๏ธ
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We trackย and report on theย dataย ๐
That may not sound exciting...but it is. We have an integration between Wrike andย our Community. Without getting into the technicalities of how it works, we have a Folderย in Wrikeย where we monitor how many people have voted on everyย thread;ย how many accounts have voted, what the change in votes was over the last 30 days, andย someย detail about the types of accounts that have voted.ย
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Anyone in the company, at any time, can check the report and see what people are asking for.ย
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In fairness, if we just tracked data, but did nothing with it, it wouldn't be that exciting. Theย great thing is that the report (i.e. the master list of what people are asking for) is very actively usedย across various teams:
- Our Product Team references the community as they plan their product roadmap and regularly references Community when explaining internally why they're working on something. For example, during our company meeting, we'll hear "We're working on "x", it's the third most requested feature in Community".ย
- We, the Community team, ask for status updates based on how many votes there are or because we know something is particularly important. We bubble up your wishes and concerns to the Product Managers who can do something about it or who can at least help us provide more transparency.ย
The community has a big voice, we look at your votes, we read your comments and what you say influences our Product Team's roadmap.ย
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Why aren't all features being released? Simply put, we just can't release everything. Sometimes what one person asks for conflicts with what someone else needs.ย Sometimes it's just not the right time,ย or,ย as amazing as a request is,ย adding functionality would weigh down the Workspace. Sometimes we even have ideas that haven't been posted but we knowย theyย will help.ย
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Moral of the story? The votes, comments,ย and threads you start in the Product Feedback section make a difference and allow you to connect directly to the Product Team.ย
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So now that we've covered what happens when you post/vote - always remember to search Community before making a suggestion becauseย there's a good chanceย your ideaย hasย already been requested and you can vote for it so our teams see how popular the request is. But best of all, you might find a suitable solution that someone else posted ๐
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Any questions, we're happy to discuss, post below.
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Thanks for expounding on this Stephanie. I've heard a number of Wrike employee's refer to the importance of the community, but this helps provide clarity around how it's used.
Hi Tim! I'm really glad to hear that ๐ We've been wanting to share for a while now how significant your votes and posts are.ย
It sounds like this integration you have between your community page and wrike would be a killer app for all of us to have. Have you thought about making a product out of it? I would love to have our own version of your community page with a wrike back end! Thoughts?
basically goes into a black Holeย
check this thread amost 2 years and no updateย
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https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000157409--Coming-Soon-Code-formatting-in-task-descriptions-and-comments
@Brian - it's an interesting thought. I suppose using our open API, this is a possibility for anyone to achieve today. Check out our developers portal or post to our API sectionย to chat with other developers. Happy to chat about this here too if you've any questions.
@Pedro, the people here were the change-makers in getting rich commenting out there. I can promise you that every feedback post here is auto-captured and reported to the Product Team, and then they are a big part of the research when developing new features, or considering items for the roadmap.ย
The Community team continue to advocate the ideasย posted here to help influence this roadmap so keep searching for ideas, voting, providing use-cases and current workarounds. Thanks ๐
Can I suggest something?
I've made mention of this in another thread, but many of the feature suggestion threads I've seen or contributed to are 2+ years old. A quick sort of feature suggestions by number of votes are also 2+ years old.
If a feature has 100-200+ votes and is 2+ years old, it's highly likely that the community has essentially given up hope that the feature in question is ever going to get any attention, especially if its current status is either "Investigating" or not present after such a long duration.
It's frustrating to see what the community considers essential features being passed over while watching new functionality (with apparently less demand from the existing user base) being implemented as add-on products requiring additional licensing fees.
Having said all that, and knowing that these suggestions and comments reach the Product Team as a matter of standard workflow, how about posting a regular update (monthly shouldn't be too intrusive) that provides up-to-date commentary on status of features with x number of votes? At least then the community knows that there has in fact been some effort applied to the most popular feature requests on a regular basis, and things don't just end up in a black hole.
Hi Randall, I actually really like this idea and thank you for your feedback. This space exists for members to engage together and suggest ideas, so hearing this feedback about Community and product feedback really helps.
You're totally right. We have put a lot of effort here on the Community Team last year to ensure all feedback posted in the community is presented to the Product Team in a way they can take action and I'm always interested in hearing how we can make updates about this even better for our members.
I think adding the date of the last update on each thread would be useful to see - what would you think of this?
Also, just to clarify the development process, which isn't necessarilyย unique to Wrike's development but product development roadmaps in general.
For some ideas that are +1 year old, often those ideas were really good and popular, but the timing of actually achieving a request in aย meaningful and scalable way was not possible at the time. We don't forget about it and we have builtย APIs to keep tracking votes and discussions about this feature.
Often smaller updates you see released are part of a larger plan. So although they may seem like they're not requested here or not important, they may be first of the necessary steps to achieve something in line with what is actually requested on Community.
I hope that helps a little. I'm happy to keep discussing what we can do to make this process better ๐
I agree with Randall,ย we are just in the process of purchasing Wrike, and I have come into this thread as a link from the contact team.ย My concern is that my question to him was that some of the key things that are missing from Wrike are indeed already in the forum, and are indeed 12 month plus old.
While I understand you can't provide all requested features, and need to continually evolve to keep relevant in the marketplace, having somewhere that shows what features will/won't be included or are being looked at would be great. Even going back and saying this isn't going to happen.
Hey @John, happy to see you on the Community and thank you for the feedback.ย
I wanted to explain how we work a little more so that you understand our processes. We check up on the Product Feedback threads' statuses with the Product team on a regular basis. When we do have an update from them, we go back to the Community to let people know about it. If there's no update, we usually let the Community know about it as well. But I really think that @Stephen's idea about adding the date of the last update on each thread is great. I'll be happy to hear what you think!
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Hi @Lisa, any visibility from a customer end shows that you as a vendor are engaged and looking.ย ย Community/forum based support is great, but for someone who has raised an issue, can been seen as a graveyard if there is no update or closure.
Adding the last update on the threads is great.
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@John, thank you again for your feedback ๐ I'd like to point out that we have Wrike Support as a separate department, and here on the Community, we share best practices, help each other and discuss ๐คThe Product Feedback forum is the perfect place to share your ideas on Product enhancements, and we're always happy to receive the feedback and pass it on to the Product team.
We're discussing the ideas internally on how to ensure the visibility of status updates, so thanks for posting and stay tuned for the updates ๐
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
What are the restrictions on the comment sections?
I saw that it's no longer possible to comment on some of the issues. Is this time-based (e.g., 1 year after opening the feedback thread)?
Hi Sebastian Nemetz, thank you for reaching out!ย
You're right, we sometimes close old threats where the discussion stopped - in cases like that, we recommend creating a new post if you'd like to start the discussion. But please let me know about the thread in question, I'll be happy to look into this!ย ๐
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Hi Lisa,
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thanks for clarification. I wanted to comment on the following issue to enhance the feature request and provide additional screenshots: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000103149-
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Thanks for getting back to me, Sebastian Nemetz! Could you please create a new Product Feedback post here?ย
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover