Why open forums and voting can game your product roadmap
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Open forums can lead to you building the wrong features
Most software businesses realise the value of gathering feedback from existing and potential customers. This information can help shape the direction your product needs to move in when balanced against your strategy and priorities for your internal teams.
The most popular mechanism we see over and over again is an open forum where anyone can post ideas and vote for things they would like to see get built.
There are so many problems with this when you are a Software-as-a-Service business.
A consumer approach isn’t always right for SaaS
SaaS is still relatively new and there are many great forum tools out there which allow you to gather ideas and votes to gain a rough gauge of demand for things that are being suggested.
This approach is particularly successful when you are a big brand who wants to interact with thousands of consumers but this B2C approach doesn’t work when applied to a software product and here’s why:
The internet at large has a say
We recently saw a company get gamed by the internet at large. A forum for a popular SaaS product became a place for a feature to get voted to the top and then implemented (after many months work) only for the follow-up with real and potential customers to find it wasn’t a feature they were actually that interested in. Ouch. That’s a lot of wasted development resource, cost and time you aren’t going to get back.
When you have an open ideas forum, you have no or very little understanding about which feature requests and votes are from real users, people who may seriously start to use your product or those which stumbled across your user forum and fancied joining in.
In this environment, features can easily get voted up to the top of your list by people who have barely touched your product simply because the ideas with the most votes are usually the ones that are the most exposed.
We aren’t saying just listen to your real users - you can get so much insight from understanding the requirements of potential users and free triallers but this is very different to giving anyone who lands on your forum from the deepest depths of the internet a say in how you build your product.
You can’t see the who or the why
A lot of SaaS companies gather masses of un-prioritised ideas, feature requests and feedback which tells you something but not a lot. There’s so much value in the data you receive as a SaaS business but you have to use it and implement a system beyond simply feature votes. You can easily game voting methods and we’ve seen users try to do this in other systems by getting everyone in their company to upvote a feature, or even use different names to vote more than once. At Receptive, we believe that votes alone are as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Simply segmenting your feature requests adds so much. It’s hard to make informed decisions about where you place your time and development resource when you have very little or no understanding of who requests are coming from.
What do your biggest paying users need? What about your smallest? What’s important to users in Europe versus those in the US? You’ll find that each user group will have their own demands on your software and those demands change over time.
Forums and votes also don’t let you understand the why. As we recently explained, you often have to dig deeper to get to the bottom of why a feature request has been placed. You need to be talking to the right people, not randoms from the internet.
You don’t understand priorities
When you ask users to prioritise their requirements your list of feature requests will change beyond recognition. This is one of the most powerful features in Receptive - all users can change and prioritise feedback.
Feedback becomes stale as soon as you receive it unless you give users a mechanism to engage with their requests and change them. It’s always fascinating to see how user requirements and priorities develop over time and you can’t capture this in an open forum and voting environment.
As soon as someone leaves a comment or vote in a forum, that’s it. Very few people will delete their request or remove their vote if the feature is no longer required and without restrictions in place, every request is the one that needs to be implemented right now.
It goes back to the fact that votes alone are not enough - understanding priorities changes everything.
Closing thoughts
Don’t let the systems you have in place game you. Understand priorities of your user groups, segment your feedback data and don’t let randoms on the internet dictate your product roadmap.
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