User feedback and feature planning with canny.io

As I read through all the topics here, it seems like it could be much more useful to use a tool like canny.io where your users could vote for features they would like to see. You can see this in action with the amazing raindrop.io here:
https://raindropio.canny.io/ :+1:t2:

We’re not big believers of a “you vote and we build” approach, I could easily spend a long time talking about the why, but to keep it short, it can easily lead to a range of problems like unrealistic expectations, feature bloat, pro-user bias, etc etc. Having said that, by registering your support for a certain feature in this community forum you definitely influence what we’ll work on.

BTW, if you are a curious I talk more on this topic in the conference presentation you can find here: The Next Box™ – The story of how Agenda came about

That’s cool! Thanks for sharing :+1:t2:

1 Like

It would probably be useful for Agenda team to see what’s of most interest to users, but I think the key risk is that users then develop the expectation that the ranked list is the product roadmap. User feedback / reuqests is certainly important, but ultimately Agenda knows their business better than anyone else and is best positioned to make strategic decisions.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”

:slight_smile:

We already get this info in quite subtle ways, for example by looking at the stats of frequent searches in this community, and for example by looking at the number of clicks on the links in the The features we are working on right now… page.

1 Like

That’s great, for you. The reason I suggested using something like canny.io is so that everyone else can also see what others are interested in and vote for those features, all in one location. Although this board is great, and the “features we are working on” is great, there are so many ideas floating around this board that are awesome and I personally feel would be much easier for everyone in a more centralized location… 2 cents given :wink:

But that brings us back exactly at my earlier point, that having a central place where everyone can see what others are interested in and vote for is simply not something we believe in – it creates unrealistic and most likely biased expectations that can only lead to disappointed and angry users (why haven’t you added abc yet?! xyz is nice but why are you now working on 123???). We simply don’t believe you can build great software just by following the marching orders of the big majority, sorry.

1 Like