10 Tips To Incorporate Community Suggestions Into Your Product Roadmap
By: Lisa Bogdanova
Tags: Product Feedback, Product Management, Feedback, Community Feedback, Community

If you manage a brand’s digital community, you’ve probably seen lots of customer feedback and suggestions. A user community allows your business to have access to customer insights and act on feedback.

But sometimes, you might be overwhelmed by all of your customers’ feedback, and it’s important to manage the flow of ideas and funnel them to your product team efficiently and effectively. Here are 10 tips to improve how you listen to customers and work with product teams, and that will come in handy if you manage communications in your digital community.

Set up processes with the product team

1. Understand what the team wants

If you send a lot of feedback to the product team, they might end up with an overwhelming backlog of ideas that are impossible to work with. Understanding what constitutes good feedback and collaborating to organize their backlog according to different scopes of work can help you drive better results for your customers.

2. Make it easy to access the suggestions

Your product team probably doesn’t have the time to view your community forums, so it’s your job as the community moderator or manager to make your members’ voices heard by collecting feedback. To do this, consider integrating your forums with a work management solution to label and send your customers’ feedback to the relevant teams.

3. Understand what it takes to get an idea implemented

Not every idea can be implemented, but it can help you understand the decision-making process. The issue can be around prioritizing customer input among dozens of other requests. Understanding your product team’s constraints while prioritizing different suggestions can help you be more transparent with your customers. At the same time, your product team can push back to verify how many users this requested feature might apply to, how often it’ll be used, and whether or not it impacts customer retention.

4. Advocate for the customers

As community managers often represent what customers want, it’s important to advocate for them. This means asking questions, regularly syncing with the product team with updates, and educating internal teams on how the community should be used as a resource to understand what customers want.

Look at how your community platform works

5. Make ideas searchable and categorize when possible

It’s usually a good idea to have a separate forum or even multiple forums for product feedback and suggestions. Having multiple forums might be helpful if you represent a product with many functionalities or verticals. Ensuring that suggestions can be found using the in-platform search engine can help you drive more interest for different posts. If possible, use tagging to help you categorize different suggestions and make it easier for your customers to find ideas relevant to their organization.

6. Reduce the number of similar ideas

Duplicated ideas clutter your forums, making it hard to understand the real interest for different suggestions. For example, there might be three or four similar ideas, and the combined vote count can show a huge amount of interest compared to if we look at them separately. Where possible, merge these ideas into one, or point users to the original idea to vote there. Always be on the lookout for duplicates and condense them.

Be open with your community members

7. Establish rules for submitting suggestions

Establishing basic house rules for submitting new ideas can help your customers understand the entire process better. Guidelines will let them know they’ll get more out of their idea if they first search for a similar one and upvote it instead of creating a new post, for example. You may also use different statuses, like “Planned” or “Not Planned,” to provide your customers visibility into scheduled updates and the conditions of taking on a suggestion and implementing it into the product.

8. Encourage collaboration

Your customers can not only submit ideas but also provide feedback on each other’s ideas and evaluate them. This can come in very handy — the customers can learn from each other and share some workarounds, and the product team will be able to not only review suggestions but also use cases supporting those suggestions. Encouraging collaboration can benefit everyone.

9. Ask the right questions

It’s great for a company and especially the product team to understand what your customers want, but ideally, you also need to understand why they want it. So, we’re back to the importance of understanding what your product team wants, but it doesn’t stop there. The next step is asking your customers questions, such as “What challenge are you trying to solve with this?” and “How are you planning to use this?” The more detailed the feedback is, the easier it is for the product team to understand the use case and act on it.

10. Be as transparent as possible

Managing expectations is one of the most difficult jobs when it comes to product feedback and ideas. Some customers assume that submitting an idea is all it takes for it to be implemented into the product. Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually work like that. This is why it’s important to be transparent with your customers by explaining how your processes with the product team work, what it takes for the team to review suggestions, and the threshold for an idea to receive a “Planned” status, for example. It isn’t always possible to share the decision-making process there, but sharing some basic information that you’ve agreed on with your product team is definitely a good way to start.

Customer feedback is a great source of insight for a business, and that’s why it’s important to establish working processes when inviting your customers to participate in the decision-making process of the product. Understanding the needs of your product team as well as your customers, setting up the right level of expectation, and looking at how your community platform works can help you incorporate client feedback into your product.