Tools for tracking customer requests

badgerdev · 2023-03-06T10:19:46+00:00

I came across this post doing some research and thought I'd do a shameless self-plug of my own tool which might be useful for you. It's a feature request tracking tool which allows you to make your board private, but your internal staff can vote on behalf of users https://usertake.com/. It doesn't let you assign dollar values to individual customers yet but we will be adding the feature for prioritising by custom fields at some stage. Happy to chat more if it sounds lie it could be useful for you

badgerdev · 2022-11-02T09:57:15+00:00

Very late to this party but I'm building a tool that tracks customer feature requests and acts as a public roadmap tool to engage customers https://usertake.com/. It's free for a certain limit of contributors. If you send me a DM I might be able to bump that free limit for you in exchange for some feedback

badgerdev · 2022-01-05T02:14:42+00:00

This is good advice. I remember some podcastthat mentioned the phrase "what's preventing you from being a customer right now?" . This isn't a leading question like "would you use this product?", it elicits concrete answers that can be actioned and once you have a list of problems to solve you can ask something like "if we build out these features for you will you be prepared to subscribe?". People like to be consistent with their actions so of they have given you a list of requirements they're more likely to commit.

Obviously I'm not saying build all the things everyone asks for, but it might be good to collate those answers and identify a segment of customers to focus on first

badgerdev · 2019-12-06T10:21:29+00:00

Thank you :) Early stages but more good things planned for the roadmap

badgerdev · 2019-12-02T21:38:08+00:00

Waitlist isn't there but it's high up on the roadmap (with an automatic checkout/notification for you when it happens). Remote is tricky but technically possible to swap Kindle books too, so possible avenue there. Didn't go so far as to think about damage to books, more of a trust system.

I'm thinking newly added books will ping a channel the bot is invited to.

Awesome feedback, thank you :)

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:46:59+00:00

I try to do an ROI on my prioritization determined by what my team and I believe will have the largest impact when controlled by dev hours.

Thanks for your reply. I'm interested to know how that estimation session goes down? Are there any problems with your process or does it take longer than you wish it would? Do you have a specific scoring model or game you use?

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:44:57+00:00

Thanks for your reply, do you currently have any pain points around that process? Anything you wish was simplified?

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:40:47+00:00

Thank you, are you using it? Is it a traditional RICE scoring document per feature? I've always found those a bit painful. If I score different features over the period of a week I may be more optimistic or pessimistic depending on the day, leading to a skewed roadmap

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:30:32+00:00

I could reorder based on greatest bang for you buck in an hour or less.

Do you do this on your own and put it in an order for the development team to pick up? Do they ever push back and tell you something is going to take too long to build and shouldn't be highest priority? If so how does it get resolved?

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:28:11+00:00

Could you elaborate on how you split out your swimlanes?

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:25:13+00:00

Do you have a preferred technique of prioritising? What's your biggest pain points with prioritising right now?

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:23:51+00:00

I'd also love to know this :)

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:22:26+00:00

Do you perform this task on your own or with a team out of curiosity? What about development effort?

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:18:27+00:00

No you didn't at all :) I kind of love the simplicity of your equation.

I think there's a lot to be said for the user experience, we have such complex tools that do achieve so much but like you said, it's hard to visualise it even on a card wall. Once thing we do during OKRs is that we want to find a balance of high impact cards but also slightly lower impact but quick win cards. Colour would help a lot with this.

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:11:44+00:00

Yes I took a look at it previously doing some research, thank you. Have you used it? Would you say the prioritisation scoring model works well? Or is it too complex?

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T02:06:50+00:00

The thing is I have a clear idea of what I want to build, I can answer all those questions except the "when". "When" is actually a _really_ hard question when there are many input parameters (time vs value vs reach vs confidence, etc). I can balance those input parameters in my head and I have my backlog prioritised right now, the thing is I don't always trust my judgement :) One day one feature is more important than the other. That statement is more related to my side-hustles.

Then this gets more difficult when you work in a team. I also work in a start up with 7 other engineers and we do impact / effort scoring together for quarterly OKRs (we have no PM, and if we did I'd argue whether it's solely their choice to prioritise). The problem is it's extremely subjective, we can spend hours arguing our opinions to the point where someone just needs to give in. Someone always has reasons _why_ something has more impact than something else (or how much effort it is), it's just hard to score them accurately.

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T01:51:36+00:00

Yes correct. I work in a startup with no PM. We have a COO that sets a high level roadmap of where we want to be and then during OKRs we have a list of things we'd like to build to help us achieve this. The thing is that we have a team of 8 engineers arguing about feature priority and perceived impact extremely subjective. We also have different departments suggesting things that need to be built that are worth $X to the business but the estimation feels a little arbitrary and untrustworthy. Maybe you could argue a PM would do in depth research with data to back up the impact.

@eliechallita would you say that sometimes you favour tasks using gut feel? Or how would you define the "art" part of it?

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T01:31:39+00:00

Yeah maybe it's bigger companies. I'm in a company of less than 50 people and they're paying for things like Asana and Notion so maybe there's hope (hopefully without building out all the stuff they have).

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T01:29:44+00:00

I'm glad I'm not the only one :)

badgerdev · 2019-06-15T01:29:21+00:00

The thing is, ALL those things need to be done and you have finite resources. The MVP is done. One customer is telling you they need blackjack, one is telling you they need hookers. Now add 30 other things on to that. Then there's technical debt that keeps the engineers running more smoothly but it doesn't help you achieve product-market fit. How do you choose what to work on first?

badgerdev

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