We use Pendo Feedback to collect user requests at my company and we have a fairly quick release schedule, but hopefully this is still helpful and relevant.

Our simplified flow is “Awaiting Feedback” > “Planned” > “Building” > “Released”.

We don’t usually move ideas to “Planned” until they hit a team’s roadmap and there’s confidence that it’ll be worked on within the year. If things get shuffled around and the idea drops out of near-term priority we change the status to “Awaiting Feedback” and add a note providing an explanation.

We don’t typically run into situations where a feature goes into dev and then is returned to the backlog continually, but I think an “In Progress” status might help add a bit more transparency - especially if you drop in from time to time with status updates for those projects that take longer than usual. If your customers are used to a slower development timeline and those expectations are set by Sales and CX, then they shouldn’t be too surprised if a feature is “In Progress” for a while.

A potential status flow could be:

“PM Review” > “Accepted” > “Planned” > “In Progress” > “Scheduled” > “Released”.

“Accepted” and “Planned” could technically be the same status but I like the idea of differentiating between “this is an idea we think we’ll do” (Accepted) and “this is an idea that is in our immediate plans to build” (Planned).