Feature Voting in Product Development
Feature Voting in Product Development
Emily Rivers
Marketing & Product
Aug 29, 2024
7m
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TL;DR: Feature voting is a user-driven system that allows customers to submit and vote on feature requests, helping companies prioritize development based on actual user demand. This approach enhances customer satisfaction by aligning product roadmaps with user needs, fosters transparency, and builds community trust. To use feature voting effectively, it's essential to centralize requests, manage expectations, and balance user feedback with strategic goals. Tools like Productlane offer streamlined solutions for implementing feature voting, ensuring that customer input is effectively integrated into the product development process.
What is feature voting?
Feature voting is a system that allows users or customers to express their preferences for potential features or improvements in a product. Usually, you use a feature voting board where users can submit their own ideas for features and then vote on suggestions from others. The features with the most votes signal to the product team which improvements are most desired by the user base.
Feature voting is a democratic approach to product development and helps you align your product roadmap with customer needs and priorities, ensuring that the most valued features are considered for development.
Why should you use feature voting boards with your users?
Using a feature voting board with your users is a fantastic way to involve them in the product development process. It helps with your feature prioritization, as you can base new features on user demand.
Using feature voting boards also helps you build a community around your product. You're giving your customers a way to discuss and upvote features that matter to them, which helps instil loyalty in your product as they see that you care about their feedback.
Plus, it helps you close the feedback loop as you can let users know when the features they voted for are implemented.
Benefits of using feature voting
Streamline the way you collect customer feedback
Feature voting helps you to keep all your feature requests in one place. As your product grows, you'll start to get feature requests in your support inbox, social media mentions, and in telephone conversations with customers.
While you'll still get feature requests from these channels, using a feature voting tool will give you a way to consolidate these requests and direct users to post their feature ideas themselves. Productlane's feedback portal allows you to gather feedback from emails, Slack, call recordings and more to keep in a central hub so you can easily organize the top requested features.
Get customer feedback on your own feature ideas
As users upvote features, you'll uncover the most popular requests. You can use feature voting to test your own ideas and see whether they really are important to your customers.
If you have a feature idea that you're considering adding to the roadmap, add it to your feature voting board and see whether customers vote for it. If they do, great! You know your customer well and should go ahead and it to your product roadmap. If it flops, consider why - did you explain the feature in enough detail? Did you outline the benefits enough? If you did, and it still wasn't popular, it might not be a feature to focus on right now.
Make data-driven, customer-centric decisions
Using feature voting boards helps you to quantify user interest in specific features. There's no need to base new features on assumptions - you'll know exactly which features customers care about most and can adjust your product roadmap accordingly.
Feature voting is a truly customer-centric approach. While you may have to focus on critical features first, you can base your feature development on what customers truly want and need, which should lead to higher customer satisfaction and retention.
Of course, you'll need to make decisions based on other criteria as well as popularity, such as whether a feature meets your strategic goals or how long it will take to implement. But using feature voting gives you insight into user demand that is difficult to ignore.
Offer transparency to your user base
Customers love to feel like their voices are being heard. Using a feature voting tool shows them that you care about their input and will act on the feature requests they put forward. Being transparent about how you gather feedback and use it fosters trust and a sense of community among your users.
Product managers can also use your feature voting board to help customers understand why some features may not be a priority. You can explain why some features may be unfeasible right now, or why a feature request is low on the list. Plus, users who add a feature request and see that it doesn't get many upvotes will understand why it's not a priority for your product development team, rather than assuming you've just not taken their feedback into account.
How to use feature voting correctly
Use a feature request tracking system
It's best to try to consolidate your feature requests into one place so it's easier for you to see which requests are the most popular. You may need to direct a customer to your feature voting board or add their request on their behalf.
With Productlane, you can collect feedback from an array of sources and close the feedback loop by notifying customers when their feedback request has been implemented. It makes it easy to see which customer requests are most popular and increases user engagement by letting them know when updates have been made.
Manage customer expectations
It's a good idea to acknowledge and address customer feedback within your feature voting tool. Let users know when you've reviewed their feature requests and they've been added to your roadmap or released.
In a lot of ways, it's more important to reply to feature requests that you won't implement. Letting customers know why you won't be moving forward with their product ideas shows that you've at least considered their request and will encourage them to continue to submit and upvote feature requests.
Use feature voting alongside other criteria
Not all product ideas are created equal. It's best not to use feature voting as the only way to prioritize new features. Consider new features based on your strategic goals, the time and cost involved and how much maintenance may be required.
Tie that in with things like user interviews and surveys using feedback software and you'll have created an ideal prioritization framework.
Delete old feature ideas periodically
Once you've had your feature voting tool for a while, you'll have plenty of requests in there. Make sure you delete old requests that you're realistically never going to implement regularly.
Go through old feature requests and delete any that haven't received many votes. If it turns out it is something that your users are genuinely interested in, someone will add it back to your feedback board.
Best feature voting tools
Now you know what feature voting is and how to use it, you'll need to find feature voting software that meets your needs. Here are some top feature voting tools that are worth checking out:
Canny: Users can submit and vote on features. Product managers can then analyze the feedback, prioritize requests, and build roadmaps and release notes.
Upvoty: Create voting boards, track feedback, and integrate with other project management tools.
UserVoice: Combines feature voting with a comprehensive feedback management system.
Feature Upvote: Set up voting boards and track feature requests for both SaaS companies and video game companies.
Productlane: a customer feedback management tool to close the loop
We might be biased, but we think our feedback portal is the perfect complete feature request tracking system for B2B SaaS companies. Integrating with Linear, our feedback widget allows users to upvote features on your product roadmap, keep customers in the loop with a changelog and share your roadmap that's synced with your Linear projects.
You can connect all feedback with Linear too - not just feature votes. Call recordings with AI transcripts, support emails and Slack conversations can all feed into your projects, ensuring that you prioritise new features based on a range of customer feedback and data insights.
Try Productlane today and see how it could transform your product development process.
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