At a recent workshop we hosted at our office for customers, I spent quite a bit of time explaining how we build our product at BrightGauge and how we prioritize what we build. We had 15 attendees and they each had a few features they wanted us to add in the product and, very fairly, they were just trying to pinpoint when those features would be available.
The short answer I had to tell them (in a somewhat joking way) was “we have no idea”. Because the reality is that we do not maintain a well defined, detailed roadmap of any significant timeline.
There were a lot of blank faces when I said that, but it was the truth. Most of the features they asked for we definitely want to build... so I couldn’t even say “no we’re not going to do that”. The reality is we have over 150 features, small and large, on our backlog and we want to get to them all. Therefore the only thing we can really focus on is prioritization and iteration. We continued to have the conversation and here’s the high level of what I explained to sync up up on how we do it at BrightGauge:
Things Change Over Time, Small Iterations are Key
Like any technology business, the only constant is change. We know this and it’s why the popular agile development process has become so pervasive. Our agile process has us doing work in “2 week sprints” where we commit to a bunch of work to do in just 2 weeks. Ultimately, that’s why I gave that joking answer about not knowing when things are coming out because we only know what’s on the coming 2 week sprint. We keep iterating every two weeks and re-prioritizing and reworking the requirements, etc. It’s all about iterating.
We Work in Themes
Essentially, from a broader perspective we do know what we want to get done from a high level and we call those “themes”. These themes span over quarters typically (and some cases an entire year) but most of the time themes don’t translate into exact features customers would expect. They are instead of phrases or a word that describes the goals: Here are some previous examples:
- Put Billing in the app (Q4 2016)
- Launch Scorecards v1 (Q4 2016)
- Launch Leaderboard Gauges (Q2 2016)
These themes are broad strokes that contain a whole bunch of little features inside of them. We used to talk about these themes publicly in 2015 but what happens is themes can mean different things to different people. “Improve Report Builder” may mean page breaks to one person or custom fonts to another. To us, the themes are just where the focus is going to be for the set period of time. We know the first few features that we’ll develop as part of the themes but after that we let priorities shift based on where we’re at in a sprint and in a quarter. Priorities always shift slightly within a theme based on long term vision, customer feedback, internal debate, resource constraints, etc. So the themes are loose in definition but keep us focused over a set period of time.
Constant Delightful Features
As much as we love themes, we don’t want to be bound to just a few areas of the application to improve at one time. We always want to be releasing small improvements (we call them delightful features) that span across our entire product. These delightful features are small, bite sizable things we want to do that we don't want to wait until a larger theme is greenlighted. If/when the themes aren’t soaking up all resources, we throw delightful features in the mix based on the same inspiration as themes (vision, customer feedback, internal debates, resources, etc).
When I explained this one to the workshop, we decided to have some fun and prioritize their wish list as an exercise. We asked everyone to submit their feature request list to us during the session. We then removed the far fetched wild ones or the ones that need to be part of larger themes. What was left was a bunch of “delightful features” folks wanted (80% of them). So we had the group pick their top 3. And the ones with most votes we then committed to doing over the following three months since they were on our backlog anyway. Since then (6 weeks ago) we’ve done three of them (Text Module in Dashboards, Scheduled Reports per client, and Goal line in bar charts).
Summary
It can be frustrating to not have a roadmap to hand out to customers or prospects. Trust me, I’d love to have a detailed plan. But the reality is it would just be rubbish since the above holds true. But I can tell you that right now, as of May 2017, our current themes are:
- Overhaul Report Builder
- Improve Out Of the Box defaults for new and existing customers
- Improve onboarding workflow for new customers
We do look at the feature request board all the time, even if we do not necessarily comment on them (there’s 500 posts on there). We look at the items that get the most votes as well to keep us honest on what we pull on each sprint. Please keep providing feedback as it definitely does impact our internal plans!
And if you ever have any specific questions, feel free to contact our support team and they can provide insights. We’re fairly transparent here so they can share what they know when you connect.
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