Feature voting describes the process of collecting user feedback for product improvement ideas. These ideas are listed as new ideas up for feedback or planned roadmap items. Both, ideas and planned roadmap items, can collect user feedback and voting.
In feature voting users are asked for feedback. They upvote the most attractive features, they ignore the not-so-relevant ones. With this, users provide a data driven idea ranking to the owner of the product.
Productific is a lightweight SaaS tool for roadmap voting: you can run running feature voting, planned roadmaps and changelog. Your users can contribute immediately, frictionless without needing an account.
Product backlogs and roadmaps carry ideas from different sources: marketing, sales, development, customers and other stakeholders contribute to the pool of ideas. While ideas are annotated with some context info, they must be ranked to identify the best ideas. Not all ideas are equally good, only the best ideas are included in the product.
Feature voting ranks ideas by user popularity. The most up-voted idea appears at the top of the stack. In the eye of users, an up-voted idea is the most attractive next feature in the product.
While the strength of feature voting is the user perspective, it is also it's weakness: the most up-voted feature is not necessarily in alignment with the product's vision & strategy. Popular features do not consider cost of operations for the owner of a product. Roadmap voting does not deliver a binding result. User feedback provides a market sentiment and roadmap decisions are up for the owner of the product to take.
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By running feature voting you can identify the most attractive product enhancements. With Productific you can easily set up feature voting and turn a list of ideas into a prioritized product backlog.