Feature Request Tracking
How-To Glossary

What is feature request tracking?

Feature request tracking is the art of managing feature requests to the advantage of growing a product. It includes enabling customers to request new features, operating a database to store feature requests and ranking them by various criteria in order to identify the most attractive ones.

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Furthermore, feature request tracking is a method to understand what your customers really need. It aims at following up on user requests efficiently and identifying the most attractive features to build in a product.

Feature requests can sometimes feel like complaints and false-positive bug reports. They can be overwhelming. Dealing with feature requests requires owner time and loads on top of an existing product backlog. However, user requests are also a great source for product improvements, they increase customer value, foster revenue growth and must be treated with care. 

Tool support

Organizing feature requests in one place helps products comes with the following advantages. A tool provides:

  • The ability to easily follow up. Avoids user feedback scattered across emails, spreadsheets and conversations. 
  • A data pool for informed product decisions.
  • Contact data to publish highly relevant product news.
  • Leads for upselling and cross-selling. Anyone requesting a certain feature will certainly get additional value from the updated product.
  • Contact data to reach out for more feedback and enable valuable discussions.

Productific is a tool for feature request tracking and supports the following activities.

Generate ideas 

Users keep submitting bugs, loading your support channels with traffic and asking for new features. Such inbound requests are highly valuable data - they can be the ideas you don't come up with by yourself. They can even expand a product's vision beyond your own lines of thought. Various feature requests are submitted by users:

  • ideas for new features
  • new integrations
  • small improvements to reduce friction/time/money spent by users
  • new use cases
  • bug reports

Productific helps you managing these ideas in one place. 

Prioritize 

Inbound requests from users are cleansed: wording and terminology may need adjustments, duplicates are removed and obvious no-gos droppes. A list of reasonable requests is then posted for user voting. By collecting voting data product owners can make informed product decissions, supported by data. The Productific dashboard displays voting data of ideas listed for your product. Items can be ranked by total votes and by trends.

Reach out

Once feature requests are managed in a tool, product owners can reach out and touch base with relevant users. With Productific, users who request or vote a feature can be asked to provide additional info like

  • Usage details
  • Context/environment of the feature
  • Benefit to the user

Traditionally, users will provide such info to support their feature request.

Close the loop

Tracking feature requests not only enables product owners to touch base with relevant users, it also supports feature roll out. Owners can close the feedback loop and inform engaged customers about updates and availability. With Productific, users who requested or upvoted a feature can be informed about its availability. News can be published via changelog listing or release notes, news can also be messaged directly to relevant users via built-in emails.