What is feature request management?

Feature-request management is a method of feedback that companies receive from their customers. Feature-requests could be about essential elements of the product, such as a bit of modification to the product flow or something completely different that they believe will improve the product.

Feature request management is also the term used to refer to the numerous methods of prioritizing available feature requests.

Feature Request Tracking

 When it comes to product development, feature request tracking is the skill of tracking and managing feature requests. It entails providing clients with the ability to request new features, maintaining a database to hold feature requests, and ranking them according to various criteria to discover the most appealing features.

Furthermore, A feature request monitoring system will provide a more detailed picture of how you will impact many of your users. Knowing if a feature will benefit two or a thousand people can make all the difference.

Consider your mailbox being flooded with emails from a demanding support staff member wary of a user repeatedly requesting the same functionality. You’ll get thousands of emails but just one request for a feature. Of course, feature request tracking systems may also assist you in taking into account revenue from a critical account.

Importance of Feature Request Management

For your company to flourish, you must regularly communicate with your clients and understand their requirements. You can jam as many features as you want into your product, but if it isn’t meeting the genuine needs of your customers, it won’t be of any use to anyone.

How to Prioritize Feature Requests

When you open up your development process to the general public, you’ll be inundated with feedback and feature requests. You’re now faced with many feature requests that you must comb through and evaluate. In order to handle all of these Feature requests in an efficient way that will lead your product toward growth, you need to prioritize the request. Simply put – where to start and where to go.

 For that, There are a plethora of feature prioritization frameworks available today. It takes some study to determine which features to add and eliminate from your product plan. You can’t respond to every request, but you can ask yourself the right questions to figure out which ones to put on hold for now and which ones are worth investigating further. The question then becomes: how do you manage feature requests truthfully while still adding meaningful value to your product? [1]

One way to tackle this issue will be to use Feature request management solutions available online. Let’s have a look at some tools that can be of use:

air focus[2] [3]

Using the Airfocus platform, Users may create and prioritize roadmaps, agree on a strategy, and manage multiple products and advanced workflows in a secure environment. The “Buy-a-Feature” technique for feature request management is recommended by air focus, which provides excellent software and the Ultimate Guide to Prioritization and encourages users to purchase features.

Trello

Trello enables the team to create a public board where customers can log in and vote for their preferred feature by leaving comments on the cards on the boards. With this tool, you can provide broader public access to your Trello board. Customers can submit their feature requests, and you can use this information to construct a customer-facing roadmap in the Kanban manner[4] .

In addition, Feature Upvote collects feature requests from various sources and posts them on an online feature request forum. Boards can be either private or public, and they allow team members and consumers to upvote ideas and requests that have been submitted.

Savio

Savio is a feature request tracking tool that is lightweight and powerful. It enables teams to collect user feedback and present it in a way that aids in the understanding of what customers genuinely desire. After that, you can prioritize features based on the essential factors. It enables you to compile a comprehensive knowledge base about your consumers’ problems and the best possible solutions.

Hello next

Hello, next is a specialized feature request tool that allows you to store and organize all of your customers and partners’ feedback. Teams can publish roadmaps and complete the entire feedback process in a single location. Hello next also allows you to grant access to customers so that they may vote on any feature requests that are submitted.

How to perform a well-put feature request management

After we discussed the background and the importance of feature request management, Here are some helpful tips that can aid you in your feature-request management routine:

Put everything in one convenient location

In the era of social media, gathering input has become a complicated undertaking. Customers can contact your firm through a variety of channels on the various platforms, which makes sorting their comments a much more complex chore than it should have been, to begin with.

 Suppose you want to get any value out of customer-submitted feature requests. In that case, you must employ software that collects every piece of user feedback from every platform and consolidates it in one location.

Organize a system for accepting and handling request submissions and correspondence.

As discussed in the first tip, having all of your feature requests in one location makes it considerably easier for your team to gather helpful insight from client input. Having all of your feature requests in one place may save time and effort. This holds for both customers and vendors.

Customers that have accurate and beneficial feature suggestions will look for a reliable mechanism to provide feedback before resorting to social media or generic email forms, which is more common than not. They want to know that you will acknowledge their contributions rather than having them disappear into thin air.

This is a simple problem to solve. Offer a different method for feature requests instead of a general one. Customers will feel confident that they are providing feedback to a company interested in what they have to say, and they will be able to organize their feature requests more readily as a result.

Prioritization and feature requests are taken into consideration.

You can begin to classify and prioritize your feature requests once you have gathered all of your requests in one place. According to your requirements, some of the applications we described before will automatically classify and prioritize information.

You can simply construct groups that best represent the different feature requests you’re considering if you’re prioritizing manually. For example, if you have submissions that are primarily concerned with user experience (UX), create a UX category and add all relevant requests in that category. It is possible to look at each request in a group and quickly determine which ones are the most significant after your groups are set.

Discuss the specifics of the features with your teammates and any key stakeholders.

Customers who request new features will expect such items to be deployed soon. However, this does not imply that their suggestion is the best for the organization.

Discuss the feature requests to determine the many variables you must consider for the bid to become a reality. Is it possible for the team to create that particular feature? Is it possible to complete it within a reasonable timeframe? These types of questions will assist you in prioritizing requests in a way that will provide the most value to your product’s functionality.

Product roadmaps should be made publicly available so that everyone may keep track of product development initiatives.

Offering a public roadmap to your consumers demonstrates your company’s commitment to transparency. It makes it easier for your users to understand that the things they have requested are being worked on and will be ready within a specific timeframe. This also allows customers to provide feedback if they believe the prioritizing does not meet their expectations.

Conclusion

What services do you genuinely enjoy as a user? Some will say it will be those who seem to be able to read their mind, Or the Products that make your workflows go as smoothly as possible. Others will be pointing toward The ones who make them laugh or Those who use their current tools.

As a result, Product Managers keep a tight watch on whatever those items are. They generally have a feature request tracking system in place where they can collect user-generated feature ideas and incorporate them into the product. They want to make sure that their product has every aspect that makes it appealing.

By understanding the information we presented in this article, And following the tips we suggested, you might find yourself making the first steps towards a well-put feature request management that will benefit your company’s whole product development process.