What is a feature request?
Feature requests are versions of product requirements you may often find as a SaaS product manager. Usually, feature requests will be suggestions from your audience (or maybe from within your company) about making your project more beneficial for them. UI modification and improvements are a common form of a feature request. Others are requests for new functions, better interactions with other products, and more.
The term “feature request” refers to comment, message, or a request from a user asking you to incorporate a specific feature into your product. As a manager, you and your team can use feature requests to determine how to iterate on a current product if one exists.
The importance of Feature Requests
The SaaS market moves swiftly and is quite competitive. If you want to get a strategic advantage in the market, you must first understand your clients.
To accomplish so, you must, among other things, meet your consumers’ feature demands. But what do you do when someone contacts you with a request, and how do you respond?
Your product goal is to meet market needs. That means it should be the best answer for whatever the end-users want. You should be asking yourself daily – does my product solve a problem or answer a need that my users have? Is it doing that better than my competition? Is there any problem that I might be missing? Feature requests can provide you with priceless insight into their questions and more. Without feature requests, you have been shooting in the dark.
How to Integrate Feature Requests in Your Project
There are a variety of approaches you may use to solicit feature requests from your consumers. To be successful, you and your consumers must be able to communicate freely with one another. Although sending requests through an automated chatbot is possible, having a Contact Us page where people may submit their requests is essential.
Second, have a look at user testimonials. Customers can submit direct (“Please add form optimization”) or indirect (“It takes too long to fill out forms”) requests for new features on this page.
You should prioritize feature requests according to your team’s strategy and requirements. This way, the methodology for prioritizing feature requests will be different. In general, however, a hierarchy might resemble something like this:
Minor enhancements and tweaks that your product team can deploy in the short term are encouraged. Features and redesigns that are significant and can be introduced in the long run.
Feature request templates are an excellent method to organize and prioritize your team’s feedback from customers and other stakeholders. The absence of a feedback management system makes it difficult to collect and organize input from customer assistance and product review channels. For the most part, feature request collection tools include templates for organizing and categorizing the comments you get.
If you’re looking for ideas on how to write effective internal feature requests, you might have a peek at this page for some inspiration.
“Closing the loop” refers to the process of responding to a feature request. Whenever possible, it is critical to acknowledge input, inform users that their feedback has been taken into consideration (“We already have a plan to include this in the future update!”), and then conclude the interaction.
In addition to identifying a method through which to contact the developer, Users must be detailed about a feature request in the following ways:
- Clearly state what the feature is
- Explain how it may function
- Describe the problem that the functionality would help to tackle
- Describe a scenario in which the requested functionality is put into action
- Clarify the procedure for submitting a new feature request
For requests to be raised, your team must have a structure that allows these proposals to be made so that everyone on your team can see them immediately. For example, GitHub makes it simple to request features visible to your complete team of contributors simultaneously.
