How to manage feature requests for a SaaS business
Most of us understand that keeping in regular touch with your customers and taking regular feedback on the product is absolutely critical to building the right features. But more than often it happens that you end up building features that you were pretty excited about in the first place, only to find that none of your customers really cared about it.
Happens to the best of us! Having a lot of feature requests is a great problem to have, that means your customers care about your product, and they want to help you improve it. But it’s equally critical to manage these feature requests correctly and keep customer feedback up-to-date, to make sure you don’t waste time building stuff that your customers don’t care about.
Customers will send feature requests through different incoming channels. Contact forms or web chat on your sales website, emails, social media or phone. Considering the process you have in place, you can either keep track of these requests in the support software your company uses, or the project management software. However, it’s highly likely, that most feedback gets lost among the many different tools your organization has in place.
This is where a tool like Cadet fits in best. It makes sure all customer related feedback and requests are in one place and gives you real time, up-to-date insights into what your customers are really asking for. Having a system like Cadet in place would make sure that product decisions are not based on gut and intuition but on actual customer data.
Feature Requests are first-class citizens of your company
Similar to all other important parts of the company like the project and the source-code, feature requests and customer feedback should also be considered first-class citizens and should have a dedicated space to be managed in.
Will you store source-code in Dropbox or manage ongoing projects in Google Docs? You’d know something is off when you try to do that. In the same spirit, if you are managing feature requests in project management tools like Trello or customer support tools, you are doing something wrong. These tools would work well at the start since you are comfortable using them and it’s the easy way to get going without much investment, but soon decisions would mostly be based on gut and intuition and not actual data.
Cadet helps you abstract out feature requests and customer feedback out of the mess of other non-important data and gives you a clear picture of what features are being demanded the most. It also lets you collaborate with your customers in the development of new features, making sure that the features you are building are in-line with customer demand.
Show your customers that you care
Developing and building in the dark can be harmful in many ways. You will find that keeping your customers in the loop of feature development and taking regular feedback would go a long way in the success of your business, and also reduce churn.
We have found that public boards are a great way to execute this philosophy. It allows your customers to see and comment on what you are creating and forces you to actively stay in touch with them. It also tends to reduce support burden and save your customer’s the pain of writing redundant emails since they can go through existing requests to find what they want is already in the works.
Having a dedicated tool to collect and manage customer feedback and feature requests would make your life much easier, and reduce the confusion among your team. It will make you a more confident Founder or Product Manager when you know your product decisions are not just backed by intuition but by data! Using a tool like Cadet would unveil insights into feature demands that you never knew before, and would give a real sense of direction to your team.
