Democratizing product roadmaps

Imagination vs. Reality

Democracy’s everywhere..figuratively, of course. Just saying.

But no, really. Apart from open-source projects I’ve come across, followed or contributed to, I’ve never come across a product where users have a say in how the product evolves.

Sure, you can email the people behind the product. Maybe buy a heavy commercial license of some sort, and have a custom version built for your needs. But what about plain-ol’ demokratizatsiya, as Gorbachev put it back in 1985?

Since we’re calling this “democratic”, let’s talk about it in democratic terms. How does a democracy works? Well, apart from the corruption and rigging, you do have elections. Let’s call them plebiscites — sure sounds like a better word. So, let’s say you throw the floor open, for users to nominate a list of features, to be considered. Out of this, you — the awesome chaps behind the awesome product — throw away the irrelevant stuff, and come up with a final list of features, that can stand up for the plebiscite. Now that I think of it, maybe a bit of campaigning might be in order — so, with every feature that a user nominates, you could get them to also provide a short blurb, explaining how the feature would be a great help.

Now comes the good part — or the gory part, for some. Voting time! Every user votes for a feature. Obviously, just voting for one feature won’t really be helpful — so maybe the users could vote for a list of features, sorted by priority. And when counting time comes along, we can simply count all the votes, and come up with the 3-4 top features — which then, get incorporated in the next release.

Sounds like nerdtopia? Yep, totally. Like utopia, a hard one to achieve, by the looks of it. Because while as awesome as it might sound, and as amazing as it might be to imagine(I actually dreamt of setting up a Trello board for this), is it feasible? I don’t know. For one, how will we ever find the time to sort through the presumably-huge list of nominations, and pick out the ones that matter the most? Second, how do you handle the voting? Or how do you manage the counting part — although admittedly, you could write some code for that..but then, the biggest issue, in my humble opinion — who resolves the disputes?

I often wonder if other people have thought about this — I’m quite certain they have. And it’s fairly obvious why we haven’t seen it much — the challenges involved are extensive.

That being said, it would be sad not to try this out. I think products in their infancy, are better placed for this sort of thing — such a scenario would help such products get early adopters, and also help build products the way the users want them to be. If done right, from the very beginning, it could be a very powerful tool in a product manager’s arsenal.

I’m planning to set something like this up in my startup — do check out our product blog and see how it fares.