How to Shape Salesforce Products on the IdeaExchange
Get a quick intro to IdeaExchange Prioritization and learn when you can prioritize top ideas from the IdeaExchange. With these tips, you can start to post, upvote, and prioritize ideas with the Trailblazer Community to influence Salesforce’s product roadmap.
The IdeaExchange is your home base for sharing ideas for product improvements or new features with the Trailblazer Community and Salesforce Product Managers. It’s where you can shape Salesforce products and influence our roadmap.
In May 2019, after owning the hard truth, we embarked on a journey, traveling to 17 cities and 4 continents, to innovate with our customers and address outdated technology on the IdeaExchange.
We heard from you about how we could reimagine this feedback platform to better serve you and be more transparent. And, voilà, our co-collaboration led to the creation of IdeaExchange Prioritization, a new experience that launched at Dreamforce ‘19.
During the inaugural Prioritization cycle in January 2020, more than 4,000 of you told us which ideas were your favorites on the list so that we could start to develop them. High fives to everyone who participated — you helped secure four additional ideas on the roadmap!
As the IdeaExchange evolves and our community grows, we want to bring everyone, especially newbies, along for the ride. So, if you haven’t prioritized yet and want to understand the process in more detail, here’s a handy walk-through complete with our top tips for success.
Prioritize ideas now (and make a difference!)
During the May 2020 Prioritization cycle — open right now — we are setting out to build something more than just our roadmap.
With your partnership, we’re going to help build homes for those in need of access to affordable shelter.
Prioritize top ideas from the IdeaExchange while simultaneously supporting Habitat for Humanity from 9 a.m. PDT on May 18, 2020 to 11:59 p.m. PDT on June 1, 2020.
When 4,000 Trailblazers prioritize this cycle, we’ll make a $10,000 company donation to Habitat for Humanity. When 8,000 Trailblazers prioritize this cycle, we will double our donation to $20,000. See details here.
Join us on Wednesday, May 27 at 11 a.m. PDT for a Prioritization party on Trailhead Live.
You’ll learn how to become a master prioritizer. The IdeaExchange team is getting together, live from our home office to yours, to answer your questions about the IdeaExchange.
Are you a fan of podcasts? Go behind-the-scenes with the IdeaExchange team and a Salesforce product manager during a recent episode of the WizardCast podcast with Salesforce MVPs Brian Kwong and Mark Ross (this episode is also available on Apple Podcasts).
Getting started on the IdeaExchange
Once you have a profile on the Trailblazer Community, you’re set up with the tools you need to start posting and upvoting ideas throughout the year.
Your ideas tell us what’s working, what’s not, and what you’d like to see in the future. Hearing your opinions helps our teams continue to create valuable solutions for you and your organizations.
Prioritization 101
Prioritization cycles happen three times a year — typically in January, May, and September to align with our release planning process. That’s when we give you a list of approximately 10 to 20 ideas and ask you to prioritize your favorites within a 2-week window.
This process helps us learn from you which ideas you want our teams to start developing next. Through this, you already helped deliver features like Row-Level Formulas, and you’re making Dynamic Pages a reality. You can see all of the ideas added to our roadmap through prioritization in the Winners section of the IdeaExchange.
🌟 Pro tip: If you want to receive updates about winning ideas and reminders before the start of each cycle, please make sure your Communication Preferences are set to receive Salesforce marketing emails.
Start to prioritize top ideas
Here’s a look at how you can work with our product teams year-round to shape Salesforce products via the IdeaExchange.
We also recommend taking the IdeaExchange Trailmix to go deeper into this process and learn about the idea lifecycle.
- Post your ideas for product improvements or new features on the IdeaExchange.
- Browse ideas and upvote the ones you like.
- Three times a year, product managers create a prioritization list from the most-upvoted ideas.
- When the prioritization cycle opens, we’ll give you 100 virtual coins. Allocate these coins to the ideas that you want to see on the product roadmaps. Learn how to allocate coins by watching this 3-minute demo.
- Product managers refresh the roadmap to include the ideas that earn the most coins.
- Salesforce lets you know which ideas won and starts working on the winning ideas selected by the community.
Winning ideas = new features
Winning ideas become new features that make their way through the release planning and development process.
We’ve already started to deliver new features from winning ideas. Check out a few of the pilot cycle winners now available in the Spring ’20 release.
The non-winning ideas will be set back to “Open” status, where they can continue to accumulate upvotes.
When product managers start reviewing top ideas again for the next prioritization cycle, they’ll look at the ones that didn’t win from the last round. If those ideas are ones that they could start working on — and other ideas haven’t climbed higher — then you’ll likely see them on the list again.
Even if ideas don’t “win,” their ranking is still a data point our product managers can use when grooming their backlog. Sometimes we’ve seen our product teams add ideas that didn’t win to their roadmap after the fact.
How to write a great idea
Let’s say you come up with an idea you think is great. You want to maximize the exposure and support your idea gets from the community so that it will rise to the top and get implemented as a new feature, right? The key to achieving this goal is by writing a well-crafted idea.
It helps to increase your chances of upvotes, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of your idea being added to the Prioritization list. An idea consists of a headline, a category, and a description.
Here are our top tips:
- Write a pithy, compelling, and descriptive headline to grab readers’ attention and differentiate your idea from similar ones.
- Choose a category to associate your idea with a specific Salesforce product so that fellow Trailblazers and Salesforce Product Managers can find your idea by searching.
- Provide a description that builds empathy and sparks more engagement and conversation from others. Follow this recommended structure:
- Situation: Describe where in the product your suggestion fits and who would benefit from it.
- Objective & Impact: Explain the objective of the new or improved feature. Rather than propose a solution, focus on the impact of meeting the objective.
- Use Case & Solution: With the situation and objective in mind, describe at least one use case and your proposed functionality.
Become an idea-writing pro! Get even more examples and advice by earning the IdeaExchange Basics badge on Trailhead.
The future of a fully reimagined IdeaExchange
But, wait, there’s more to come! Prioritization is just the first part of the reimagined IdeaExchange experience. We’re actively working on the next phase, which includes improved functionality for posting & voting on ideas.
You can help shape the future of the IdeaExchange by joining the conversation in the IdeaExchange Reimagined Trailblazer Community Chatter group on the Trailblazer Community.
