Understanding rather than Listening
Listening Every new version of BOARD, major or minor, aims at providing a good amount of new feature requests we heard from our Customers. In all occasions in which a new feature was driven by their suggestion or request, we have been working closely with them to define, design and test every new (or changed) functionality, because listening to our customers is not enough: our intention is to understand it.
It often happens that our Customers might say ‘I need this functionality' or 'I need that feature’. What often happens is that they don’t need that feature specifically: what they need is something else that can actually be solved with a different approach or using different existing features elsewhere in BOARD. Understanding our Customers means we ask ourselves and them about the need in itself, not about the "specific resolution" or "technical answer" to that need.
Better understanding the need has many times helped our Customers to discover the "true" meaning of their own requests, and has often brought to a design which responded and addressed a potential broader range of similar needs.
Driving the Change and Delivering Value At BOARD we never too much liked to be "aligned" with the Market, to "copy" or to "follow" trends. Being innovative, bringing and delivering value should come from our ability to imagine the "future of decision making" our way. Even though we listen to Analysts, we look at our competitors, and we work hard to understand our Customers, we want to drive the product evolution and we pursue only those improvements we firmly believe in.
The ideas The Ideas section in our User Community will bring a new approach to BOARD evolution. The first reason is that every user will feel part of this process, being it for proposing an improvement, being it commenting and contributing to an existing proposal, or simply liking it.
On the other hand, it gives us at BOARD a sense of relative importance of every feature request, compared to other features or in time. Every like, every comment or activity is logged and analysed to highlight interest peaks and more in general, our users' reaction. Through the discussions below the idea, the same idea can be seen and presented under different perspectives, giving us and our users the possibility to co-create its final form.
There will be times where an idea might get a lot of votes or activity, but for which we haven't finalized a reliable and performing design. Until we have that confidence, we won’t do it, but we'll make sure this information is shared with the Community, along with a reliable time slot for release. Here's the stages that the ideas are going through on the way to get released:
Be active and participate! Search for ideas before you post, vote them up (or down), and add comments to give context or alternative proposals on how the idea would be used/applied. The more activity an idea has, the more attention it will attract. R&D looks and uses the trends in the Ideas activity: if an idea seems to go dormant or less active, R&D team might see it as a lack of interest in that feature. Things change and evolve, and something that seemed like a big deal two years ago, may no longer be a big deal anymore.