Here’s just a few of the problems we are solving with Receptive:

Measuring which requests come from the most valuable accounts
The big spreadsheet of requests never keeps up with this, or gets updated when users have churned.

Managing the “long tail” of small improvements
Every SaaS vendor knows the “big wins”, the top 3 missing features that are deal-breakers for many leads. We called them “embarrassing feature gaps”. The tough part is identifying the small fixes would make your customers happier without taking weeks of development effort.

The kid in the candy store problem
If you ask your customers, they would like almost everything from your backlog of feature ideas. You can’t act upon this feedback until your customer has prioritised. Un-prioritised lists of “wants” are almost worthless the product manager. We built a system to encourage customers to prioritise, which in many cases surfaces some surprisingly small features that make customers much happier.

Its so important to concentrate on what your paying customers want, to help you get to product/market fit as fast as possible. You need to filter out ideas from trial accounts and churned users, and consider those segments separately.

Keeping customers informed about new features that they actually care about. This involves a lot of searching back in emails etc, which is really time consuming and you are likely to miss someone.

Existing tools to handle customer feature requests are basically forums with “me too” voting. Great for transparency, and I’m sure they help consumer brands to get feedback, but they don’t add a great deal of value for SaaS product managers. The product manager is the decision maker, SaaS businesses aren’t democracies.

Of course, we eat our own dog-food, using Receptive to handle feature suggestions from our own customers, which has been a great help, and an approach I’d recommend to anyone building a SaaS product, if you can do it.

Would love to get everyone’s feedback on what we are doing.

The basic idea is – when multiple users request the same feature or report the same bug, the recurrence will be automatically incremented rather than your “gatekeeper” having to do this manually at the end of the day. This way you have an idea of what to work on next. And since the bug or feature is linked to the ticket, your agents can update users once it’s done.

Check it out and let me know your thoughts – http://pura.io/

We are integrating helpdesks with other tools like Pivotal Tracker, Trello etc.

As a free tool, we get a sh*t ton of one off requests like ‘if only it did this’ and I have developed a system for this which may or may not be correct. I always ask ‘If you are willing to pay for $x for this, I’ll give you a discount of 50% when we launch our premium version later this year’ for the most part – this works because if they are really serious about it, they’ll pull up their credit card. Most of the time, it’s a ‘pie in the sky’ feature so it saves us time.

– Users are directed to an idea board where they can insert new ideas or vote existing ones
– Each user is given a limited number of votes each month

This system usually avoid multiple requests for the same feature and allow our team to immediately identify which features are the most needed. The limited votes number per user prevent them from just upvoting everything and limit them to what they really need (they can also cast multiple “votes” to the same issue if they really need it.

Finally UserVoice allows us to update, both on web and via email, all the user who were interested in a feature about status changes.

Your workflow paired with the “seven questions to ask yourself before building a feature” from Chapter 16 in Lean Analytics seems to solve most of my issues.

Alex, how do you prioritize feature requests, do you follow a checklist like this?

1. Why will it make things better?
2. Can you measure the effect of the feature?
3. How long will the feature take to build?
4. Will the feature overcomplicate things?
5. How much risk is there in this new feature?
6. How innovative is this new feature?
7. What do users say they want?