Feature requests are a great source of input for your product roadmap and an opportunity to build a great relationship with your customers. Read on for our tips on how to manage your incoming feature requests.

Feature requests are product ideas and suggestions that your customers share with you. They can be separated into:

It is often said that "feedback is a gift" when it comes to receiving personal feedback. The same is definitely true for product feedback. When you receive product suggestions, it means that your customers care about your product and are willing to invest the time to let you know what they think. This is a great thing. Make sure that you make the most out of it by managing incoming product feedback well.

1. Make it easy for your customers to give you feedback

The easier you make it for your customers to share their feedback with you, the more valuable data and input you will collect. Make sure your customers know that you want to receive their feedback and make it easy for them to give it to you. This could be as simple as having a feedback button in your product connected to a form or an email address for feedback that you share with your customers.

2. Gather all your feature requests in one place

Stay on top of all incoming requests by gathering them in one place. This allows you to organize the requests and add important information, such as who has requested it and how many customers have requested it. Ideally, you want to aggregate similar feedback and be able to notify your customers when you ship the feature.

3. Understand what your customers are asking for

It's important to understand what your customers are asking for with their feedback. Ask questions about their feedback and clarify any details. When you have a potential solution, ask them for their input again. Make sure you're on the same page and that your customers feel understood and involved. Take the opportunity to build a better product together with your customers.

21% of products being delivered failed to meet customer needs

Make sure you're not part of that statistic.

4. Reply to all incoming feature requests

If your customer has taken the time and effort to send you feedback, make sure you respond. It can be as easy as letting them know that you have received the request and asking some follow-up questions to let them know that you care. This can be the start to building a great relationship with a customer. Also, if they are requesting a feature that you are not going to implement, tell them that and let them know why. They might be disappointed, but also happy that you are being open and letting them know your reasoning.

There are several popular frameworks for prioritizing product roadmaps, such as the 

 or the Value vs Effort matrix. Regardless of which framework you use, two important inputs that you should keep track of are:

Who is requesting the feature? Are they a strategic and important customer?

How many of your customers are requesting the same thing? (read more about 

Once you know "who" and "how many", you will have a pretty good idea of the importance of the feedback. Combine that with the other factors that you use to evaluate product ideas to make a prioritization.

6. Keep your customers in the loop on the feedback they give you

Once you have prioritized the feedback and decided next steps, let your customers know. Especially let them know if you have launched something that they have asked for. This is a great user experience! One way keeping your customers in the loop is with an 

Also, collecting feature requests does not mean that you will build everything that your customers ask for. There can be many reasons not to build a feature. That's fine, just be upfront with your customer and let them know why.

As your business grows, you will have increasing amounts of incoming feature requests. This is a great source of data and input to your product roadmap. It's also an opportunity to build a great relationship with your customers. If your customers invest time and effort to let you know what you think, make the most of it and use it to your advantage by managing their feedback well.

You can manage feature requests manually or use a tool like 

 (Convas is a tool for tracking feature requests where you gather & prioritize all incoming requests in one place and communicate directly with your customers to ask questions and update them when you launch something they have asked for).

Tips to manage and track feature requests

How to manage feature requests and product feedback from your customers

Are you thinking about making your product roadmap public? In this post I go through the main benefits of having a public or open roadmap. I also share examples of open roadmaps as well as tools and templates to build your own.

A public roadmap is typically a public webpage where a company shares what they are working on and what they have recently released, accessible to anyone. SaaS roadmaps typically fall into two different buckets, timeline or time horizons based.

Roadmap that is based on a timeline showing planned releases for the coming months/quarters. Front's 

 is an example of this. They also include ideas and coming soon.

Roadmap with time horizons showing what is planned, in progress and done (or some version of that). Our own 

 are examples of this. (If you want to read more about timeline vs. time horizons, I find 

Then there are of course other ways of doing it. Trello only shows what they have recently completed on their 

Reasons to make your product roadmap public

Your customers will love you for being transparent. Once you share what you are working on, your customers will be more inclined to let you know what they are thinking and interact with you directly. Transparency is a great way to build engagement. Front even found that people with experience from similar problems to those on the roadmap 

just announced that they are making their roadmap public

What we’re trying to do is provide a way for people to see what’s coming, join in that dialogue and give us feedback and be able to collaborate with us

2. Attract new customers and differentiate from your competition

Website visitors that are looking around and thinking about signing up for your product will appreciate the transparency of a public roadmap. They will have a better idea of what they're signing up for and what's to come, especially for early stage SaaS companies. Use a public roadmap as a differentiator, something that makes you stick out from the competition.

Similarly, a public roadmap makes it easier for your sales team to close prospects. It gives them an easy way to answer questions such as "what are you working on" and "when will you build this feature". It could be a super power for sales - imagine a customer asking for a certain feature and you showing them that it's in progress on your public roadmap.

3. Build the right features based on customer feedback

By sharing your roadmap, your customers will let you know whether they think you're on the right track or not. Their feedback on your planned features can be invaluable to make sure you're prioritizing the right things and building features that they actually want. Front calls it a "

supplemental feedback loop to the product development process

4. Good for your team & stakeholder alignment

Sharing your plans and roadmap openly will make sure your team has thought through what goes into the roadmap and make them more accountable on delivering it. Buffer says it 

encourages the team to think more long term and be more deliberate about what they build

Other than your team members, it can also be a great way to communicate with and answer product questions from stakeholders such as investors and partners to build alignment.

What about my competition knowing what's on my roadmap?

This is a valid concern, especially if you're in a highly competitive space with little differentiation between players. However, it could be argued that it's rarely about the exact feature that you plan to build, but rather your execution - how you decide to design, implement & communicate it. In the words of Front on 

If we can’t beat our competition on execution, we can’t win.

it's a good thing that your competitors know what you're working on

As founder of a public roadmap tool for SaaS companies, I am obviously biased and a proponent of public roadmaps.

Tools & templates to create your own public roadmap

Below is a list of tools that you can use to set up your public roadmap including our own product, 

Both Buffer and Front have build their roadmaps using Trello. Read more about 

how to set up your public roadmap using Trello

 in Coda, although more built for internal use.

In Google sheets & Microsoft office you could either make your own product roadmap from scratch or use a template. UseFyi has a nice 

collection of roadmap templates for Google sheets, excel, powerpoint, Coda, Airtable etc

A public roadmap is something that your customers (and potential customers) will love. They will engage more with you once you share what you are planning and working on. With more engaged customers, you can use their feedback to make sure you're building products that they will value. In the end, it comes down to growing your business faster and keeping your customers happy.

Benefits of a public product roadmap for SaaS companies and examples and templates

Public product roadmap

Why you should have a public product roadmap (+ examples & templates)

We are happy to announce that you may now share a public roadmap with your customers using Convas. The public product roadmap is an easy way for you to show your customers feedback that is planned, currently being worked on, or recently completed.

We hope that the product roadmap feature will help reduce the number of incoming queries that you and your support team receive from enthusiastic customers. It's a great way to keep your most engaging customers informed and happy, without much extra effort from you.

If you don't know what Convas is read more 

The product roadmap will automatically show all feedback posts that are either Planned, In Progress, or recently Completed. It's that simple. 

Take a look at how our product roadmap looks at 

Please share your feedback on the product feature roadmap with us, any thoughts or concerns are welcome. Just go to our 

Public product roadmap showing customer feedback organized by status

We are happy to announce that you may now share a roadmap with your customers using Convas. The roadmap is an easy way for you to show your customers feedback that is planned, currently being worked on, or recently completed.

Back to Blog.

Product roadmap - New feature on Convas

How does the public roadmap work?

Feedback on the roadmap feature

Plug: Convas, a feedback page for your company

More Stories

How to manage feature requests and product feedback from your customers

Why you should have a public product roadmap (+ examples & templates)