@f_latulipe
I appreciate you sharing your concerns here. I know that it can be difficult to trust a process when you're not first hand with the day to day workings of it, so I'm hoping I can share a little bit of 'behind the community' that will help with that. You're right that we do not share our entire roadmap, and that's intentional. There are just some things we can't share. We do however strategically share roadmap priorities that we need/want user feedback on in the Canvas Studio. The priorities list is what we're working on right now - so please make sure you're following the space to get updates when they are available.
Your comment "The 'voting system' in the community doesn't reflect the 'value' of a feature request." is a difficult comment to break down, because everyone has a different definition of "value" based on their role and perspective. To us, each element of the ideation process has value, or we wouldn't do it! First, every idea submitted has unique and valuable data, beyond just votes. In our internal dashboards we can see demographics of who submitted the idea, who voted on the idea, and who commented on the idea. This gives us a grand picture of who any and every idea matters to.
We do look at the highest voted ideas, but that's not all that we look at. We also, often, are looking at sets of ideas by theme. For example, a product manager may come to our team looking for ideas around 'assignments'. We don't just look at the highest voted ideas of assignments, we look at all ideas around that theme, including those in cold storage. So, every idea matters, even the low votes.
In addition to highest vote, and related to a theme, we also look at the themes that bring in the most submissions. This gives us another piece of data to check our priorities against. It's a gauge of what themes (assignments, gradebook, quizzes, etc...) people are most interested in.
And don't forget about the comment threads! When we're looking at ideas, the comment threads play a big role. They often contain important use cases that help us understand the problems a new idea is seeking to solve. The underlying problem that is seeking a solution is key to development!
So, there is a lot to ideation that is unseen, like an iceberg, but that also is intentional. We work very hard to keep a simple user experience for finding ideas and submitting new ideas. This is why we allocate so much time and human resource to reading (moderating) and managing every idea. We know that things could be simpler, which is why we have a wish list (feature requests) of things we'd like to see in Jive/LithiumX (community platform) to make this experience even better. For example, we'd love to be able to merge duplicate ideas, but that's not possible, so we employ a different strategy (archive>cold storage)...
I hope this information helps you to see that the ideation process trough a different lens. We look forward to seeing you in the forums there!
Floriane
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