Tl;dr: You want a forward-thinking roadmap, you want insight on the problems we are addressing that matter to you, not just what released in the last quarter, and most importantly you want to know the what, why, and when of how Instructure intends to serve your needs best. We heard your feedback on the community and we will be making changes to address it starting with regular updates. This post outlines some of the changes being focused on in the coming months.
In my post last week, I shared an update about the path forward for New Quizzes. As mentioned, I have had the unique opportunity to meet with many customers in-person, dive in deep to our community, and talk with our team members. These conversations have highlighted a few key areas which require change in order to effectively share our vision and hear from you.
In fact, we found our time with customers so enriching, we want to incorporate this cycle of listen-and-learn as a permanent fixture in our product development. Considering our diverse client base, and the communities they in turn serve, a listen-and-learn, rinse and repeat, mentality will help us to serve all of our clients’ unique needs.
We are dedicating the remainder of Q4 2022 to addressing the following areas to ensure that we are hitting the ground running at the start of the year.
Product Roadmap: Looking to the Future
Many of you have been asking for more transparency into our future product strategy. We are pleased to announce that we have released a forward-looking outcome roadmap! So what does that mean?
Our new company roadmap—found at roadmap.instructure.com—has several different features to help you understand where we are, and where we are going. We have added these various layers of information to give you the option of having as broad or as detailed a view as you want.
- Company-wide Focus Areas: This new company roadmap shows the focus areas across all of our products as a whole.
- User Problems we are Solving: The roadmap is rooted in the problems we are solving and the impact for our users.
- Roadmap by Product: Each Instructure product family now has its own roadmap page, making the content easier to read, sort, and find what’s relevant to the tool(s) you’re using. Links to each roadmap are found in the top-level navigation and by clicking on the Product Name in the legend.
- More detail for current quarter items: For current quarter product roadmap items, you can click the plus (+) icon to read detailed explanations about what is changing, why it is valuable, and which Idea Conversations align with the update.
The Path Forward for Idea Conversations
4,393 Open Ideas…love all of the ideas… I do not love so many being in open status. We want to take advantage of the valuable input from customers who utilize our products in their day-to-day. Currently, we know Idea Conversations are unequivocally not structured to aggregate and act on contributions in a scalable way. As a team, a top priority is to create a new process, which allows us to gather your insights, assess their actionability, and close the loop with customers through regular, clear, and detailed responses.
Over the next few weeks, we are consulting with various community members, internal teams, and community forum experts to determine the best path forward. We will explore questions like:
- How can we provide better visibility for community members into problem identification and prioritization?
- How can we identify trends and group similar ideas under a single problem statement?
- What is the best way for users to support ideas while maintaining their voice?
- How can we foster better communication and collaboration between our product teams and users?
- How can we better classify ideas?
- How can we create visibility which clearly shows where your ideas are in our development process?
Change is coming.
We are excited for positive change and committed to creating a proactive and inclusive product development methodology which takes into account the wide diversity of our client needs. We are dedicated to transparency and specificity and will not provide partial answers moving forward but fully fleshed-out responses when they are ready.
Over the next month you will see a variety of modifications to our ongoing systems for gathering ideas and input as we determine our next steps. We ask for your participation and patience as we develop the right system of processes to gather your input and disseminate the details of new plans, highlight important deadlines and dates, and explain our rationale behind important roadmap decisions and their impact on your users.
We look forward to embarking on this new journey together and the opportunities it provides to edify each other and create the best possible product roadmap for all of you.
Thank you all for your feedback, comments, and insights over the last few months and remember to keep your eyes peeled for another update on November 17, 2022!
The content in this blog is over six months old, and the comments are closed. For the most recent product updates and discussions, you're encouraged to explore newer posts from Instructure's Product Managers.