Thank You for Your Feedback on Ideas and Themes

[ruthfoulkrod]

We want to take a moment to express our gratitude for all the thoughtful feedback and insights you shared with us regarding our proposed updates to Ideas and Themes. In the Ideas process, we aim to foster collaboration and innovation, and ensure your voices are heard and actively incorporated into our strategies. Your opinions are incredibly valuable and help guide our decisions as we strive to enhance this process and better meet your needs.

In response to the rich array of feedback we’ve received through various channels, we are taking a moment to pause and pivot our strategy on Ideas and Themes. We’ve taken your feedback seriously, and the insights gathered from the original blog post, in-person customer sessions, and conversations with our product teams and the wider Instructure organization have significantly influenced our direction. This process has provided us with a clearer perspective on what matters most to our customers, and we are committed to integrating your input as we refine our strategy moving forward.

What We Heard: 

• Develop a Realistic and Transparent Process: Many of you have emphasized the importance of creating a process that is both realistic and transparent, a sentiment echoed by our product teams. We are reviewing our processes to ensure we build solutions at scale that are achievable, while being careful not to overpromise and underdeliver. This will guide our strategy moving forward. We heard you when you shared things like:

“Triage Timeline: This short timeframe (10 Business Days) might not give sufficient time to our users to react to an idea or request.”

“How can we make sure that (product managers) aren't being set up for failure by setting reasonable turnaround times?”

• Backlog Management: We understand the concerns regarding the initial proposed ideas lifecycle, particularly the “maybe” status assigned to ideas in the reconsideration backlog. Our goal is to empower our internal teams to address ideas effectively and efficiently and ensure your ideas don’t sit untouched for extended periods. By streamlining backlog management, we aim to enhance responsiveness and transparency, ultimately leading to timely updates and implementations that benefit our customers. Thank you for sharing sentiments like:

“I think the "Maybe" stage is probably going to be the area that will be trickiest to manage. If a lot of ideas go in there and then eventually go the No path, folks might lose faith in the process.”

• Prioritize Usability Bugs: The issue of usability bugs has been a significant pain point for many of you. It’s essential for us to distinguish between ideas and usability bugs and to develop a sustainable, realistic process for prioritizing and tackling these bugs consistently. Your feedback reflects a key concern:

“..there is a disconnect between the Canvas Community and the users regarding the importance of the difference between ideas (i.e., enhancements/nice to haves) and (usability) bugs/issues that should be fixed”

• Enhanced Communication: We acknowledge the need to improve communication about where your ideas stand in the process and why. Additionally, we aim to better communicate our strategic initiatives and how they are informed by your suggestions. Establishing clearer expectations regarding our development priorities and the allocation of time and resources toward your ideas is also a key focus for us. This need for improved communication is evident from your feedback:

“My main issue with Ideas is the disconnect between what Instructure thinks Ideas should be for and what the consumer thinks Ideas should be for.”

“...the process diagram of the Idea Lifecycle is helpful but does not provide detail at this time on how the Yes/Maybe/No decisions will be made…”

We are excited about what’s ahead and are committed to making changes that truly reflect your needs. As we update our strategy to incorporate your feedback, we will be focusing on three key areas:

• Simplifying Feedback Solicitation: We will develop straightforward methods to gather your feedback at scale, ensuring we capture diverse insights effectively.

• Enhancing Internal Processes: We aim to create efficient internal processes for managing and prioritizing feedback, enabling us to respond to your ideas more promptly and effectively.

• Closing the Feedback Loop: We will establish clear communication practices to ensure you, our valued customers and users, see how your input influences our decisions and outcomes.

What’s Next: Over the coming weeks, we will be refining our strategy, and we look forward to sharing our comprehensive go-forward plan with you in the new year.

Thank you once again for being a pivotal part of this process. We look forward to sharing more in the new year!