Feature requests

Feature requests without a public board, and without the arguments.

A public roadmap looks like transparency and behaves like a commitment device. Every date becomes a promise, every rejection becomes a thread, and your competitors get a quarterly briefing for free. There is another way to run this: collect the requests privately and answer each person directly.
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What a board actually costs

Four bills that arrive later

None of these are reasons a board is wrong — plenty of companies run one well. They are the costs nobody mentions when the board is being set up, and they all land after you have committed.
  1. 01

    Your roadmap becomes public

    Anyone can read what you are planning, in what order, and what you have decided not to do. For a small team competing with a larger one, that is a strange thing to publish.

  2. 02

    No becomes a negotiation

    Rejecting a request privately takes one sentence. Rejecting it under a post with forty votes takes a paragraph, a follow-up and often a second thread.

  3. 03

    Votes measure volume, not value

    The requests that win are the ones from customers who are organised enough to campaign. The request from your best account, made once, quietly, loses.

  4. 04

    It needs an account, so it filters

    A board only hears from people willing to register on a second site. That is a small and unrepresentative slice of the people using your product.

What replaces it

A private inbox and a direct answer

Requests arrive through the widget already on your site, with no account for the person asking. You triage them privately through five statuses, and when something ships the person who asked gets an email in their own language — which is what most people wanted from a board in the first place. That mechanism is described on closing the loop.

When a board is the right call

Be honest about this one

If you sell to developers who expect to see the roadmap, if your community is already active and vocal, or if public prioritisation is part of how you market the product, a board is genuinely better and you should use Canny or Featurebase. This page is for the much larger group of teams who set one up because it seemed like the done thing, and now maintain a page with eleven posts on it.

FAQ

Questions

Why would I not want a public feature request board?
Three reasons come up repeatedly: it publishes your roadmap to competitors, it turns every rejected idea into a public argument, and vote counts reward whoever has the loudest customers rather than whichever request matters most.
Without votes, how do I know what to build?
By reading the requests and counting duplicates, which is what most teams with a board actually do anyway. A vote count tells you how many people clicked; the text of ten similar requests tells you what problem they all had.
Do my users lose anything by not having a board?
They lose the ability to see other people ideas, which almost nobody uses, and they gain not having to create an account to say something. For most products that trade is heavily in the user favour.
Can I still tell people when their request ships?
Yes, and this is the part a board is usually a proxy for. Move the request to shipped and whoever asked gets an email in their own language. They hear from you directly rather than by checking a page.

Start collecting requests privately.

One script tag, and the next idea from a user lands in your inbox instead of nowhere.

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