Where do product and feature ideas come from?
If you’d like to submit a feature request for one of our products to the team, please use the button below.
CLIENT FEATURE REQUESTS
Either directly submitted, or submitted
via an Account Manager or during the
sales process, or raised during a meeting,
workshop or event.
INTERNAL IDEAS
Ideas from the learning innovation, product
or tech teams, or the wider business.
INNOVATION LAB
Our internal idea ‘incubator’. This is focused on very
new ideas – further away from the next iteration of our
products (because that will happen anyway…).
EXTERNAL IDEAS
Things we see in terms of industry trends, best practice
and expert views on learning and user experience.
TECHNOLOGY
Capability or need. When new technologies become available
or the environment changes, we may need to change our own
technology, or respond to the external change to keep our
systems robust, secure and future-ready. New technology
often also gives us new choices in the way we develop.
What do we do with requests and ideas from clients?
When you submit an idea, you’ll be asked (or your LC will help you) to re-frame the request as a problem to be solved and to check it’s in line with the product vision.
Then we ask for other information to help us understand the issue – like the nature of how it impacts your work. (If it’s actually a bug, we’ll pass it on to the development team for assessment, fixing and testing. If so, they may need to come back to you for more details to help them diagnose the issue.)
Why?
While the solution you have in mind might make perfect sense right now, we have to take into account the other current and future development work across the product ecosystem.
The most important thing is that we understand the problem so that we can try and solve it in a way that will work for everyone, now and in the future.
What is the process for this?
Because our products are generally complex, we have to address new features and re-designs at a high level (rather than just make lots of small changes that may be incoherent in the long run or affect other things).
We prioritize these bigger developments according to our roadmap. We review this every month, and prioritize according to criteria generally used for this type of decision making:
How do we design a new feature, product or update?
We use a process we’ve refined internally that’s a type of Design Sprint. this has 4 stages:
UNDERSTANDING
THE PROBLEM
GENERATING
IDEAS
REFINE AND
DECIDE
PROTOTYPE
AND TEST
We use more or less the same approach every time, but different parts of the process varies depending on the type of problem and product. The team taking part in the ‘sprint’ includes people from around the business – always including those in client-facing roles as well as design, learning and product specialists.
How do client problems feature in this?
Mostly at the ‘Understanding the problem’ stage. this stage involves an extended period of looking at evidence to make sure the issue is well understood. We do things like look at information from clients (which is why we ask for information about impact, etc.), data and analytics from our systems, and interviewing ‘experts’ – this might include clients, account managers, solutions and support, learning experts – internal or external, etc. We’ll also review external information related to the problem so that we are up-to-date with current thinking and look at potential solutions – for example, how leading companies in other industries are tackling this problem.
We also look at client data to help us prioritize (we always have many more ideas than we can build), and we may come to you as a client or partner to help us with prototype testing. We test with a variety of types of user, always including both those who know the platform as it is, and those who know nothing at all about the way it works right now – this helps us balance designing the best solution possible vs managing and understanding the amount of change for our existing users.
How can I find out more about what’s coming in relation to my problem (and in general)?
Our public roadmaps are updated every month on the website (when there are changes to make). Your Account Manager or Sales contact also has access to internal, more detailed versions of this and can provide further information. They can also get in touch with the Product Manager for further information as needed.
We will also publicize any significant changes, and our regular release notes are a good source of detailed information about upcoming and recent developments.
