Overview
At Limble, we don’t just like feedback from customers; we rely on it. Instead of collecting virtual dust in an inbox, customer feedback helps determine which features get built.
Limble’s Product team uses customer feedback to make improvements to our software. In the product development process, the Product team goes through several steps to thoroughly research customer requests and build the right solutions.
In this article, you’ll learn about the product development lifecycle: where you can submit product feedback, how and when product improvements get selected, and the development process.
Table of Contents
The Product Development Lifecycle
The product development lifecycle is the process in which customer feedback or a feature request becomes a part of our software. There are a series of steps to get to the end product, including research, customer interviews, prototyping, and testing.
Here is the step-by-step process of the product development lifecycle:
The Product team gathers customer feedback. Customers can submit ideas directly to the product feedback board.
(Note: Premium + and Enterprise customers can also provide feedback to their Customer Success Managers.)
Selected ideas move on to the discovery phase. Limble’s Product team conducts comprehensive market research and customer interviews to understand the opportunity for improvement. The team works closely with customers, engineers, and designers to find and test the proposed solutions with customers.
Not all ideas move past the discovery phase. There are several factors that determine whether an idea can or should be built, such as how many customers are asking for the product feature or what other features may be in development at that time.
Once the solution has been developed, it is released to customers. Once an improvement gets released, the Product team gathers additional feedback to further refine or improve the product.
How to Submit Product Feedback
Customers should submit their ideas to our product feedback board.
Before you submit your feature request, we encourage you to check out the entire product board. You’ll find ideas other customers have submitted for consideration, planned product features, features in development, and recently released features.
The idea form will ask you to include three things:
Share an idea about what you want to be able to do in Limble and how that idea would help you and your team solve a problem or achieve a goal.
Rank how important the feature request is to you:
‘Nice to have’ – your request would make the app more convenient or useful, but it’s not a significant need
‘Important’ – your request would solve a significant need for you and your team
‘Critical’ – if your request cannot be built, you’d consider switching to another product
Provide your e-mail address so our Product team can contact you to learn more about your request.
Submissions don’t have to be fully-formed product feature ideas; we care most about what customers are wanting to achieve and how their feature request would help them get there.
How Feature Requests Get Chosen
You submitted product feedback that you’re really excited about. Now what?
Several factors determine whether product feedback goes into the discovery phase, and even more, factors decide if a request will move on to be developed.
Here are some of our Product team's top questions when reviewing product feedback:
Is there a feature currently under consideration or in development that will solve the customer’s need?
What impact does this make for our entire customer base?
Is there an existing feature or workflow that can solve the customer’s need? (Don’t worry, we’ll tell you if this is the case!)
How long will it take to research or build the feature? Sometimes, we table good ideas until there’s a better opportunity to dedicate the time and resources to building them.
There are instances where product feedback moves into the discovery phase and does not move on to development or gets put on hold. Most of the time, the decision stems from asking one of the above questions.
Once a customer is looped into the process, our Product team will maintain an open line of communication, whether directly or through the customer’s dedicated Limble Customer Success Manager if they have one.
The Feature Build Process
Your feedback gets chosen for consideration and makes it through the discovery process to become a product feature. Now what?
We wish there were a one-size approach to building new features, but the reality is that no feature is identical to another. While some ideas take a small amount of time and resources to create, others require a lot more research, staff time, and customer input to execute well.
If your feature request is under consideration, our Product team will contact you through each development stage to keep you updated.
While we can’t lay out a broad timeline, we can say that we’re committed to keeping our customers in the loop! We encourage you to keep an eye on the Limble product feedback board to see what’s in the works.
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