Open letter - What are the rules or conditions for getting suggestions implemented

Greg shared this question 12 months ago
Answered

I am grateful that MM developers have an open forum for soliciting ideas. From a product improvement perspective this provides the opportunity to have some of the most committed users provide ideas that should be considered.

I have over several years asked for a two simple changes.

  1. To allow users to change / swap the order of icons in a topic
  2. To provide a true 0-100% progress icon suite (allow the option of a 100% full blue icon rather than a green tick)

I have noticed there have been some similar ideas presented by others, that alone will not elicit significant buy in from the group. However, collectively, the similar ideas could be aggregated, but I am not sure this is taken into consideration.

MindManager is not cheap, however, it is an essential tool for my daily work. I am questioning are we getting value for money. We are in a world of constant change, but I think significant change is rather slow for each of the iterations within MM. If this was an open source program I am sure that many of the great ideas provided would just be implemented. Like the ability to simply swap the order of icons. What triggered my rant is that PowerToys provide significant improvements on almost a weekly basis.

So my question is:

  • Is it clearly articulate how our suggestions are taken on board and implemented?
  • Are we happy with the rate of continuous improvement?

Replies (2)

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Hi Greg,

The MindManager product team regularly engages with customer questions and ideas here in the MindManager community. MindManager has millions of users across the world and many of them use MindManager in very different ways. It's always a challenge for us to make decisions about which areas we should focus on next. We take customer feedback very seriously and use it to guide roadmap decisions. This community is an important source of customer feedback used for that purpose.

That said, we also use other methods to gather customer feedback at scale. For example, we recently sent out in-app invitations to a survey that asked participants to rank various new features and enhancements, some of which were originally suggested here on the community. The survey had thousands of respondents which provided more statistically significant information about customer preferences than what is available here on the community. This is largely due to low participation when it comes to voting on community ideas.

Over the course of this year, you will see some of the highly ranked features and enhancements from that survey implemented in MindManager.

We also recently added additional statuses for ideas here on the community so that you can better understand the progress of your idea through the process. If an idea has enough votes or supporting requests from other sources we will mark them as "Under Consideration." This means that we have enough evidence of customers support for this idea as compared to other ideas and have begun the process of determining its feasibility, estimates, and priority amongst other initiatives so that we can determine when we can fit it into the release schedule. You can see an example of an idea with this status here:

https://community.mindmanager.com/topic/82-mindmanager-go-editing

We also added a status for "Implemented." This status shows that the idea is now available in MindManager. You can see an example of this status on this idea:

https://community.mindmanager.com/topic/1299-mm-essentials-touch-scree-capable

I appreciate your open letter and hope this helps shed some light on our process.

P.S. I too want to be able to re-order icons, but I can't just move this idea ahead of other ones that have more customer support based on the current information we have available. I encourage you to create an idea for re-ordering icons, and I'll be the first to support you with a vote.

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Thanks for your detail explanantion.
I think it would be helpfull if everybody could see what happen on ideas on this board.
Maybe its helpfull with two additional search words.
b6ebb3eb2a9061e344546a5dc680d341

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