Close the loop on customer feedback with Promote to Roadmap

Available today, we're significantly enhancing the opportunity for engagement with your customers and stakeholders throughout the product development process with promote to roadmap. With this new feature you can now easily elevate prioritized ideas to your roadmap, and keep invested stakeholders informed at every stage.

Engaging customers and stakeholders in the process of gathering feedback, analyzing, and then prioritizing that feedback to build features is crucial, yet not always straightforward. With this feature release, your customers can follow as an integral part of the journey from feedback ideation to feature launch.

Promote to roadmap allows you and your team to elevate popular ideas into roadmap items through the ‘promote’ action. Crucially, all contextual information (feedback, votes) is associated with the new work item. Stakeholders that left feedback and votes stay associated with the work as it is prioritized, scheduled, and developed - giving you easy access to a list of people to contact for further research, testing, beta releases, and more feedback after launch. 

Why we built this feature

Originally, we built the feedback functionality into the LaunchNotes platform to help foster stronger connections between product teams and their customers during product planning and development. We envisioned a two-way conversation where our customers could glean insights from their users about essential features, challenges, and enhancements.

Today, promote to roadmap brings that conversation into all aspects of LaunchNotes. It offers deeper transparency into how customer feedback directly affects your roadmap. This not only showcases user impact on your product's evolution but also transforms feedback from a static survey into a continuous dialogue. With promote to roadmap, your team can ensure that stakeholders leaving feedback and votes never miss an update related to their needs. 

How close the loop works

Promoting an idea in LaunchNotes automatically generates a corresponding roadmap item with the same title, description, and categories. The original idea is archived, and the roadmap item is added to the first stage of the roadmap.

Users who provided feedback or voted on the idea are automatically subscribed to the new roadmap item. An optional email can also notify subscribers that left feedback directly about the update, linking them to the new roadmap item if it is in a published state. This ensures a seamless transition from idea to roadmap, with no loss of context.

Management portal experience

Within the idea editor, once you select an idea, you can promote it to the roadmap. Options include emailing users who have provided feedback and sending a test email to review the notification in your own inbox first.

Subscriber experience

Subscribers can be notified when their feedback leads to a roadmap commitment. If the roadmap item is promoted to a published column, they can follow the link in the email to navigate to the published roadmap item for the full content of the item. They'll also receive email notifications when product announcements associated with the roadmap item are published.

Why is this critical to the CX of product communications? 

The promote to roadmap feature emphasizes active engagement over passive feedback collection. It enhances the user experience by:

• Acknowledging positive feedback

• Actioning user insights and queries

• Closing the loop by informing stakeholders of change related to their feedback

This direct, personalized approach underscores the value of user feedback in the product development journey.

Creating more business value

Give customers a great experience, and they’ll engage, buy more, be more loyal, and share their experience with colleagues:

Engage all stakeholders

Stakeholders that have a product or feature developed because they asked for it are your highest intent individuals. Informing them the moment that there is an update keeps them engaged, and primes them to take advantage of any new functionality the moment your team makes it available. 

Better customer relationships

Customers who feel heard and know that you will take action on their behalf are more likely to remain loyal and become advocates when they feel recognized and valued.

Better employee experiences

Providing front-line employees the power to resolve customer queries and take action on a customer’s behalf keeps them moving at top speed while delighting your customers.

Improved revenue creation

Strong customer relationships and positive customer emotions translate into healthy revenue. When customers feel appreciated, “they are willing to pay up to 16% more for products and services” (source: Research from PwC)

Get more feedback and insights in the future

By inviting customers to join the product development journey, they are getting something back in exchange for their feedback. When they have confidence their feedback is being actioned, they’re more likely to offer more feedback in the future. And with more data and insights coming from your customers, you’re better able to build a virtuous product development cycle.

Invite your users and stakeholders to share their critical needs and feedback, and take them along for the ride as ideas progress from suggestions to reality. We can't wait to see you and your customers bring more ideas to life – together!

Got feedback?

Please let us know! We love it, and now better than before, we can keep you up to date on what we do about it! No more !