A feature request is an idea sent to you by a client to help you understand how he uses your product and what he needs from it so that you can provide him with a better experience. Feature requests serve as an important conduit of communication between you, the product owner, and your customers. They provide you with a realistic view of how your customers utilise your goods. By Better management of feature requests, it will help you to Keep track of product ideas, prioritise product features, improve your user experience, and retain and increase your user base as a result.
Types of Feature Request:
Reports of bugs.
Whenever you had a product malfunction or break when you were working with it such as an Android tablet, and your programme crash and you get a message that “your application has crashed.” “Do you want to file a bug report?” When a user is using your product and anything breaks, doesn’t work, or doesn’t deliver the functionality they expect, they submit a bug report.
Requests for product enhancements
Most of the time, your users are happy with what you’ve created, but they believe it might be better Product improvement requests are essentially customer feedback that tells you what works well in your product and, more importantly, how you can enhance it.
Requests for new product features
Your customers don’t always desire more features. They anticipate completely fresh ones that will assist them in getting more value from your goods. They submit your product feature requests that require that your product include new features.
How to manage product feature requests:
It’s more of a science than an art to manage a product. You’ll need a sustainable method that you can use from time to time to help you prioritise feature requests, manage them, and produce better products that please your customers. These are six best practice methods to help you maintain the best possible management of your product features.
Sort requests into categories and order them by priority.
Users that use your product in various ways communicate a large number of varied ideas, ambitions, and aspirations in the form of product feature requests. As a consequence, even if your customers’ input differs substantially, you’ll always be able to uncover some common ground pointing to certain aspects of your product. The question is how do you make sense of all this information so you know what needs to be developed or improved? Sort them into categories.
Talk over the features with your co-workers and key stakeholders.
Before starting a product development project to produce a feature that users have requested, you should consult with other project stakeholders to identify the best course of action. Each feature request should be accompanied by a series of introspective questions, such as:
Do we have the necessary resources to develop this feature?
Why haven’t we implemented this functionality earlier? Are there any barriers we should be aware of before proceeding?
Is this our most important requirement at the moment? Are there any additional things that have been requested that we could implement that would be the most beneficial in the long run?
How important is this to our customers?
Keep track of product development activities via a public product plan.
A consumer product roadmap shows users that their desired features are being developed and will be available within a certain timeline. Using a changelog tool for your digital product helps you gather feedback from users along the way. They can tell you if the product is improving as expected and suggest where changes might be needed even before new features are introduced. This way, you can keep track of updates, involve your users, and make sure your product meets their needs and expectations.
Maintain consumer interest
When you receive feature requests from consumers and incorporate them into your product, the process of product enhancement does not end. Customers want to know that no matter what their demands are, you’re working on them and launching them as quickly as feasible. This is one technique to gain user trust by persuading your product’s consumers that you’re always improving it to make it more helpful to them. There are various strategies to keep your users interested in the growth of your product, including email updates, sharing mock-ups and design concepts, incorporating consumer feedback at various phases of the product development process and more.
Set up a mechanism to receive and manage requests.
Users of your product are certain to have some feedback for you, but if you don’t have a mechanism in place to make the process easier for them, it will be difficult for them to do so. Using an open request management technology allows your users to offer feedback quickly and easily through a user-friendly interface.
Product input that is dispersed is one of the most serious issues that product teams encounter, especially when it comes to digital products. Users may submit feature suggestions for your digital products via email, live chat, Facebook, Twitter, and a variety of other channels. This is a significant challenge for product teams who must manually collect and organise all of this disparate feedback to make sense of it. How can you prioritise your product’s users’ demands and focus on incorporating them into the digital product if you don’t even have a comprehensive overview of what they want to see?
To answer this, you can put all of your product feature requests for your digital products in one place, similar to a project management tool. This way, you can see, prioritise, and update their status as they advance from to-do to done. Having a centralized system for managing these requests enables better organization and ensures that valuable user feedback doesn’t get lost or overlooked, allowing the product team to address user needs effectively and enhance the digital product accordingly.
