The Idea Exchange is, in general, a great idea....to get product enhancement ideas from customers and allow them to vote on them in order to guage the level of demand for the various ideas. Once the number of votes reaches 45 it crosses a threshold where Product Management are meant to review and respond. All good so far.... The customer's natural assumption is that ideas over 45 votes should be seriously considered by Product Management and have a good chance of being added into development plans. Otherwise, what's the point of all the effort everyone is putting in to submit and vote on the ideas? With that in mind, the results are a bit disappointing. Picking some of the more popular categories, these are the results of ideas which reached 45 votes:
My Work : 2 under consideration and 5 not planned (including the top 3 not planned).
Resource Management: 2 under consideration and 2 not planned.
Projects: 1 delivered, 3 planned, 3 under consideration, and 5 not planned.
There are also a few occasions (e.g. in the My Work area) where ideas have been marked as 'Not Planned' without even a response explaining why. Some constructive ideas to help improve the Idea Exchange moving forward:
Workfront to reserve a portion of each release specifically for Idea Exchange ideas. Mention on the release notes that the idea came from the Idea Exchange.
Curation of ideas by Product Management to reduce duplicate ideas. This will ensure that it is easier to find the right idea to vote for, and votes are not split across multiple ideas which are essentially the same.
Add a new response category of "Backlog" or something similar to identify that Product Management like the idea and plan to introduce it at some point, although not immediately enough to warrant a 'Planned' status. This could reduce the number of 'Not Planned' responses.
'Not Planned' should only be used when Product Management firmly disagree with the idea, and they should provide a fairly detailed explanation as to why. If Product Management see an idea early on and they know it won't ever get done, then they should use the Not Planned category early, before waiting for the 45 votes.
Regards, David Cornwell