Gliffy Planner

Designer 2015 •

For about a year and a half at Gliffy we didn't have a full time product manager, so to come up with our company roadmap, our CEO held a planning meeting every quarter with our head of engineering, head of marketing and me. We'd spend an entire afternoon:

  1. reviewing our KPIs and writing them on a white board
  2. writing potential company projects that we felt could affect our KPIs positively on sticky notes
  3. placing those sticky notes on the white board under the relevant KPIs
  4. voting for projects we thought the company should focus on by placing sticky dots on the sticky notes representing each project (a process commonly known as dotmocracy)

Lastly, we'd create a roadmap in Gliffy to record our decisions. While this method of determining our roadmap had the benefit of helping us capture ideas and make decisions relatively quickly, there were a couple shortcomings - namely, it:

  • made the decision making process around projects a closed door affair
  • didn't allow us to capture ideas on an ongoing basis as they occurred
  • didn't allow us to capture ideas and feedback from customers in their own words
  • didn't allow us to capture ideas and feedback from team members in their own words
If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere. It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process.

- Ed Catmull, President, Pixar

To address these shortcomings and make the decision making process around what we work on more transparent, I came up with this project during one of our quarterly hackathons. The goal was to allow customers and anyone in the company to propose and vote on ideas, and to help decision makers evaluate and prioritize them.

Opportunities:

  1. Be the system of record for a company’s ideas & roadmap
  2. Improve operational efficiency
  3. Improve transparency and company morale

The ideas page is where anyone can view, search for, or add an idea. Customers and employees can also check on the status of an idea to see if it's currently being evaluated or already on the roadmap.

While anyone can propose an idea, employees are encouraged to keep the company's goals in mind by checking the relevant KPIs their idea could affect.

Ideas can be sorted not only by recency and popularity but by "notability," a metric determined by "who" voted for an idea.

So even if an idea doesn't receive a large number of votes it can be deemed "notable" if the people who voted for it represent a potentially larger cohort based on their role and the company they worked for. This criteria was missing in the way we were measuring the popularity of feature requests in our forums on Zendesk.

Admins and key decision makers within a company would have the ability to "evaluate" an idea based on the effort it might take and the benefits it might have on the company's goals. An overall project score and rank could then be determined based on criteria specified by an admin or key decision makers.

After an idea has been evaluated it can then be added to the company's roadmap.

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