#Backlog Prioritization Methodology

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mortal horizon
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@void pumice I've split this conversation into another topic here to make it easier to sort and find it.

Here's a quick view overview of the tool I said, Product Board . It looks like a solution for the issue you presented.

I'm contacting them to see if there is any ways of getting a special license for Home Assistant and will keep you informed if something works.

If not, I think the methodology they build upon can be used with other tools to organize the roadmap. I'll be searching for FOOS tools that help with this goal as well while wait their feedback!

https://productboard.wistia.com/medias/f86ootughy

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Mentioning @vocal lantern also on here 🙂

vocal lantern
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Also pinging @opal spoke, Product Manager and roadmap hero of Nabu Casa

mortal horizon
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Just as a follow-up, Product Board responded. They have no possibilities of a free plan for open source projects, only a 30% discount.

But I feel we can go with something simpler using the line of tought here of Capturing feedback, Spliting and Categorizing it and then weighting on the product pillars defined.

I'll try to start a Proof of Concept here on Notion (or maybe try on Clickup since you use that) for this Methodology

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Bonjour @opal spoke just to sync, I was talking to Madalena on how can I collaborate more on Home Assistant as a product person and she mentioned this stage of collecting feedback from different sources for the team to better understand what are the weights on certain feature requests or to understand better the feedback on newly implemented features.

So I'm using a bit of my free time to help understand what can be done in that sense. Let me know if you already have something in mind!

opal spoke
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Hey! Great to see these discussion popping out here 🙂

I know ProductBoard, never used it but I used an equivalent (https://chattermill.com/)

To me, the problem with these platforms is that they heavily rely on feeding them tons of data to surface actionable insights.
Customer Feedback being just one part of it.

When you're a "regular company", the decision of going with such tool can make sense (And it's not even a given, they cost a lot and you really need to commit using it in order to ripe the benefits)

For us, looking for a tool to collect feedback from different sources, I would say that for now, we need something simpler, even hacky if I may, that is only focused on collecting feedback.

I would say that for now, we are on top of the feedback related to the feature we release since we have a product team (Dashbaord, the automation improvements, Voice)
We are not on top of older feedback, yet.

I'd love to get a better view of user feedback in general but I am not sure a tool would sufice 😉
I will actually ping @cyan wren our community manager that is doing an incredible job surfacing feedback already.

cyan wren
mortal horizon
cyan wren
mortal horizon
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Awesome inside info Guys! I was working only with what I see from the outside so this is great to hear on how it works from the inside. I know that on the product area is a lot harder to collaborate on open source projects than it is to write code for them, but I do think that this conversation is a great way to go! 🙂

@opal spoke Agree 100% that new and old feedback can and even should be treated differently, I was even thinking if we shouldn't try to understand how to deal with feedback from now on and then try to apply that to old feedback little by little. Collecting old feedback seems to be a huge task.

I did not have much time to have some progress on that but I'm thinking that maybe something to block the door on unstructured feedback from now to the future is what should be the focus now. Something like )UserVoice)[https://www.uservoice.com/] is also a way for that having votes and such, but I agree with you that having a "hacky way" should be enough for now, Google Forms (or any form really) can be a good first test, we can use the power of the community for people to help directing feedback to this tool.

cyan wren
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Uservoice is a product we very likely would not use. While I was at Microsoft, they stopped using it because they (at the time) refused to adhere to the GDPR policies MS built. While not fully confident right now, I bet that they still don't handle data well.

When MS tried to build up a new feedback system, what I did for Edge was I took all the feedback items I posted on the forums monthly (which was the "old" feedback) and put it into the new system as myself. Any new feedback would be done by users at that point. While the Discourse forums are already set up to do this, it's not....great. I plan on taking a stab at improving that after focusing on Discord.

opal spoke
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IN my former company we had an unstructure feedback channe; (A "Tel us what you think" on the footer of every page) and it was the wild west. Impossible to surface anything actionable.
We plugged Chattermill and it was better but the product teams were not on top of it, I eventually pulled the plug due to cost issue, the tool was costing us north of 10K a month if I remeber well.

We I ended up doing was feeding the whole shebang to Zappier, storing everything on a spreadsheet, per language.
Once a day the spreadsheet was analysed by ChatGPT...
I buit this in a day and honestly it was much better than I anticipated.
The cost was more than reasonable. We, of course, lost of a bit of context due to translation and such but it was actionable.

A report was posted my Zappier every day on a slack channel, some kind of hacky user sentiment analysis -

That's the type of things I clearly see working for Home assistant.