#First time beta tester
south patrol
First, HI WELCOME AND THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING. Love to have you here. 
There really isn't a single piece of documentation that goes over all of this - open source projects in general don't have that level of detail. Could it be created? Maybe, but what we do is actually work in the open so it's less needed. I do see a point here in which how we work in the open could be in one spot, though.
Basically, most ideas start internally based on a couple things - feedback from users we've seen online (on our social spaces, on our Feature Requests, and during month of What the Heck), and research we do; for the latter, we're working on publishing it out publicly (but our web devs and designers have a lot on their plate right now).
As early as we possibly can, ideas are then shared in #1346914401508392980 - this is where the developers and designers start iterating on things. This is available for everyone to read - but we keep it gated so that there is no confusion between the Support channels and where the developers chat. Highly suggest you look through that and see if there's something you're wanting to track!
We also have discussions on our GitHub repos - this one is a bit harder to follow. It's designed for the developer contributors to weigh in on changes, but normal community members are more than welcome to join in the convo!
Feedback is then handled on the fly. We cannot predict how everyone will react to things - in fact, we knew Dev Tools was going to be A Thing™, but we didn't expect it to be like this gestures at everything. We do not gather interaction data from users - that goes against our core values, even if people want to opt in.
Normally, though, these kinds of heated topics happen about once a year. Last year's explosion was about the way we implemented backup encryptions, also in January.
This was word vomit, but please ask me anything you need clarified!! I may be slow to respond, I have a ton of meetings this morning (which is rare for me, actually).
tropic owl
👆 Very good summary
That said, we are in the process of making this all more clear as well (defining more processes) and bringing the early development stages in the open as well. More on that will become available in the upcoming months, but traces of it can already be found on our GitHub repositories (e.g., roadmap repo)
mellow zealot
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my message. Much appreciated!