AgileAssets is striving to increase the engagement between our customers and our product development teams. At our International User Conference (IUC) in April, we introduced a new way for our customers to help shape and influence the product roadmap.
Up until now, sharing an enhancement idea or feature request usually came through the help desk, a conversation with an account executive, or a meeting with one of the product managers. With the introduction of Communities and Ideas, we can cast a broader net to capture ideas from you and your users at any time.
In fact, with Ideas, you’re able to see all the ideas other users and customers have submitted and vote or comment on them. This allows the best, highest value ideas to come to the top of the list. Then we can prioritize them into our releases. With the transition to a faster release cadence, this means we can respond to these ideas and get them released much more quickly.
Once we introduced Communities and Ideas at IUC, customers began to submit ideas and comment on those that were already submitted. In addition to submitting and voting for ideas, the product managers can communicate the status of the ideas, for example “on the roadmap”, “in design”, or “delivered”. Product managers are also using comments to ask questions or get clarification on the ideas so that they can understand your needs while we design and develop a solution.
Along with Ideas, we introduced AgileAssets Communities at IUC. Customers have asked for user groups around the product modules – like bridge, pavement, maintenance, fleet, and signs – to collaborate and share ideas with other organizations. Communities are our answer to user groups, and they have two parts. First, there is an online community where each AgileAssets module has a forum where you can submit questions or topics for discussion with other AgileAssets users and the AgileAssets staff. The second part includes a quarterly conference call facilitated by AgileAssets for the user community to share and discuss topics with each other. We are starting the quarterly conference calls on the most popular AgileAssets modules and will expand to discuss other modules as we gather community feedback. Starting this summer, the first calls will focus on Bridge, Pavement, and Maintenance.
If you are ready to get involved with Communities and Ideas, go to the AgileAssets website and click on Communities at the top of the page. You will be prompted to create a username and password the first time you come to the site – and then you’ll be able to join in the conversation with all of us!
Written by: Michael Lester on June 4, 2018