Forest Admin Product Roadmap is now public!

Update: 08/24/18
Our Product Roadmap is no longer available on Trello. But it’s still public!
We’ve decided to switch to productboard. Access our Product Roadmap here.

Why?
1. We’re now using productboard internally to manage product feedback and roadmap.
2. We don’t have to duplicate content from productboard to Trello (and waste time by doing so).
3. We’ve a preference for productboard design and user experience (e.g. submit an idea or upvote a feature).

If you read this article, you probably already know that we are frequently sharing content about our adventure and product via several channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Medium (obviously), Github…, and also via Slack with our customers (benefit included in our Pro plan).

All of these moments are great opportunities for us to engage with our community members such as prospects, customers, friends… and gather feedback. There are also allowing us to share our vision of current & future developments and keep people up to date on any issues or releases.

By people, I mean …

… Investors. It is important for us to communicate to them our vision, strategy and as much relevant information as possible. For example, we will be able to share our customers’ feedback (positive or not), in the most direct and transparent way. It helps them to better understand our product, our operational strategy & reactivity, and in a nutshell how and why is our business growing.

… Lumberjacks (aka Team members). To make sure we are going in the same direction, at the same pace, and we will succeed in our mission (to build the first SaaS admin interface), it is mandatory that everyone is at the same level of information. It is especially true while we are currently growing fast (our team doubled in the last few months) and onboarding new teammates almost every week.

… Customers (of course). I can’t think of a successful business without well informed and engaged customers.

During these opportunities for sharing, we noticed that most of our customers’ feedback or ideas were already present in our product roadmap. Sometimes not. We also realized that lots of them were coming from different people who did not know they were sharing the same input. Well, how could they have known?

“It would be great to have more collaborative features such as…”“When I’m calling a customer, I need to have access to all its information and a the same time…”
“I wish Forest Admin could be integrated with Zendesk!”

The solution was obvious: all the relevant information on our product development, centralized, and accessible by anyone anytime!

That’s why we finally decided to make our product roadmap public, on productboard.

We are really excited to publicly share this roadmap because it is an important step further in the adventure with our customers. From now on and more than ever, our community members will be part of this great project of building the first admin interface as-a-Service with us !!!

Transparency

This public product roadmap brings more transparency to the relationship with our customers, especially when you consider the impact any new features can have in their admin interface.

Everyone can now enjoy an open board where to find what we’ve shipped recently, what we are currently working on, and some ideas of what we should be doing next.

Win-Win

Also, everyone can now suggest ideas or tell us what really resonates with them from a list of suggested ideas that we feel most strongly about.

Obviously, we have a vision for Forest but with customers’ help, we are making sure the product gets better, faster. From their side, customers have a way to participate in building the product they need, by simply voting for the features they want in their admin interface. It’s a win-win situation!

Accountability

When Front released their Public Roadmap, their CEO Mathilde Collin said “by adding transparency to your workflow, you introduce something new and very powerful: accountability. Indeed, when your users clearly state what they want from you, you really have no excuse for not delivering it!”

We already have high standards on this topic because we know that is an important element for our future success. But, this direct connexion with our community offers the team a good feedback loop to our product development process. No feature will be built for nothing.

How is it working?

The Product Roadmap board is organized in four tabs:

• Ideas & Requests is the tab which contains interesting ideas (well every list contain interesting ideas). We haven’t committed to them yet, but we’re eager to discover how they resonate with you! Feel free to upvote them — by clicking on the card — if you think it would be helpful.
• The Committed tab contains all the ideas we’re currently researching and preparing to build.
• Doing is the tab of under construction features and projects about to be launched.
• All improvements and features you can see and use in your project are listed in the list Launched. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Disclaimer

We are hopeful that our Open Product Roadmap can shed some light on our past, current and future tech projects. Please understand that it is being shared for informational purposes only, and not as a binding commitment. Actual release dates may vary from those committed on our roadmap so do not rely on this information in making purchasing decisions.