PathPro’s Feature Submission tool lets you collect feedback, ideas, bug reports, and feature ideas from those actively using your product. However this is much more than a simple form submission. With PathPro, submissions essentially become tasks that can be moved directly into Feature Voting, or directly into your production pipeline! Let’s breakdown how a Feature Submission works with PathPro:
A Customer has an Idea for a New Feature #
A customer has been using your product, and they have an idea for a feature that they’d like to see implemented. This customer goes to your front-facing view of your project to get an overview of everything in the works. For an example of a front-facing project, you can see the official PathPro Product Path here.
If this customer has not yet joined your product’s community, they can easily join by clicking the “Join Product” button”
By joining your community, this allows this customer to submit feature ideas, upvote potential upcoming features, and other interactions that inform your product’s growth. For now however, this customer is here to submit a new feature. As an official community member of your product, they now simply need to click the “Submit Feature Request” button in order to submit their idea via a handy popup form:
Upon submitting this form, this item becomes more than just a form submission. It essentially becomes a task, but we’ll cover that in the next section. For now, the customer will wait to see if the idea is “adopted” and in the meantime they can check their own stats in their account area to see their rank and other analytics based around their overall interaction with your project. As you can see below, this member currently sees that their rank is a default “Community Member”:
Reviewing the Submission #
Logging into your PathPro account’s admin area, you’ll now see a notification for the new feature submission on your dashboard. You can also review all Feature Submissions by clicking the appropriate tab in the left sidebar, as shown below:
Clicking through to the Feature Submission section of your admin, you’ll see a list of all existing and new Feature Submissions in chronological order. Here’s an overview of how these submissions are organized to give you a quick glance:
Let’s click through on the submission we just received from the customer. After clicking on a submission, you’ll be taken to that submissions detailed view. This page contains the full feature/idea submission, as well as options that let you put the submission into action. Let’s have a look at this screen’s elements below:
At first glance this may seem like a straight forward form submission, and while receiving an idea for your product is great, PathPro empowers you to actually “put the idea to work” in multiple ways. Let’s cover a few scenarios in the next section.
Adopting the Feature Submission #
After receiving a Feature Submission, you have a few options, all based around ensuring that an idea never “falls through the cracks”. Before outlining these options, let’s look at an overview of the Feature Submissions detailed view below:
Let’s dig into the details a bit:
Submission details:
In the lefthand column you’ll find all of the details of the submission, including who submitted it, time stamp/status, etc., but also the submissions title and description. Keep in mind that both the title and description will carry over when you adopt this submission into a task (more on that below). With this in mind, you may need to edit the title and description for better presentation.
Highlighting a Submission:
Sometimes you’re not ready to take action, but you notice the submission is interesting. To make sure it doesn’t fall through the cracks, click the “Highlight for Later Reference” option. This option makes it simple to find key submissions at a later date via the filtering option on the list view.
Adopting the Submission:
Perhaps the most important feature, this allows you to “adopt” the submission. This essentially converts the submission into an actionable “task”. We cover this topic in the following Article “Adopting a Feature Submission“.
As you can see, Feature Submissions are a powerful and vital part of PathPro, and allow you to truly integrate ideas from those using your product. Give your customers and community a voice! To see how Feature submissions integrate into PathPro’s overall “Golden Pipeline,” check out this article.
