Product Ideas Archiving Policy: Discussion & improvement?

[LawrenceS]

I understand PTC's motivation to reduce the clutter in the hopes of focusing on more value added activities, however I think it is unfortunate that we cannot reply, comment and make suggestions on the policy where it was posted (Read only), so will do so here.  I hope others will add their feedback here as well.  I sincerely hope this updated policy means that PTC has a renewed interest in implementing customer feedback...

It seems to me that the number of votes within a certain time period is an obvious place to start, however there are other factors I would really like to see addressed by PTC that may give it equal or greater importance.

• Idea activity
  • Archiving policy should really account for commenting activity/discussions as well as the number of votes within a certain time period.
  • For example, there may be lots of comments (and page hits) in the same year that it is decided to be archived, even though there may not be a lot of votes.  This activity should lend the idea to being of greater importance.
• Nature of the idea
  • How does PTC plan to account for easy to implement ideas that make sense but don't have a lot of votes?
  • How will PTC handle areas that may strongly affect many users, however only recognized (and maybe only understood) by a few (e.g. select admins)?  These may only get a few votes, but could negatively affect thousands of users.
  • Large scale Vision changes.  Based on PTC feedback these idea forums is only to capture isolated micro improvements?  What about sweeping changes to update the software to modern capabilities?  
• How does this actually help PTC implement feedback?  
  • PTC can certainly filter ideas by number of votes and age.  Why is it beneficial to archive rather than tweak a search filter?
  • Some of the top ideas are well voted on and well commented on but PTC hasn't implemented them in ~10 years.
  • Can you pair this "Archiving Policy" with an "Implementation Policy" that if it gets a certain amount of votes within a certain time that PTC will implement it within a certain amount of time?
    • This policy could account for scale/difficulty to implemnent by using certain categories by the user (e.g. Sweeping change affecting multiple areas, vs isolated tweak) and by PTC (e.g. very easy, easy, medium, hard, very hard) that might even relate to approximate man-hours.
    • One example of how this could be done is that the user could define the scale of the idea, PTC could adjust this as necessary then assign a level of difficulty to implement, which could mean small ideas get implemented very quickly, and larger ideas get prioritized correctly.
  • If an idea is implemented ("Delivered"), allow users to provide feedback to either thank if implemented as intended, or the solution was not really delivered (sometimes marked as delivered even though original request was not fulfilled).

Note: Commenting on this post:

• Product Ideas Archiving Policy - PTC Community

[TomU]

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@LawrenceS wrote:

Can you pair this "Archiving Policy" with an "Implementation Policy" that if it gets a certain amount of votes within a certain time that PTC will implement it within a certain amount of time?

I would love to see something like this.  Unfortunately the number of votes means very, very little.  Ideas that do get implemented did so because a product manager wanted them, regardless of how many votes they received.  Ideas open for many years and with the highest numbers of votes continue to remain unimplemented with virtually no feedback from anyone in product management.  Ideas that PTC doesn't want to implement are not going to be added regardless of the number of votes they receive.

I would love to see a policy enforced that says any idea that reaches a certain vote threshold will get a written response from the appropriate product manager back to the product idea.  If it's not going to be implemented, say why.  If it is going to be added to the roadmap, give a realistic estimate on when we can expect to see it implemented.  Regular feedback from product management would go a long way towards changing the perception that product ideas don't really matter.  (The other way would be to actually implement a significant percentage of ideas at each new release.)

[LawrenceS]

Agreed!  I think what you are saying about number of votes being misleading is right in line with requesting that PTC take other factors into account. 

The factors that PTC uses to determine if an idea should not be considered ("archived"), should be similarly useful to leading them to determine if it should be implemented.

I like the required written response determined by a well-defined criteria that can be automated (e.g. if criteria met the Product manager automatically gets a task/email, etc)

[BenLoosli]

One CAD vendor I worked with used to compile the list of enhancement requests submitted each year and send them to users to vote on. The vendor would do enough research into the topic to assign it an implementation value, 2 was easy, 8 was very hard. For each category, you were allowed to vote for so many ideas but had to keep your votes down to a total implementation value of 30. You could vote multiple times for a very hard to implement idea, but that would use 8, 16 or 24 of your vote total. This was done 3 months prior to the annual user meeting. For each area of the software, one session at the user meeting would be to present the top vote getters and show the rankings. The #1 in each category was then supposed to be added to the development task list to be implemented in a future release. It was not always the next release, but a good majority of the #1 enhancement requests did eventually make it into the product.

Not sure they still do this, but it did work for a number of years.

[TomU]

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@BenLoosli wrote:

The vendor would do enough research into the topic to assign it an implementation value...

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That's the biggest difference right there.  That vendor was engaged enough to estimate what each idea would take to implement and then provide that information back to the users.  We desperately need that kind of 2-way communication between the actual decision makers and the rest of the community.