There are several SaaS (web based) Customer Feedback Service offerings out there, among the best is http://www.UserVoice.com, though it has become a little pricey. These offer, in some form or another, exactly what you describe – a way for both bugs and feature requests to be described, discussed, and voted upon. UserVoice offers a vote allocation system (you get an allowance of 10 Votes total, for example, and can give 1, 2, or 3 votes to your favorite issues until your allowance is used up; when an issue is complete, merged, or discarded, you get your votes back for other issues).
Is letting Customers help drive priority of a a product a good idea? It sure is.
The trendy business model these days is MVP – Minimum Viable Product. You can read hundreds of articles and books on the topic. The fact is the with MVP, you don’t really take much customer feedback into account … before the first launch. You need to get to market quickly with minimal expense to see if the basic idea makes sense and has a sufficiently large market willing to buy the product.
MVP is the reason Kickstarter and IndieGogo is such a popular launch model for new products. Ironically enough, that includes SmartThings. Doh!
The next step in MVP is constant, agile iteration and improvement. Of course, “improve” has many definitions and inputs … it must include, for example, a lot of back-end refinement to scale the previous “minimum” configuration (e.g., moving to local processing from just cloud processing); The choice of improvements can obviously benefit from Customer input. The aforementioned Customer Feedback Services (voting, etc.) seem like a rather efficient way to collect that input, even if not a scientific sample set. Focus groups and individual demo/feedback interviews are additional options.
The Risk (drawbacks)?
Publishing the issues / bugs / feature request list has been discussed a few times, and I’m ambivalent because I acknowledge the following drawbacks … mostly to SmartThings, frankly.
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Product reputation (and sales) can suffer due to the excessive naked transparency of all the current bugs/flaws being published. Even the history of successes (which can be collected by web scrapers) can contribute to the negative perception, as it gives a history of all the mistakes, bugs, flaws, shortfalls … along with how long each took to resolve!
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Competitors can more easily exploit SmartThings’s weaknesses, especially if they note which bugs/features have the highest votes and are not being addressed.
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Users will be extra frustrated if their vote feedback (i.e., bugs and issues with the highest votes) are ignored by SmartThings, even if for very good reasons (or for reasons that are strategic, long-term, and cannot be published for competitive reasons).
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Bug Fixes and Features that are “accepted” into the queue need to be given release timelines, else Customers endlessly beg “when is this going to be ready, are we there yet, didn’t you say it was going to be ready last month” … i.e., SmartThings is either pressured into rushing and releasing enhancements too soon for proper a proper development and test cycle, or again, they receive a reputation as being unable to meet their own deadlines. If they pick conservative deadlines, then Customers complain the fixes are way too far away and they’re going to leave for a competitor.
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As @bravenel points out; It is difficult to get “good data” from the average Customer, particularly when the set of sampled customers is small and not scientific (i.e., not distributed randomly and weighted across the desired target market demographics; novices vs. power users vs. geeks vs. professionals vs. competitors). Online voting systems aside, even many professionals in the marketing industry think that Focus Groups don’t yield good data. Innovation needs to come from within a company and focusing too much on short-term customer demands distracts from long-term strategy and goals. In the case of SmartThings, I reiterate: We are small potatoes: Only around 150,000 Customers total, a fraction of which are on this Community Forum … when compared to the millions of Customers that SmartThings is targeting. It is quite possible that the #1 bug/feature we vote for is the #10 in priority of that much larger population, or it doesn’t fit the abstract concept that SmartThings is really headed towards in terms of the big picture, artificially-intelligent homes with mega revenue generating potential … or not.
If I had to choose, I would prefer the fully transparent approach, including the collection of Customer feedback in text and votes. But I would also like to be able to trust that SmartThings would use good business factors in ultimately being in control and making deciding priorities and implementation timelines. And we already know that it would be a very very bad idea for SmartThings to publish “hard dates” for fixes and features; they are simply too many variables preventing them from meeting their estimated timelines.
