The Best Way to Manage Thousands of Customer Ideas

Idea management can take on a life of its own. It’s tough to manage the inflow of customer ideas and feature requests. The work gets especially unwieldy when you are managing requests by the thousands. Some ideas can be implemented quickly, but for most, they need to be categorized for later consideration.

Gathering customer input is critical to innovating your product. But managing all those “not yet” ideas can become a big time suck.

Thankfully, there is good news. You can now bulk promote ideas into features, master features, and initiatives in one quick step. Because customer feedback should be a benefit, not a burden, right?

If you have not set up an ideas portal yet, what are you waiting for? Check out our detailed support documentation or watch a quick video to get started.

If you already have an ideas portal, you know the existing bulk editing capabilities help product managers handle ideas and feature requests more efficiently. You could already use bulk editing to organize ideas within categories, assign a group of ideas to a teammate for additional research, and update the target release timeframe to set customer expectations.

But choosing which ideas will be promoted to your roadmap is equally deserving of an efficiency update. Now, instead of laboriously deciding which ideas to implement one by one, you can promote the best ones to your roadmap with a single bulk promote action.

Here are a few ways bulk editing and bulk promoting can save you time:

Easily organize ideas into categories Wading through hundreds or thousands of requests can make idea management feel like sprinting through mud. Categories help organize your ideas in a flexible yet manageable way. Find all the ideas that map to a particular theme or area of your product and bulk edit to add a category — making them easy to find when the time is right. In this example below, several ideas are being edited to include “Navigation” as the category.

Aha! makes it easy for you to save time by editing ideas in bulk.

Stay responsive to customer ideas There is nothing worse than submitting an idea to a company and wondering if anyone even saw it. You can avoid that — as the ideas roll in, assign any group of ideas to the product manager responsible for reviewing them. Now it is clear who owns those requests so the team can quickly review them and make a determination on whether those ideas are duplicative, likely to be implemented, or should be a future consideration.

When an idea status changes, the idea submitter and anyone who voted on it receives an update via email.

Set the right customer expectations The robust Aha! data model means that you can even use bulk edit functionality for your custom fields. For example, add a custom field to capture your target release timeframe. Then you can bulk edit ideas as your plans come together so the sales team and customers know when to expect the new functionality.

Custom fields make it possible to capture information that is relevant to your product but not in Aha! by default.

Promote ideas with the new bulk promote option Once you have identified the ideas you would like to target in your next release, you can now promote them to features in bulk. You can promote a group of ideas into individual features, with each feature linked to the corresponding idea. Or, if you have many similar ideas that relate to an in-progress feature, you can bulk promote the ideas to that existing feature.

Ideas can also be bulk promoted to master features or initiatives.

If you give your customers a voice, they will happily tell you what they want. Now you can listen to those voices, even if there are thousands of them.

Using an Aha! ideas portal makes it possible to manage all of your product requests in a single location. And our bulk edit and new bulk promote functionality saves you time so you can focus on building the best ideas, not sifting through them.

Sign up for a free Aha! trial — be happy Bulk edit and bulk promote are available to all Aha! customers. If you are not already an Aha! customer, you may want to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Aha! now to see why over 150,000 users trust Aha! to set product strategy, create visual roadmaps, and prioritize releases and features.