We don’t create anything specifically to be accessed by our customers-we simply make our processes public and available to them. YouTrack is the main tool our developers use to collaborate. We benefit from getting the information required for an investigation quickly, and we enjoy immediate confirmation and gratitude when something is fixed.Īre updates to the tracker made in real time? Is there a team member who’s responsible for keeping it up-to-date? That’s a challenge because it makes negative feedback visible, but it also helps us build trust by making sure those affected by an issue get updates on it. That only works when the entire team shares the same vision, attitude, and values toward collaboration.įinally, the entire process of working on any product flow, bug, or issue is also reported publicly in the tracker-from getting assigned a task to implementation, testing, and release. Second, a development engineer or feature owner might reach out to customers directly to get details on how something is expected to work. This means some parts of our product might be released earlier or later than we estimated, but we believe our customers trust us to take time to release a high-quality product and understand that this flexibility allows us to rely on their feedback, too. Instead of tracking KPIs, we often make decisions about specific feature attributes on the go. First, we need to fulfill our commitments while still keeping our plans flexible. Sharing plans and commitments publicly creates additional responsibilities. What are the benefits and challenges of collaborating with customers on product strategy on public platforms? The Knowledge Base was added to our next publicly announced roadmap, and we shared a list of hundreds of tasks for its minimum viable product on the public tracker. We assessed customer votes and product discussions, and we limited the scope of the initial release to functionality requested by customers who were genuinely interested in it and who used YouTrack the most.
Instead of trying to build a tool right off the bat with lots of advanced functionality, we decided to take a different approach. But in 2019, when we published our roadmap for the first half of the year, we again heard from customers who wanted this feature. It had been gathering votes since 2011, and we were planning to address it. There was a longstanding request for a feature that would allow customers to keep project documentation and notes alongside tasks. To properly prioritize these tasks and set out the scope, we go deeper using the public tracker.Īn excellent example of this approach is YouTrack’s Knowledge Base. This gives us an opportunity to explore the demand for new features and adjust our plans. Other customers express what they’d like to see on the list. Some of these customers are happy to see long-awaited features, which confirms we’re moving in the right direction. When we announce the strategic vision for product development for the next year or two, we get customer feedback. The best way for us to learn about these scenarios is to be as close as we can to our customers and discuss their needs constantly. Increment : How do YouTrack’s product roadmaps and public tracker affect its product development strategy?Įlena Pishkova: Because YouTrack allows teams to manage their projects with the level of flexibility they want, it needs to be adjustable to any specific business scenario. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Increment spoke with Elena Pishkova, who leads global product marketing at YouTrack, about how the team approaches product planning in collaboration with customers. This approach remains unusual for tech companies, but the YouTrack team believes it provides significant advantages: In addition to having a close view of how customers use the product, they’re able to communicate with users directly and uncover unique product insights. With over 7 million users as of 2021, YouTrack is now planned in public at an unprecedented scale. That same year, the company published the product’s roadmap, breaking it down into specific features and fixes on a dedicated public tracker and inviting feedback from its community of early adopters. Originally built for internal use, YouTrack was publicly released in 2009.
YOUTRACK COM SOFTWARE
JetBrains, the birthplace of the Kotlin programming language, makes SaaS tools for software development teams, including the product management tool YouTrack.
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