Hey, Benchling Community!
Mike Taylor here – Head of Product Operations at Benchling. If you read our Chief Product Officer’s – Shawna Wolverton’s – message to the community, you know that customers are at the center of our strategy.
Building empathy for your work, understanding your pain points and hearing how we can make your work easier is critical to our success as a product team so we really appreciate your willingness to share your ideas with us!
If you’re taking the time to share an idea with us, you probably want to know the answer to some key questions upfront:
- Who will review my idea?
- When can I expect to hear feedback from the Benchling Product team on my idea?
- How will I know if my idea is selected and if it’s selected, how quickly will it be implemented?
All great questions I hope to answer for you in this article. Our goal is transparency so if anything isn’t clear – let us know.
One caveat to call out upfront – our process will likely change over time. Like Shawna said, this is our first time creating an ideas portal at Benchling so we plan to keep iterating to make sure it’s awesome and serves everyone. We will broadcast changes when they occur to avoid any surprises.
1. Who will review my idea?
Once you post your idea to the Community, all members will be able to review it, reply, and upvote it. Getting upvotes is an important step to move your idea along in the process so be sure to socialize your idea with your peers and – when it’s an idea that matters to them – endorsement in the form of a vote!
2. When can I expect to hear feedback from the Benchling product on my idea?
Once your idea hits the minimum voting threshold, the Benchling Product team will review it to determine roadmap alignment and provide a status update. To start, our voting threshold will be 25 votes. This is our signal that the idea is important to the community and you want to hear our perspective on it.
You can expect our voting threshold to change over time as the number of community members and engagement grows, but we’ll always communicate these changes to you.
An idea that doesn’t reach the voting threshold isn’t guaranteed a response or a status update. We wish we could respond to every idea but we want to be realistic about how much time we spend responding versus building you great products! So we ask that you use your votes to tell us what’s important to you.
3. How will I know if my idea is selected and if it’s selected, how quickly will it be implemented?
We’ll keep you updated on the progress of your idea with statuses. Currently, we have six idea statuses:
- 🆕 New: Ready for community feedback. Vote and comment to support the idea.
- 📌 Near Term Roadmap: Ideas that are on our current, three quarter roadmap. We still reserve the right for timing to shift, but generally you can expect these ideas to be shipped in the next 12 months.
- 🛠 Under construction: Selected for the product roadmap and is being worked on.
- ✅ Shipped: Delivered and available in GA.
- 🟡 Not Currently Planned: Not selected for the product roadmap or deprioritized. This category is not “no, never.” Think of it instead as, “not right now.”
Out of scope: These are ideas that do not align with our mission or, in other cases, ideas we believe have sufficient existing workarounds.
We will review your ideas quarterly and if they meet the voting threshold, we’ll respond and update the status.
This community is full of incredible ideas and we wish we could do everything, but even seemingly simple ideas can be complex to engineer and implement, so we appreciate your patience as we take the time to thoughtfully consider each idea before responding.