Ideas management at Nexthink

This document describes how Nexthink uses customer ideas to make future product decisions and build even better products.

We value ideas and suggestions from our customers. They provide us with a unique guiding path to building even better future products. We encourage our customers to share these suggestions as ‘Ideas’ in our Ideas Portal. Here, you can suggest new Ideas, view existing ones from any customer, follow progress, add comments, and vote on active ones.

How does Nexthink decide to implement features to satisfy an Idea?

Our Product team evaluates all ideas submitted and gathers votes. Product Managers are always considering ideas that meet the following criteria:

• Solve a relevant specific business problem, bringing clear benefits and value.

• Generally applicable to our broader customer base or an area of specific focus or product area.

• Are of interest to a significant number of customers, as indicated typically by the number of votes.

• Aligned with our business strategy. Some ideas might be useful from an operational point of view, but may lie outside the scope of Nexthink's core business and product strategy.

How to vote for ideas?

Before submitting a new idea, first, check to see if a similar idea exists already and vote for it rather than creating a new idea. Your votes show us your interest and support for other customers’ ideas. You can also comment on an existing idea to add a new use case or further information. Ideas that receive a high number of votes or that attract many votes in a short time period are tracked by Product Managers and also shared monthly with Product Leadership.

When voting for an idea, you become a subscriber and will receive an email update if it changes status or receives new comments (you can unsubscribe at any time).

To ensure Nexthink customers carefully consider the ideas that would bring them the most value, each user has a limited number of votes. This helps ensure that your votes are applied to the ideas that matter the most to you, rather than acting as a general 'me too' thumbs up across all Ideas. You have 15 votes at your disposal, so spend them wisely! If you have used all your votes, you can go to the My Votes menu and unvote what you consider the least impactful before voting for another idea. Note that once an idea is shipped, the votes are released, so you can use them to vote for new ideas.

How to submit new ideas?

To ensure that your ideas are given proper consideration, please keep the following in mind when submitting a new idea:

• Give your idea a clear and succinct title that other Nexthink users can readily understand and identify. This makes it easily searchable. You want other Nexthink users to find and vote for your idea as well.

• Be clear about the problem you are trying to solve and the outcome you want to achieve. We welcome your suggestions about solving this, but note there may be other ways to achieve the same business outcome.

• Please don't combine several ideas into one submission; instead, submit a separate idea for each.

How to understand the status of your ideas?

When you submit an idea, our Product team will review it, and it will progress through one or more of the following statuses:

• Under review: Typically, within a week of your submission, we will review the idea and assign it to the Product Manager responsible for that product area. The Product Manager will then review the idea in more detail within the context of their broader roadmap and other ideas received.

• Pending clarification: If some aspects of your idea are unclear, the Product Manager will contact you in the comments to ensure they fully understand the outcome you are trying to achieve.

• Already possible: If your desired outcome can already be achieved with Nexthink (though perhaps in a different way) the Product Manager will leave a comment to this effect.

• Future consideration: This is an interesting idea that we will keep active to gauge interest from other Nexthink users. There is no fixed timeframe nor intent to implement or reject the idea, but high volumes of customer votes do further raise the visibility and impact of an idea over time. So, Future Consideration means we are continuing to monitor, explore, and research. Some ideas may progress quickly, others may stay in this state for some time if the Product Manager wants to continue gathering votes and considering long term plans far into the future. If an Idea in Future consideration does not receive any new votes over the past 12 months, we typically move to Not planned for now on the basis that there is low community interest.

• Planned: Good news. Moving from Future consideration, we set an Idea to Planned when we have a clear intent to develop around this idea. Often, what we develop is a rethinking of the original idea or taking advantage of new concepts. A planned idea may not describe exactly what is shipped in the future, but if it is Planned, then we do expect to achieve the outcome described in the Idea. Of course, plans and directions do change, so it is possible that we may revise this status at a later date. A Planned idea could move back to Future consideration or even Not Planned for Now, although this is a rare event.

• In Technical Preview: The new feature work that satisfies this idea is now available as a technical preview to a limited audience. This generally indicates that it will be released within the next couple of releases, although some technical previews run over a longer timeframe.

• Shipped: The new feature that satisfies this idea has now been delivered in a release, and the business outcome can now be achieved in the product. Remember that this may be in a different manner than that described in the original idea submission.

• Not planned for now: While we don't exclude revisiting this idea at some point in the future, we use this status to indicate that we currently have no expectations to implement features addressing this idea. Consider this long-term parked.

• Inactive: We track our customer and partner ideas for a long time, in some cases for years while gathering more comments, discussion, voting, and gradual evolution towards a product future. However, in some cases, a clear lack of any user interest or activity in an Idea can lead to automatic maintenance over time.

Comments and replies

• Be assured that all your comments are viewed by the assigned product manager throughout the life of an idea. At times Product Managers may also post their own updates or questions as a comment onto an idea. We welcome your responses to these in the same place.

• At the same time, please recognize that this is ad-hoc commentary over time, and there is no formal commitment to respond to all individual questions posted in comments on Ideas.

Inactive idea maintenance

• An idea is considered Inactive when it has remained in consideration status for over 12 months and has not received any new customer or partner comment or any new customer or partner votes for over 12 months. In that case, the idea may be moved to a Not Planned For Now status.

• Our Product Managers have the option to keep inactive ideas in Future Consideration if they feel they are particularly interesting or have future potential, but generally, if an idea has not been voted on or commented on for over 12 months, it does indicate that it has very low current interest in our user community.

• Not planned for now ideas remain visible, they are not deleted, we are just specific that we see no likely future plans for that idea at this time.

Do Ideas with high votes get added to the roadmap?

It's not quite as simple as that. A high number of votes helps us understand your opinion and impact. They rise to the highest visibility and get the greatest attention. At Nexthink, we regularly review the most-voted and newest-voted existing ideas, and typically, the most-voted and most active Ideas influence our product features and planning. However, no threshold or rules are applied. Ideas are important but are just one of many different factors that contribute to product decision-making and our future roadmaps.

Why are my ideas not in the product yet?

We receive hundreds of ideas every year, and we love them. Your ideas steer the future of Nexthink products, and many ideas are addressed by new features.

Although we constantly adjust them, our product plans have been in place for a long time. So some great ideas may stay in the Future consideration or Planned statuses for a long time and some simply don't fit into our overall strategic direction or lack broad multi-customer value. We would love to do some ideas but just can’t get to them while even better Ideas with even greater value keep coming in.

Our Ideas portal is not a New Feature request queuing system. It is a platform for gathering and understanding your valuable insight, helping Nexthink make the best decisions about our product plans. If you have any additional questions, please contact your Nexthink representative.