How to get player feedback
I strongly believe that listening to player feedback will make your game better.
But what if you’re not yet getting any player feedback?
I have three tips for getting players to give you feedback.
Feature Upvote Blog
9 best Discord bots for suggestions & feedback [113 analyzed, 2024]
A well-crafted suggestion & feedback system can breathe new life into your server, increase engagement, make your community feel heard and improve your game. In this post, we’ll explore some of the best Discord bots designed to streamline the process of collecting, organizing, and addressing player feedback and suggestions. These tools will help transform your […]
23 top tips to smash your game early access goals
Don’t fail your early access launch. This guides covers everything from feedback to community, retention, promotion, and a lot more.
Game retention: 12 strategies from the most popular games
Everything you need to know to measure and improve game retention: statistics, KPIs, real-world examples, strategies, tools, and more.
Player feedback in early access: How to manage it without getting overwhelmed (7 strategies)
Manage player feedback the right way to make your early access successful. This guide helps you with tooling, guidelines, participation rate, communication, prioritization, and more.
Feature voting: How to make it work (+ 5 best tools)
Discover why your organisation needs feature voting, best practices, pitfalls to avoid, considerations for choosing a tool, and much more.
12 best customer feedback tools [102 analyzed]
We review 12 of our favorite tools for creating surveys, heatmaps, feedback boards, and forms. We help you choose the right tool(s) to meet your customers wherever they are.
Voting at events with Feature Upvote
With a few tweaks, you can use Feature Upvote at events to get attendees to vote on presentations.
Here’s how.
What’s new: Restrict moderator access to specific boards
Do you have multiple feedback boards in your Feature Upvote account?
If so, you might not want all of your moderators to access all boards.
So we’ve made it easy to assign moderators to specific boards.
Community tools for a successful launch of your video game
I’ve been a Community Manager for video games for 13 years.
Here’s my selection of the best tools available for helping streamline your approach to community management and ensure a smooth launch.
Why so many bugs?
Why do products used by millions of people have so many bugs?
A major cause is lack of care.
What can you and I do to keep the bugs out of our software?
GDPR-friendly feature request tracking
Looking for a way for your customers to suggest and upvote ideas to improve your product?
AND YOU need excellent GDPR compliance?
Then Feature Upvote is the product for you.
The only 4 Canny alternatives to consider in 2024 [18 analyzed]
We analyzed a lot of Canny alternatives and shortlisted four of them based on pricing, UX, features, and integrations.
The only 5 feature request tools to consider in 2024 [19 analyzed]
We analyzed a lot of feature request tools and shortlisted five of them based on pricing, UX, features, and integrations.
Stop adding new features to your SaaS! Why and what to do instead
Not adding new features to your SaaS product sounds counterintuitive.
But adding new features means making trade-offs. Your product may get better in some ways…but it’ll definitely suffer in others.
Embed your feedback board on your website with our JavaScript snippet
We’re building a new widget that allows you to embed your Feature Upvote feedback board in any web app.
And we need your help!
How to avoid creating “death of a thousand cuts” software | 5-minute video
You know that software you regularly use, but it is just so painful? The rough edges, the weird messages, the unexpected behaviour?
No-one sets out to make software like this. But it happens – all too often.
In this video, I share six things you can do to avoid your product becoming a painful experience. Follow these, and your customers won’t have to endure a “death of a thousand cuts” user experience.
Making a B2B SaaS? Don’t innovate – 99% of the time | 5-minute video
We all like to claim our software product is full of innovations to make our users’ lives better.
In reality, your software should actually be the opposite. It should not be full of innovations. On the contrary, it should work just like everybody’s else software, say 99% of the time.
How to get and manage feedback from beta testers
Our tips on getting and managing feedback from beta testers. We look at when you should ask for feedback, which tools will help you gather and manage feedback, and when you should iterate based on feedback.
Turn a good product into a great product with usability testing | 5-minute video
Usability testing turns a good product into a great product.
We did some formal usability testing in the early days of Feature Upvote. This turned out to be one of the most valuable things we did in our early days.
In this video I share some tips for doing usability testing with almost no budget, no special equipment, no special training, and no special labs.
How SaaS teams really prioritize features?
In theory, we use sophisticated frameworks to choose what to build next.
In reality, many product teams are using these somewhat less-sophisticated approaches. Not you of course, and not us. Oh no, just those other dysfunctional product teams!
Harsh lessons in dealing with customer feature requests | 5-minute video
Make a great product, seek and listen to customer feedback, and use the feedback to make your product even better. Simple right?
The reality is much harsher.
In this video I share the harsh lessons I’ve learnt in dealing with customer feature requests in my 20+ years of creating software.
Feedback boards: what are they and how to use them?
Learn how to set up and use feedback boards to collect suggestions from customers, employees, and beta testers.
Why we (kind of) deleted our backlog
Well, not exactly “deleted”; we’ve archived the backlog for future reference. Only our team has access to the archive, so the feature requests it contains are effectively deleted for the people who suggested and voted on them.
We then re-seeded our feedback board with the feature requests we’re most likely to implement in coming months.
Move suggestions between boards in bulk
You can now move suggestions in bulk from one Feature Upvote board to another board.
The new “bulk move” allows you to move up to 50 suggestions at a time.
Create an online idea board with Feature Upvote
Learn how to create and use an idea board. Discover tips to maximize the board’s engagement. Optimize the moderation process.
Contributors can now tag their suggestions
If you have created some tags for your Feature Upvote board, you can now let contributors (i.e. your customers) choose tags to add to their suggestions. If you’d like contributors to be able to tag suggestions, you can enable this in your board’s permissions, as follows: Once you’ve done this, the “Add suggestion” form on […]
Your account now has an activity log
We’ve added an activity log to your account.
It won’t help you work out what feature to build next, but it will make your account more secure.
Working out what to include in your MVP – and what to leave out
Learn the technique our founder Steve used to trim away non-essential features from Feature Upvote’s MVP back when he started the company.
Two ways to export your Feature Upvote data
There are now two ways you can get your data out of Feature Upvote in a form suitable for getting it into whatever other tool you’re using, such as a spreadsheet. First, there’s the full data export. This has been available for a long time. In your board settings, you have an option called Export, […]
Why we embrace slow growth at Feature Upvote
Being ambitious and aiming for fast growth are qualities usually celebrated in business circles. However, is there a downside to such a strategy, particularly in human terms? We think so.
When listening to user feedback resulted in a DMCA takedown
A video game had to deal with DMCA takedown requests after one player gave feedback and then made unreasonable demands.
Due to this alarming story, we’ve added an Acceptable Use Policy to Feature Upvote.
We’ve enabled voting directly from the front page
You can now enable voting directly from the front page of your feedback board.
Although this has been a popular request for a long time, for a long time we resisted adding it.
Here’s why we finally relented.
Feature Upvote 2022 Year in Review
Each January I reflect on how our product and company has evolved in the last year. Here’s a summary of how we did in 2022.
How to announce new features in your SaaS product
We researched how leading SaaS companies like Figma and Slack announce new features and compiled our findings in this list. Use these examples to inspire your next release and drive feature adoption.
Sort suggestions by “trending”
Since the day we launched, Feature Upvote has offered your customers two views of your feature requests: “Top” or “New”.
We’ve just added a third order, “Trending”.
Product strategy framework: 4 steps to create a winning strategy
Product strategy coach and consultant Nacho Bassino shares his 4-step framework for creating a winning product strategy.
Ending support for Internet Explorer 11
Microsoft is ending support for Internet Explorer 11. So are we. Here’s what it means for you and your customers.
Bug vs feature: What’s the difference and which to prioritise?
Fixing bugs or adding new features? Here’s why we think software teams should always fix bugs first—and how to get your devs on board.
Feature request tracking: 3 strategies to do it better
Feature requests scattered across channels? Use these 3 strategies for tracking and managing feature requests effortlessly.
Feature Upvote 2021 Year in Review
I run Feature Upvote, a B2B SaaS product that offers feature request tracking via a simple online board, which can be made public or kept private.
Feature Upvote and log4shell
Feature Upvote is not vulnerable to the log4shell RCE issue. Here’s a full report of our investigation.
5 steps to successful user onboarding for product managers
User onboarding is a system that helps your customers start receiving value from your product. Your customer will never get to experience your fantastic product without the right system to get them there.
Conducting customer interviews
A straightforward way for product teams to interview customers – and gain better product insights.
By Liz Painter
SaaS onboarding: self-service or a sales-driven approach?
Here at Feature Upvote, this is a question that’s intrigued us for some time. Should you make your SaaS self-service? So your customers can clearly see your pricing on your website and easily try out your product for free?
How to get useful user feedback (4 simple tips)
Getting useful user feedback helps you build better products. But how can you do this in a quick and simple way? Particularly if you don’t have the budget for testing labs and a big customer support team?
Our company wanted a simple way to track feature requests
This is the story of how our company tracks feature requests. We share what worked, what didn’t and what we use now. We look at spreadsheets, Jira, Trello and UserVoice.
5 communities to help product managers
We love reading newsletters and blogs, but there’s nothing quite like belonging to a community to make you feel better about yourself and your job! There’s other people out there, like you, who can help you and who you, in turn, can help right back.
Best Slack Apps & Integrations for Product Managers
We’ve brought together a list of all the best Slack apps and integrations, as suggested by product managers. We have apps and integrations for collaboration and productivity, roadmapping and feedback, fun and friendship, and more.
How to get product suggestions from all your team (remote and in person)
In this article I look at 5 ways you can get manageable product suggestions from your team in a way that leaves you feeling calm, informed, and ready to nail that roadmap.
Does your SaaS really need new features?
The pressure to release new features for your software product can be considerable, particularly considering you’re probably deploying changes to your site daily, if not hourly. However, in this article we look at what you might do instead, with better results for your company.
Which feature requests should inform your product roadmap?
You have lots of feature requests for your product. How do you know which should be added to your roadmap? And which should be ignored? Here are some tips.
How to say no to a feature request
Do you get a lot of customer feature requests? Some are great, but many aren’t. You need to say no in a way that doesn’t upset your customers. Here are 5 tips.
Jira tips & integrations for product managers
If you’re a product manager using Jira then this article is for you. We look at using Jira across multiple teams, collecting feedback, adding roadmaps, avoiding complexity, managing issues and integrations.
What I learnt in 2018 while running Feature Upvote
I learnt these lessons: Direct customer feedback is invaluable; don’t be afraid to pivot; strategic planning should include content; only build features with proven value.
Why we concentrate on building our core SaaS product
On the shoulders of giants, we’re building Feature Upvote.
Bug fixes or new product features?
As a software product manager, how should your team prioritise between bug fixes and adding new product features? Back in 2000, Joel Spolsky created the Joel Test, a 12-step list to better code. We’ll start here.