Hey guys - in the next few weeks we'll be rolling out an update to our Ideastation process (we've actually been putting it to practice over the last 3 weeks). Rather than reviewing each idea that hits 10 votes in 30 days, every Tuesday we review the current top 10 highest voted under Gathering Support (+ more, if time permits). In this meeting the product management and UX teams discuss each idea, compare to existing projects in the backlog (if they exist), balance against other user input (forums, events, customer meetings, etc), and then make a decision to either Accept it (likely coming in 6 months), make it Future Consideration (something we hope to do, but it's at least 6 months out), Archive (for one reason or another at this time we don't have plans to do it... not to say 2 years down the road things could change), or we merge multiple duplicate ideas with the same sentiment (thus also increasing overall votes). We also meet on Thursday's to review items Under Review or Accepted (these meetings are currently a bit more house keeping focused to make sure older Idea's we've accepted are officially put into the system, ranked appropriately, etc). We've been investing more time with each of these ideas ensuring that we give them the discussion they deserve, and also documenting explanations for the status change. Each month we will be putting out a list of the ideas we reviewed, and the status change and reason. With the current rate, we believe we can review approximately 30% of the incoming ideas (review ~50-60 each month, with about 160 ideas being submitted monthly right now). It's also important to note that from all of the various team's engagements with the community, we routinely work on projects that may not rank high on the IdeaStation, but we pick them anyways (to your point that some ideas might get low votes, but are just the right thing to do, or good for the overall strategic direction of the product). These are captured in the What's New with each update, for example, here. To me, I think this greatly increases the transparency of what's being looked at on the IdeaStation and will give a clear picture of where the development team stands on certain features/capabilities/experiences.
If you combine this with the high-level Roadmaps from Kevin here, and the regular check-in's we've started from Keqing, the hand picked ideas we put in each update in the What's New, we hope this gives a good view into overall strategic direction, status updates on the progress, and clarity on what gets reviewed in the IdeaStation. We know it's not a perfect system, and appreciate the feedback on what's working/what's not, so open to other suggestions!
