Hello everyone,
Through the years, we tried different ways of having a product roadmap that effectively kept the WP Ultimo community informed and offered good intel for the team on the most requested features.
We had a board on Trello, then moved to Feedbear, and finally created our own self-hosted board on roadmap.wpultimo.com.
Boards are great as they incentivize community participation, the option to cast votes, etc. However, they also are very burdensome to maintain up-to-date, which can lead to frustration on the customers’ part and create a massive volume of to-do items that can feel very intimidating for the development team.
We’re restructuring many things internally to make life simpler and free our time to focus on building the actual products. The core targets of simplifications have been our support flows and communications with Ultimo users.
The WP Ultimo Roadmap Sections
As part of that effort, we’re doing away with the board Roadmap. In its place, we now have a single-page WP Ultimo Roadmap with three main sections: now, next, and later.
Now is the section where we keep items being actively worked on at that particular time.
Next gives you a sneak peek of what features we’re planning to tackle as we finish the items on our now list. We want to get to these in the 2-3 months timeframe.
Later lists things we want to do after we get to the items on our next list. They might still be listed in very abstract terms, as research is still needed to know the unknowns of implementing those features. We plan to get to those in the 3-6 month timeframe.
Finally, we have a Backlog: a place to keep items we know we really want to do but are still quite unsure when we might get the time to do them.
This approach is heavily inspired by other SaaS roadmaps we’ve seen pop up recently.
It’s way simpler, straight to the point, and gives a clear view of what’s coming and when (even if ETAs are an approximation).
That doesn’t mean we’ll stop listening to your feedback, though. Through the discussions in the community and the support tickets we get every day, we can have a pretty good picture of what needs to be prioritized.
In addition to that, there’s still an option to send your suggestions. They’ll land on our internal project management triage inbox, and we’ll get back to you with feedback.
This move ties in with a couple of other changes we’ll announce soon, so stay tuned!
