Idea Tracking for SaaS and Digital Businesses

With the rapid speed of new startups and ideas hitting the market, being truly innovative is becoming really challenging. But innovation is not just thinking of new ideas in isolation and thinking improvements about your solution by imagining yourself in your customers’ shoes. It’s an interactive, customer-inclusive, systematic, and almost clinical process where you build an idea-generation engine with new ideas coming in from different sources and backgrounds. In such a setting, it’s pretty easy to lose track of a few ideas coming in.

The Importance of Idea Tracking in SaaS and Digital Businesses

Idea tracking is the process of capturing, organizing, and prioritizing ideas for new products, features, and improvements. This process helps digital businesses especially SaaS companies to stay competitive, innovate quickly, and deliver better products and services to their customers.

Streamlining Product Development

Idea tracking plays a critical role in the product development process. By keeping track of all ideas and suggestions, teams can better prioritize and allocate resources to the high-potential ideas that will have the most significant impact on the product. This streamlines the product development process, reducing wasted time and resources.

For example, a SaaS business that tracks ideas for new features can quickly identify which ideas are most popular among customers. This allows the team to focus on developing those features first, rather than wasting time on less important ideas that may not resonate with customers.

Enhancing Customer Experience

Ideas are often generated from customer feedback and requests. By tracking these ideas, businesses can improve their solutions to better meet the needs of their customers. Customers notice when they’ve been heard. This enhances the customer experience and also drives customer loyalty and retention.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

Innovation is critical in a world where businesses are constantly competing with each other. Tracking and implementing new ideas quickly helps businesses stay ahead of the competition and continue to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

For example, a SaaS business that tracks industry trends and emerging technologies can quickly identify new opportunities for innovation. By implementing these ideas quickly, the business can stay ahead of its competitors and continue to offer cutting-edge products and services to its customers.

Methods for Effective Idea Tracking

Tracking and managing ideas is a crucial aspect of any successful business. It's important to have a system in place that allows for collaboration, prioritization, and execution of ideas. Here are some effective methods for idea tracking:

Utilizing Project Management Tools

Project management tools like Trello, Asana, and Jira are great ways to track and manage ideas. These tools allow teams to collaborate, prioritize, and assign tasks to ensure that ideas are efficiently executed. Trello, for example, is a highly visual tool that allows you to create boards, lists, and cards to organize your ideas. Asana, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive tool that allows you to track projects, assign tasks, and set deadlines. Jira is a tool that is specifically designed for software development teams, allowing them to track bugs, issues, and new features.

But a general problem with such project management tools is that it’s difficult to give access to your customers as they’re not meant to be shared with them. This is why you need a platform that’s customer-facing but your team can actively communicate with customers and other people outside of your organization.

Implementing Feedback Systems

Feedback systems allow businesses to gather suggestions and ideas from customers, employees, and partners. This feedback can then be organized, tracked, and prioritized, ensuring that high-potential ideas don't get lost in the shuffle. There are many ways to implement feedback systems, including surveys, suggestion boxes, and online forums.

However, a key problem with these tools and systems is that they’re passive. This is why customer feedback and idea management tools are quickly emerging. A classic example of such a tool is FeedBear. FeedBear allows you as well as your customers to track ideas from the time they get submitted all the way to production. It’s not a passive system as it acts like a forum where anyone can come submit feedback at any time, dive deeper into discussions, and upvote ideas and suggestions. In short, the activity keeps on going.

Conducting Regular Brainstorming Sessions

Brainstorming sessions are a great way to generate new ideas and encourage collaboration between team members. By scheduling regular brainstorming sessions, businesses can continue to generate fresh ideas and stay ahead of the competition. There are many different techniques for brainstorming, including mind mapping, free writing, and the SCAMPER method.

Mind mapping involves creating a visual diagram of your ideas, while free writing involves writing down everything that comes to mind without censoring yourself. The SCAMPER method, on the other hand, involves asking questions about your existing products or services, such as "How can we substitute one component for another?" or "How can we adapt this product for a different market?" By asking these types of questions, you can generate new ideas and improve upon existing ones.

In the case of FeedBear, we’ve already shared that it’s a continuous system of feedback collection where sharing feedback becomes an interactive activity. You don’t have to plan a campaign like in the case of surveys or emails. You can let users come up with new ideas, or share your ideas under the status “Up for discussion” or “Need your guidance”. In the end, FeedBear slowly becomes an autonomous brainstorming engine.

Integrating Idea Tracking with Agile Tools

The tools we just discussed like JIRA, Trello, and Asana are not customer-facing. But FeedBear is. That’s why we’ve made your life easy by creating a seamless integration of FeedBear with PM agile tools. Once you finalize any idea you want to pursue, you can directly send it to your JIRA or Trello board to the right sprint or campaign. This way you won’t lose any idea in migrating them manually. 

Prioritizing High-Impact Ideas

To track ideas diligently, you must prioritize what you’re going to work on based on your capacity and resources. But this doesn’t mean you forget about other valid ideas suitable to pursue in the future and totally forget about them. 

With FeedBear, you get a customizable product roadmap that’s extremely easy to tailor according to your preferences. This way, to get guidance from your customers, you can select ideas for development without forgetting about the ones that you’ll pursue in some future sprint. All you have to do is to organize them in a different column or status. FeedBear’s product roadmap has a Kanban style and each idea can be tagged. So it’s impossible for any submitted idea to fall in between the cracks.

Closing The Feedback Loop

Only collecting feedback and communicating with customers isn’t the end of the process here. What you must also understand is that keeping customers informed about any product launches is also important. Especially when your customers have contributed to the brainstorming and idea polishing of a particular feature. FeedBear comes with a built-in changelog powered by GPT-4 for exactly that. It’s very easy to create an announcement using AI for any idea that’s launched. Once you make an announcement, every one who interacted with that particular idea will get notified. 

Final Thoughts

Idea tracking is critical for any SaaS or digital business that wants to stay ahead of the competition and maximize its potential. But to be really good at it, you must make use of a modern and efficient feedback system like FeedBear.

FeedBear will help you

1. Collect, organize and make sense of customer feedback all collected in and tracked from a central place.
2. Drive user engagement and create customer loyalty.
3. Run a brainstorming engine where your users guide you on what to build next.
4. Keep your users notified about what you’re thinking to build, what’s already in the pipeline and what’s about to get shipped. 
5. Close the feedback loops by releasing product updates on a few clicks, informing everyone who ever interacted with the idea. 
6. Run this process almost autonomously without creating or launching any campaign.

FeedBear offers a 14-day trial with almost all its features. It's incredibly simple and takes just 1 to 5 minutes to set up. Give FeedBear a try today! It's completely free, and no payment details are required.