Draw.io + Git + Terraform. Visually build & manage cloud infrastructures. Empower collaboration, enforce security and accelerate automation.
Brainboard is a collaborative solution for cloud visualization and deployment for Cloud architects and DevOps teams. Brainboard needed one place to collect and validate ideas, feature requests, and guidance to plan their next quarters.
Brainboard has been using FeedBear for nearly a year now. The team uses FeedBear for collecting feature requests and bug reports.
FeedBear works as a central place for BrainBoard's customers and internal team members to stay connected.
So how did FeedBear help Brainboard achieve its goals? Let's find out!
We asked Stephane, Growth Product Manager at Brainboard, to provide an overview of the company and its purpose.
He explained that Brainboard is a solution designed to help engineers visually and collaboratively design and deploy cloud infrastructures without needing specialized GitOps/DevOps knowledge. The company was founded by Chafik and Jeremy, who had a vision of operating infrastructures from a diagram.
Brainboard has since built an ecosystem of features that have empowered over 10,000 engineers worldwide.
Stephane explained that Brainboard was born out of the paradigm shift happening in the Cloud Computing industry. They had seen engineers struggle with gluing Terraform, Git, Vault, Jenkins/GitHub action, and Lucidchart together to build and maintain cloud infrastructures.
Brainboard offers a modern alternative that saves users 75% of their time by automating the design and management of cloud infrastructures.
Brainboard has been in development for more than two years and incorporates feedback from over 10,000 users and customers.
Some key features of Brainboard include the ability to design infrastructure and have Brainboard generate Terraform code, import existing code, visualize infrastructure, and use ready-made templates for Azure, AWS, and GCP. Users can also centralize management of their cloud assets, collaborate with colleagues, and maintain Gitflow.
Stephane explained that the team at Brainboard was focused on scalability and wanted to grow through their community. They needed a tool that would help them centralize customer requests, plan their next quarters, and drive adoption and retention. They wanted to quantify feature requests and centralize feature releases and bug fixes.
That's when they found FeedBear - it met all their criteria for a public roadmap tool. FeedBear helps Brainboard bring clarity to their customer feedback and feature planning process.
Stephane explained that at Brainboard, they conduct internal benchmarks of tools they have used or plan to use. FeedBear was one of the tools they evaluated along with other solutions, and they valued its simplicity.
After trying each solution, they found that FeedBear met 95% of their criteria, including being easy to set up, allowing custom code and URLs, allowing anonymous input, having reactive support, being a complete solution, and being affordable and scalable.
The fact that FeedBear was scalable enough, especially for their early-stage startup a year ago, was a major factor in their decision.
Today, the internal team, investors, and customers all have access to the same source of truth thanks to FeedBear.
Brainboard uses FeedBear for three pages that help them stay connected with their customers and keep them up-to-date on their product development process.
The feature requests page is used to track new requests coming in from their community. They constantly review and analyze these requests to quickly adapt their quarterly product roadmap and bug report. This helps them ensure that their product is meeting the needs of their customers and that they are providing solutions to the most pressing problems.
The public roadmap is perfect for announcing what's coming next in Brainboard to current and future customers. Through this portal, they tease out some of the features that are coming next and measure excitement with upvotes. This helps them gauge customer interest and prioritize features that are in demand.
By keeping customers informed and involved in the development process, Brainboard is able to build a strong and engaged community around their product.
The changelog is used to give an overview of recent releases to leads, customers, and prospects. These posts are reposted through their social networks and newsletters.
This helps keep their customers informed about new features and enhancements and provides a transparent view of the development process.
When asked about best practices for using FeedBear, Stephane shared a few insights his team has learned over their ongoing experience with the tool.
One of the most important best practices, he said, is to make the FeedBear pages the source of truth for both internal and external purposes. Having a single source where all teams, customers, and future customers can access and share feedback is key to bringing real value to the community.
Another best practice, according to Stephane, is to measure upvotes for what they're worth.
Prioritizing developments based on anonymous upvotes is a great way to gauge interest and advertise the non-commitment of requesting features. However, this approach can also lead to low-quality upvotes from random searches and anonymous visitors.
The final best practice that Stephane shared is to optimize each changelog and feature request for SEO organic search. Doing so can help bring traffic and interest to the integration and other services Brainboard offers.
Stephane's team uses FeedBear to measure interest in new features and integrations in the market and prioritize and plan for future quarters.
They drive customers' traffic to FeedBear through their monthly newsletter, which includes current feature releases and future requests, their website, and social media posts with polls.
Stephane's experience with FeedBear has been overwhelmingly positive. He encourages anyone on the fence about signing up to go for it:
Go for it! Feedbear is the best customer feedback manager out there!the team is amazing
It was great to speak with Stephane and hear about his amazing approach to utilizing FeedBear for scalability and relationship building.
If you’re ready to do the same - you can get set up in minutes and try FeedBear free for 14 days. No credit card is required.
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Draw.io + Git + Terraform. Visually build & manage cloud infrastructures. Empower collaboration, enforce security and accelerate automation.
