Power to the people!

There are now thousands of businesses using Timely, from many different industries. The amount of diversity in our customer base means we’re able to look at a range of features, which would all add value to Timely in their own way.

As a Support Team we’re constantly advocating for the features you want. That’s why we stand by the feature request process we’ve always used. It gives the power to you, our customers. So how exactly does this process work?

Lightbulb! It all begins with an idea

The life cycle of a new Timely feature begins with the idea being added to our Customer Feedback page. Ideas on this page are moderated by one of our head Techbots to make sure there aren’t any duplicate ideas or features already available in Timely.

The Timely community can then vote on the idea and add their requirements as comments. By opening up the discussion to you we hope to build features that will add real value to your Timely experience.

From idea to feature

Once an idea has some traction on the feedback forum we’ll look at a few key things:

How many votes that request has

While this is only one aspect of the request process, we consider it pretty important. This is where you get to have your say on what features are important to you. Once the votes start accumulating, it becomes pretty obvious to us what you want!

The scope of the request

We check out what this request means for you, and how you see it working. It’s important that we fully understand the request to make sure we’re building the feature you asked for!

How well it fits with the overall Timely product

We’ll have a think about how well that proposed idea fits into the Timely product, and whether it will add genuine value for the majority of our customer base.

We’re pretty honest here at Timely, and sometimes a feature just doesn’t fit the vision for where Timely is headed. In these cases, the idea stays on our radar or as a ‘nice to have’ feature.

How feasible it is for us to develop

If the idea has passed through the top 3 stages, the Techbots get thinking on how feasible the idea is. As with any piece of software, any change to the system needs to be evaluated.

We’ll think about what changes might be needed to implement the new feature, what aspects of the system might be affected, how the user experience might change, and many other important technical considerations.

The status of requests

Requests have statuses which will be updated to keep you in the loop with where we’re at in the consideration process. The most common statuses you’ll see are:

• More info required: This means the Techbots aren’t quite sure of what this idea is. They’ve likely responded asking for a bit more information.
• Gathering feedback: Most ideas will have this status at any one time. This means we’ll still gathering votes and requirements on this idea.
• Planned: The Planned status means this is an idea that is becoming a feature, wahoo! Sometimes a date will be included, but sometimes it means it’s something we’d like to do and we’re factoring into future development plans.
• Started: Yay! This means the Techbots have started working on bringing this idea to life!
• Partially completed: This status is used where we’ve started rolling out a feature, but we haven’t quite met all the requirements of the request yet.
• In preview: We often ask for beta testers on big ideas that need rigorous testing. This status means beta testing is underway and we’re nearly there!
• Resolved: This mean we’ve found a way to solve this problem with the current features available in Timely.
• Completed: The best kind of status! This means the idea has been implemented in Timely for all customers.