Configuring a Customer facing Feature Request board in Trello - SDLM in Trello, part 1
If you’re looking for a light-weight supplement to Jira for Software planning and execution, Trello can be just the tool. While it doesn’t have the same functionality, it is easy to configure, administer, and use. With a little creativity, you can have an application that works for almost any business process.
In this blog series, we’ll show you how to configure a board to support your team through the entire SDLC, including;
- Receiving feature requests
- Prioritizing feature requests
- Requirements Management
- Development with Scrum and Kanban Teams
- Release Management
Trello Feature Requests
In this blog, we’ll explore how to configure a Trello board for customer feature requests. Let’s jump in.
An example Feature Request board in Trello could look like this below:
Notice there are three basic lists that represent a workflow of sorts. One to collect new features received from customers, one to show features that are selected for development, and one to show which features are on hold.
When a feature is ready to be assigned to a development team, it can be broken up into smaller tasks, and then moved to a development teams board for development and release.
Integrating with other tools
As product teams, we receive our features in many different ways. They will not come directly from people going into our Trello boards. Some customers live on social media, and some prefer going to a website and using a communications tool from there while others still even use email. We have to be prepared to receive features from all mediums, but also to be able to place them in a common place where they can be voted on and where decisions can be made.
One neat power-up that helps compartmentalise the noise is this Twitter power-up. With this power-up, we can add new feature requests gathered from tweets straight into yourTrello cards. To do this you need to create a new card, then select the Twitter power-up in the card’s toolbar select the relevant tweets from a drop-down menu of your feed.
Slack
Slack also integrates nicely with Trello with a power-up. You can create cards from Slack, and also create custom alerts to be sent to Slack from Trello.
What to learn more about what Slack can do for your teams?
Intercom
What about if your company uses Intercom? With this power-up, you can easily add content from conversations with customers to an existing request and help to determine the priority based on seeing how many customers have requested a specific feature. Additionally, you can follow-up with them once the feature is live!
Use this power-up to send requests straight from your inbox to the feature request board. Each board has its own email address, which can be advertised to customers if you don’t want to share your own. You can select where on the board the new card will be created or click on the current list name ('None' in the below example) to change the card to a different list.
Stay tuned for part 2
Check out part two; Prioritising Feature Requests in Trello, available now!
Need help migrating to Trello?
