🗺️ Connect with the Product Roadmap to learn more about the changes coming to Brightspace, Wave, and Creator+ over the next 6 Months!
Baking More Transparency Into PIE
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As you probably know, the Product Idea Exchange (PIE) provides a place within the Brightspace Community where faculty, administrators, and other non-student roles can submit new feature requests to D2L, as well as promote and comment on existing feature requests. Since its inception, it’s been a great source of ideas and features.
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In fact, we have shipped multiple features in every single release since we launched PIE, including the not condition in release conditions (allowing instructors to trigger an action if a learner does not do something); improved intelligent agents; and, time savers like the ability to copy files with the copy course function. What all these features have in common is that a user identified a pain point through PIE, others indicated that they too had the same challenge and those insights shaped a new feature in Brightspace aimed at making your lives a little easier.
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As effective as PIE has been for us, we know it isn’t perfect. We get a lot of suggestions; since we launched PIE in 2013, we’ve received more than 3500 ideas which have received a collective 50,000 votes! That’s a lot of ideas to consider and you’ve told us that one of the frustrating things about PIE for you is that it’s hard to tell what’s happened after an idea is suggested.
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So, we’re making some changes to make PIE more effective and transparent.
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We’ve moved accountability for PIE within D2L to the Product Management team. That’s the team that already takes inputs from across D2L — from marketing, sales, and other customer-facing teams — to make recommendations on our product roadmap. That means that recommendations from PIE will be an integral part of the data we consider as we make future product decisions.
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To identify and consider the most viable recommendations when we’re developing our product roadmap, we’re also improving the way we triage and prioritize incoming PIE submissions to make the process more effective — and more transparent to users.
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Product Management will meet regularly with stakeholders from our engineering group, the folks that manage the Brightspace Community, and our support staff to review and validate PIE ideas. That means you’ll start seeing a response to ideas more quickly. And we’ve refined the statuses — and their definitions — to more clearly indicate what’s happening with a recommendation.
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We also will be working to ensure ideas are closed off clearly and in a timely matter. This means we’ll start looking more closely at ideas that have a low number of votes after having significant time for feedback. When ideas have a lack of community engagement, they will be closed.  Low votes don’t necessarily mean an idea will be closed – we’ll careful evaluate every idea you share with us.
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Changes to Close Status
- We want you to have clear expectations for each idea, and that means being very clear when we aren’t able to build your idea. To ensure we’re effective in this message, we will ensure that when we close because an idea isn’t aligned to our roadmap we are explicitly stating this in the response.
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Three key status changes to note:
- We’ve changed the former “Bake it Further” status to “Seeking Input”. These are submissions that don’t quite have enough detail for consideration and/or we need to do more research. As members of the Brightspace Community comment further, the idea can be developed into something with enough detail for further consideration
- We’ve changed the former “Not Currently on Roadmap” to “Wish List”. Some brilliant suggestions aren’t viable in the short term. Maybe we need to do some further technical development to enable the suggestion or perhaps we have some other higher priority recommendations we need to do first. That said, we don’t want to lose a great idea just because we can’t do it right away. We’ll keep those ideas on the wish list and revisit them periodically, addressing them when the time is right.
- We’ve added "Partner Solution". We have amazing partners that deliver fantastic features and products that integrate with Brightspace. We’ve added this status to be able to indicate when an idea you’ve submitted can be achieved through a solution provided by one of our Brightspace partners.
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What do you think?
Having absorbed these changes, we ask two things from you. First, we’d love your feedback on these changes in the comments below. Second, we’d like to get a sense of where the current process isn’t effective; where good ideas somehow don’t seem to get the recognition they deserve. If you can think of a PIE submission not currently in the top 10 that you think is worthy of greater attention, please link to it in the comments below. Most importantly, share why this recommendation is important to you. Collectively, your feedback and PIE highlights will help us in the ongoing process of making PIE more effective — for you and for D2L.
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Updated PIE Statuses
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Status | Definition |
Submitted | This is the default status when a new idea is submitted. Ideas in this status are to be reviewed by Brightspace Community facilitators to look for consistency with categorization and tags. |
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Closed | A Closed idea has one of several meanings:
1) Not a product idea; some of common reasons for closing an idea is that the idea is a support ticket, service suggestion, etc.
2) Something we would not be considering for our product roadmap. 3) Work-around was provided 4) No longer relevant in current product version 5) Insufficient number of customers have indicated interest
6) Duplicate |
Wishlist | The idea sounds great! We'll leave it open, and our product managers will re-visit it as our roadmap evolves. |
Seeking input | Further exploration is needed, we’d like to hear more comments and elaboration from our clients. Internal investigations may still need to be done. |
In Planning | The D2L team is defining the solution in detail, how to build it, who will build it, and when it will be built. |
In Development | The D2L Product Development teams are actively working on a solution. |
Released | A Released idea has one of two meanings:
1) A solution has been implemented in an upcoming version of the software.
2) A solution was previously implemented and is already available in the product. |
Partner Solution  | Partner solution is offered in place of D2L development/changes. |
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