🗺️ 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
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, PIE has been a great source of ideas and features.
In fact, we 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 then those insights shaped a new feature in Brightspace aimed at making users lives a little easier.
As effective as PIE is for us, we know it isn’t perfect. We received a lot of suggestions since we launched PIE in 2013: more than 3500 ideas that 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 is that it’s hard to tell what’s happened after an idea is suggested.
So, we’re changing things to make PIE more effective and transparent.Â
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.
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 transparent to users.
Product Management will meet regularly with stakeholders from our engineering group, the teams 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. Additionally, we’ve refined the statuses and their definitions to more clearly indicate what’s happening with a recommendation.
We will also 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 carefully evaluate every idea you share with us.
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 are explicitly stating in our response that we are closing an idea because it does not align with our roadmap.
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 continue to provide feedback, 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.
What do you think?
Having absorbed these changes, we ask two things from you. First, we want to hear your feedback! Join us in our Community Feedback thread.
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 have a PIE submission not currently in the top 10 that you think is worthy of greater attention, please link to it in our Community Feedback thread. 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.
Updated PIE Statuses
For more information about updated PIE Status options, refer to D2L Product Idea Exchange Statuses.