Engaging with our Clients - Part 1 Product Ideas Portal

In software product management, we are in the business of solving “market problems.” Market problems are evaluated along two dimensions: pervasiveness and willingness to pay. That is, the “problem” must be 1) experienced by many people (your “market”), and 2) so painful that people who experience this problem are “willing to pay” for your “solution.” If the “problem” does not score highly along both dimensions, then we as Product Managers move on.

Here at HCL Commerce, we strongly believe in this market-driven approach to product management, and we use different methods to take the pulse of our market. Through this series of blogs, we’ll share more details about each of these methods with you.

Earlier this year, we launched the HCL Commerce | Product Ideas Portal (powered by a third-party solution, Aha!). It is our new, centralized repository to collect and manage enhancement requests, or ideas, that our clients and business partners have for the HCL Commerce solution.

After self-registering on the portal, users can vote on ideas that have been submitted by other members of the HCL Commerce community. As you might expect, we use the number of votes an idea has as a measure of its “pervasiveness” in our market. We recently also added the ability for HCL Commerce employees to add votes to ideas on behalf of clients and partners.

Users can also submit new ideas, and when submitting a new idea, they provide details, like Use cases and Business Priority, information that we use to better understand their “willingness to pay” for a solution.

Every couple of weeks, a cross-functional team of Product Management, Development, and Support, review and discuss the most popular ideas and determine whether to prioritize them on our roadmap. Since the launch of the HCL Commerce | Product Ideas Portal, over a dozen capabilities that we have shipped originated from ideas submitted and voted on by our clients and partners.

This is one of the many ways HCL Commerce is going Beyond the Transaction to ensure we are continually improving through feedback from our clients and partners.

Stay tuned for future blogs highlighting the other ways we work closely with clients to guide the direction of our platform.