How ReadMe uses Canny to build the most impactful features for their customers

If your business has thousands of customers, you're probably familiar with a large volume of customer requests. ReadMe definitely is.

David Reed is head of sales and customer success at ReadMe. He always has his eye on their customers. While he wanted to solve the biggest problems their customers were facing, understanding what those problems were always proved difficult.

“We had lots of requests but didn’t actually know what customers wanted. It took forever to decide on what to build next.”

Inside ReadMe, the link for "Feature Request" used to direct customers to a form. Over time, feature requests piled up. The team had to spend a significant amount of time manually keeping track of requests. It was a big time commitment for a small team of ten. So, David sought out a new solution.

Challenge

Prior to Canny, David and his team manually tracked feedback in many different places: Asana, Excel, Trello, and more.

“We'd tried everything, nothing worked.”

Process changes can be very disruptive to a team's productivity but they hadn't found a solution. They wanted a product that:

• Helps understand the biggest problems customers were facing to inform product decisions.
• Was customer-facing so the team wouldn't have to manually track requests.
• Aggregates requests in one place, removing the issue of duplicate requests.

Solution

David described their process before Canny as:

“All over the place and confusing.”

ReadMe simply replaced their feature request form with Canny. When customers reach out through other means, ReadMe directs them to Canny.

Their only concern was that customers wouldn't use it. However, after populating their board with a few requests, it quickly filled up with feedback directly from customers.

With Canny, they have everything in one place and can refer to it when building their roadmap every month.

“A significant amount of our roadmap just creates itself. All the tracking and guesswork are done.”

Results

As a sales/customer success person, David hears requests every day. Nearly every customer interaction involves a feature request.

“Documenting requests then fighting for them on behalf of the customer internally was a huge percentage of my time. Canny allows our customers to request features in their own words and sell the features for me.”

When building out their roadmap, ReadMe considers several inputs:

• Ideas from the team
• Bug fixes
• Iterating on the current product
• Things customers want

Canny has become the oracle for the "things customers want". Marc, head of engineering at ReadMe, is one of the main Canny users at ReadMe. Now, Marc and the team are able to make product decisions with confidence.

Importantly, their customers feel more respected. The ReadMe team is listening and cares about their feedback.

“If you want to focus resources on the highest impact features that scale to the most customers, try Canny. We love it.”