Idea: make a bigger deal of our roadmap

[jamesefhawkins]

We could make a way bigger deal about stuff that we're intending on building.

This is cool because:

• building in public = awesome. Building with the community will lead to more excitement and word of mouth
• we can get feedback from users
• we can find early stage users
• it demonstrates how ambitiously we're thinking to the community

How can we do this:

• Create issues for each major feature (perhaps we'd have around 8 of these right now )
• Have a sign up form for each of them (to capture excited early users)
• Make each issue really exciting - why we're building it, mockups, etc. Maybe even custom artwork?
• Link to these from the homepage roadmap
• Link to them from newsletter
• Post their links to social media etc when we update them
• Link to them from a posthog.com/roadmap page

Would love any other ideas

[pjhul]

Love this idea! Made me think of another cool OS YC company that did something similar: SuperTokens roadmap.

[andyvan-ph]

Very much up for this, but would add another thing... make our RFCs public. At the moment, a lot of our RFCs end up in product-internal. There might some good reasons for this in some circumstances, but generally I think they should be public so we can share them with the community.

[joethreepwood]

I've been thinking on this topic separately and, obviously pending Website & Docs thoughts, I think we could lump this in with a static page for Array and product updates.

Essentially this would be a page on the site which lists upcoming features, as well as shipped features and fixes. Users can submit ideas, vote on and follow features they like, and also get info on new features. We could centralize relevant content, such as tutorials, into each feature too.

The difference would be mostly in the level of granularity -- in order to fill the space of Array, this page wouldn't be limited to just our 8-ish big features: it would be much more detailed.

[pjhul]

This is actually another great example that I totally forgot about: DigitalOcean Ideas. Basically an entire forum with separate posts that users can up-vote and comment on. It's pretty impressive how active it is and I think it actually has a significant impact on what DO focuses on.

Probably also worth thinking about this in the context of #3993, since that looks to be the next big section to get built-out and I think this would fit well there.

[corywatilo]

A concept homepage block for making a bigger deal about our roadmap:

What you're looking at:

• A flying hog, traveling down a timeline (but could be him on a train, on a roller coaster perhaps passing through a tunnel) as you scroll down the page
• As you scroll to this section, the confetti appears (and goes away)
• As you scroll down further, the hog moves with the page, the last block closes and the next block opens to confetti
• I think we want to curate this a bit, so not sure how much should actually pull from GitHub vs us cherrypicking specific issues to highlight and arrange (by order of completion). Maybe the top-level item (Session recording 3.0) shouldn't look like an epic - we just link the select issues/PRs inside).
• Sample custom artwork for the feature release
• "Subscribe for updates" - a few ways to play this
  1. Simplest: Email input
  2. We use Squeak! for this. If they're signed in, they don't have to input anything else. If not, it creates a record for you in Squeak! that we can link up to later if they later create an account.
  3. If they're identified users (by PostHog), can we pass the email through to this?
  4. Browser notifications (ew)

cc @lottiecoxon and @smallbrownbike for feedback. Eli - I think this sort of fits in nicely to what you're working on with linking teams and issues, especially with how this could filter on through to job rec pages (eg: "What this team is building right now").

[jamesefhawkins]

A few more ideas, if we were going nuts:

• users (of posthog.com) can sign up to collaborate on a new thing.
  • we could then show their profiles on the feature page, with a "join them" way to subscribe
  • we could add anyone that comments on the issues perhaps automatically via github api
  • this means you get subscribed to updates on the feature, your profile also gets included etc

philosophy - the contribution we really value the most is people giving us great feedback trying to use our product for real

Perhaps the MVP is something like:

• Link issues from website (Luke is creating these)
• Create a beta sign up form for each major feature (and make sure the relevant small team has access to this)

Then we can iterate from there?

[lottiecoxon]

I'm just thinking about the page structure here- if the aim is to get people interested and more importantly involved: maybe we should clarify at the top things we are working on now and things we are working on next with easy buttons/links for our users to either get involved or sign up to contribute in the future.

I like the idea of moving hedgehogs and fun moments of joy but I would like to sketch out what we want on the page and what end result we want to get out of this- I worry too much scrolling and movement may be too much distraction.
Maybe we have a sign up/pin board at the top outlining what we are working on now and future projects, then underneath give an interactive and informative roadmap that illustrates what we have done and want to do in more detail.

[joethreepwood]

@lottiecoxon @corywatilo I'm keen to help move this forward as a new page rather than just a homepage block so that we can include all our historic releases in it too. Obviously the homepage block could be used to feature the new, exciting, upcoming stuff -- but having a static page for new features and announcements could level-up/replace Array and help drive feature adoption more.

I'm happy to start creating all the content that would be needed for that in upcoming sprints, but (as with the apps launch, which was similarly a lot of content) want to get your thoughts on the idea and potential layouts before I start putting pen to paper and write anything which just ends up discarded. Basically: How best can I help progress this?

[smallbrownbike]

Just a heads up - we can now create roadmaps in Squeak. I'm going to be working on getting all of the milestones on the homepage added to the company-wide roadmap (once the build succeeds), so if anyone is planning on creating/editing current roadmap goals, use Squeak! 😊

[corywatilo]

Roadmap

The roadmap is broken down into three columns, with all data being managed using Squeak! Roadmap, which syncs some data from GitHub.

Because roadmap items are geared around teams, it's set up to group the items by team.

I'd expect to have one card for each of our small teams. With ~10 cards, I'd expect this page to fill up, but hopefully won't be too overwhelming.

1. Under consideration

These entries are added as roadmap items. (We may need an additional checkbox indicating if an item is in progress, otherwise they can be considered as proposed.)

Because we can link a GitHub issue, we show reactions from the issue, thus keeping all "voting" and discussion over on GitHub.

2. In progress

These are Squeak! roadmap items where multiple issues are linked. Clicking more shows the breakdown of all tasks and details about the overall progress. (Note: We'd cherry pick select issues/PRs to list, like major feature releases.)

The Get early access button would subscribe the user to email updates about this feature via Squeak!. (We'd likely just make an easy way to copy email addresses of the interested users.)

3. Recently shipped

List roadmap items completed in the past month-ish.

(Eventually, it would be cool to have a component for this that we can insert into Array posts to automate a lot of the copy/pasting required to put those updates together.)

Changelog

A somewhat incomplete page thus far, but we'd move the homepage timeline here, possibly limited to product-related events. (We could have a separate timeline for non-product releases/only company milestones on the /about page, or we use the Milestone flag.)

@smallbrownbike we'd have to discuss details about all these flags and what we really need. I'm probably overthinking it a bit, but I'm trying to standardize so we can pull the same format of data for different purposes in different places. I think we're close already with how you've got it set up!

[corywatilo]

Note: I had this earlier version of the wire that stacked the content, but I think the column approach (above) is better because it's a familiar UI (sort of like a Kanban board), which works for this type of data.

It's much more interesting to look at than this:

[jamesefhawkins]

(Eventually, it would be cool to have a component for this that we can insert into Array posts to automate a lot of the copy/pasting required to put those updates together.)

Future scope,don't worry now but - 100%. I think we can make the array way cooler. However, we need to avoid it being 300 clicks to read the update each time (seeing a high level card, having to click into it). We'd maybe need some kind of long description (that could cope with gifs/images) stored in squeak! if so

[corywatilo]

Hi-fi of this page (showing various states):

[jamesefhawkins]

Process for how to handle this once it's live (@joethreepwood as we discussed)

• We set up a private slack channel with each team that has something listed above, in our community slack.
• User signs up to a beta program
• We take them to a form that we need to build (so we can understand them as an ICP or not)
• Then we put them into the relevant private slack channel
• When they're in slack say "hey let's get you access" and introduce ourselves to start a chat
• Marketing do the above process, and provide regular content on anything that happens to keep them excited and engaged.

[joethreepwood]

Crossposting an update to the above, for visibility.