Have you ever felt that your feature suggestions for MarketTime are not being heard? It can be frustrating to take the time to send us your feedback and ideas and feel like we're not paying attention. But rest assured, we're always listening!

When you get a reply from the Support Team or Product Team letting you know that we'll consider your suggestion, you may or may not believe this is true, depending on your level of skepticism. However, we do consider each feature request that comes from our customers.

In this article, we'll explain what happens after we receive your feature request. We'll pull back the curtain and shed some light on what happens in product planning and development at MarketTime.

Product, Platform, or Ecosystem?

MarketTime is a platform and ecosystem that comprises a range of products. Although you cannot physically hold our products like a vase, a shoe, or a stuffed animal, they are still products. Whether we are working on the web app, the mobile app, B2B e-commerce sites, mtCharge, the Public API, or any other product in development, we refer to them as our "Products."

Our Product Team is responsible for managing these products. They determine what features the Development and Engineering teams should build to enhance our products and make them even better.
Just like a chef improves a coleslaw recipe by making it more tangy, we are constantly working to refine the MarketTime recipe to better meet your organization's needs and wants.

Incoming Feature Request!

When you contact us through our Support Center using the Submit a Request form, a Support Team member will be the first to see your message. Your feature request will be seen by a real, live human, not a robot.

If your request can be answered with an existing knowledge base article or a little training, we will reply with that information. If your request is for a new feature or an improvement to an existing feature, we will place your request on an internal idea board. This is where we gather suggestions and feedback from external and internal customers (our co-workers). The Product Team periodically reviews the idea board to decide where each idea should move next.

We use five main categories to track feature requests:

1. Now: Features and change requests that are currently being actively built or tested.
2. Ready for Development: These features are ready to be worked on as soon as our teams can start on the project. The ideas in this phase do not have a specific timeline yet.
3. Discovery: Ideas that are actively being researched and evaluated to decide if we should pursue them. These ideas also do not have a specific timeline yet.
4. Next: We may consider adding items to our roadmap, but we have yet to make plans to build these features.
5. Later: Items that are not yet on our roadmap.

We sometimes receive ideas that don't align with our core values, core verticals, or vision of the future. These ideas go into the "Not Doing" category. We don't consider feature requests that would only benefit a small group of customers or have little appeal to the majority of users. Also, we avoid anything that could compromise our system's data integrity or security.

I asked for something else!

After your request is live, you might notice that the final result differs from what you initially requested. This is because there are often multiple ways to solve a problem, just like there are various ways to slice a pizza. Additionally, delivering a feature does not guarantee that it will provide value or help you achieve your desired outcomes. To put it in pizza terms, when a pizza is delivered to your door, that doesn't automatically guarantee that it will be delicious and satisfying.

Hence, our goal is to "build the right thing" before we proceed to "build the thing right." To build the right thing, we take your feature request and ask ourselves, "What problem are you trying to solve?" We talk to different customers, conduct user story-writing workshops, create mockups, designs, and flowcharts, and, if necessary, speak to subject matter experts. After gathering all this information, we determine the best way to solve the problem, whatever form that may take in the end.

How do I know what's new?

We'd like to encourage you to visit our Release Notes: MarketTime Cloud and Mobile App page and receive release announcement updates by email to say informed when new features and capabilities are added to MarketTime.

Do you want to shape the future of MarketTime?

If so, please consider joining the MarketTime Research Group! When you join, you will have a direct line to members of the Product Team. You'll help us discover how to make MarketTime work even better for you. You'll be invited to interviews, usability studies, surveys, and more.

These sessions are no pressure and require minimal time commitment. If you're interested, please tell us a little about yourself by filling out this quick questionnaire: MarketTime Research Group. We look forward to learning from you!