Introducing the “Product Manager for a Day” subcategories

Hey everyone!

You may be familiar with the Suggest New Features category of our Community – this is where we expect our community to… well… suggest new features for our products: SonarQube, SonarCloud, and SonarLint.

Today, we are announcing that we are closing this category (keep reading to the end to find out what’s coming in its place)

Why this change?

Suggest New Features works in a pretty straightforward way – our users post ideas, and others have the opportunity to comment and vote on these ideas.

You may have noticed that even some of the most highly voted-on suggestions haven’t yet made it into our products (although some have! Like SonarLint for Rider or detecting the Trojan Source vulnerability).

The truth is that while the number of votes a feature suggestion has is one input to decide whether or not to actually develop it, it’s not the only one. Votes also don’t tell us very much – it’s hard to know exactly how to develop a feature if we only know many people like the idea, but don’t give us any more information about their needs.

What’s replacing it?

We are creating three new product-specific subcategories named “Product Manager for a Day”. This is where we expect you to put yourself in the shoes of a Product Manager at Sonar and explain the problems you face (or opportunities you see) in our products that you would prioritize as a Product Manager.

Here, we expect topics to include quite a bit of information:

  • What are you trying to accomplish?
  • Why does this matter to you?
  • Why should it be a priority now?
  • How would that look in the product? Can you imagine any alternatives?
  • How would we know it works well?

If you are only suggesting a tweak to existing functionality, your post is probably better off in the top-level category for each product.

You can find these new categories here:

What about existing topics?

First, we are going to close Suggest New Features to new posts.

Then, we’ll gradually move over what makes sense (paying first attention to topics that have, historically, gotten a lot of traction).

Ultimately, this is an experiment. We’re confident in the direction we want to go, but we’re also happy to listen to your feedback

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