Latest / Community Marketing with Fexingo: Discord, Slack Groups, and Brand Communities / How One Brand Community Builds Product Roadmaps in Public
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a moment in a brand community where you stop asking members what they want and start showing them what you're actually going to build. I think that moment is more important than most community managers realize. Luna: You're talking about public roadmaps — like, actually sharing your product plans inside the community? Lucas: Exactly. Not just a feedback channel. A living document that says: here's what we're working on, here's why, and here's what we decided not to do. I want to look at one specific case today — a B2B SaaS startup called FieldNomics. About 500 members in their Slack community. They started publishing a public product roadmap inside that community eighteen months ago. Luna: And you've got the numbers on how it went? Lucas: I do. Over those eighteen months, community members submitted 73 specific feature requests. Twelve of them got built. That sounds like a low hit rate — about sixteen percent. But the Net Promoter Score among active community members went from 32 to 59. And churn dropped by about a third. Luna: So the transparency itself was valuable, even when most requests didn't make the cut. Lucas: That's the key insight. FieldNomics didn't build most of what people asked for. But they explained why. Every quarter, the product manager posted a thread: here are the top ten requests, here's what we're prioritizing, here's what we're deferring, and here's the reasoning. Sometimes it was technical debt. Sometimes it was strategic alignment. Sometimes it was just bandwidth. Luna: And the community — they didn't get angry? I feel like most companies are terrified of that reaction. Lucas: Some people did get frustrated. But the data shows that the people who stayed — the ones who remained active in the community — had a much higher tolerance for 'no' when they understood the rationale. FieldNomics actually tracked sentiment in the thread replies. About 70 percent of responses to deferral posts were either neutral or supportive. That's remarkable. Luna: It's almost like treating members as partners rather than customers changes the emotional dynamic. Lucas: Exactly. And this is part of why shows like this exist — to surface real examples like FieldNomics. If these conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going. Buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — it's that simple, and it makes a real difference in keeping the podcast ad-free and focused on cases like this. Luna: Yeah, it's a small thing that adds up. And it lets us keep digging into stories that actually help community builders. Lucas: So back to FieldNomics. The other thing they did was separate the roadmap into three swimlanes: committed, exploring, and not right now. The 'not right now' lane was brutal for some members — but it also generated some of the most productive conversations. People would reply and say, 'I get why you can't do this now, but have you considered a lighter version?' And sometimes that led to a compromise. Luna: So the roadmap became a negotiation tool, not just a broadcast. Lucas: Exactly. One example: a member wanted deep Salesforce integration. FieldNomics said not right now — too complex, too early. But the member pushed back with a simpler version: just sync contact lists, not full CRM. They ended up building that in a sprint, and it became one of the top five used features. Luna: That's a great illustration of co-creation. The community didn't just request; they helped shape the scope. Lucas: Right. And FieldNomics was smart about how they framed the roadmap. They didn't just dump a Trello board into Slack. They had a dedicated #roadmap channel with a pinned post that was updated weekly. Every quarter, they did a live AMA with the product team in the channel. The product manager would walk through the roadmap slide by slide and take questions. Luna: How did they handle the questions that were critical or confrontational? I imagine some members would be unhappy about their pet feature being deferred. Lucas: They had a simple rule: no defensiveness. The product manager was trained to say 'I hear you, and here's the trade-off we're making.' They also had a 'roadmap feedback' form that fed directly into the product backlog. So even if a feature was deferred, the conversation wasn't dead — it was just parked. And they'd revisit it every quarter. Luna: That systematic revisit is crucial. Otherwise, deferred feels like rejected. Lucas: Yeah. And the data backs that up. FieldNomics surveyed members after six months and found that 80 percent of respondents said they felt the roadmap was 'genuinely open to influence.' Not that they got everything they wanted, but that their voice mattered. Luna: So what's the downside? Are there any risks to this approach? Lucas: Absolutely. The biggest one is losing competitive secrecy. If you're building something truly novel, you don't want to tip off competitors. FieldNomics handled that by keeping the roadmap at a feature-name level — no technical specs, no timelines beyond quarters. They also had a 'stealth' swimlane for things they wouldn't discuss publicly. Luna: So the transparency is curated, not complete. Lucas: Exactly. Another risk is over-promising. If a feature stays in 'committed' for too long, members get impatient. FieldNomics had a policy: if a feature sits in committed for more than two quarters without moving, it gets moved back to exploring or removed entirely. They'd explain why — usually resource shifts or market changes. Luna: That keeps the roadmap honest. I've seen communities where the roadmap is basically a wishlist that never gets updated. Lucas: Right. A stale roadmap is worse than no roadmap. It erodes trust. FieldNomics updated theirs weekly — small changes, but consistently. And they had a changelog in the same channel so members could see what was modified. Luna: What about the community members who don't care about product details? Do they find the roadmap noise? Lucas: Good question. FieldNomics kept it in a dedicated channel, so it was opt-in. Not everyone joined. About 40 percent of the 500 members ever visited the channel, and about 15 percent were regular participants. That's fine — the silent majority still benefits from the features that come out of the process. Luna: So the roadmap channel is a subset, but the output serves everyone. Lucas: Exactly. And there's an interesting secondary effect: the roadmap channel became a recruiting tool. FieldNomics started linking to it in job postings for product roles. Candidates could see how the company thought about trade-offs. The product manager told me it helped filter for people who valued transparency. Luna: That's a great example of how community infrastructure can support other business functions. Lucas: Let me give you a practical checklist for anyone considering this. First, start small — don't try to expose your entire product strategy. Pick one area, like the next quarter's features. Second, set expectations upfront: this is a living document, not a promise. Third, have a clear deferral process with written rationale. Fourth, update regularly — weekly if possible. Fifth, create a feedback loop so members can weigh in without derailing the roadmap. Luna: And how do you know if it's working? What metrics should a community manager track? Lucas: FieldNomics tracked three things: engagement in the roadmap channel — comments, reactions, questions; sentiment in those threads — positive, neutral, negative; and correlation with NPS or churn. They also tracked feature adoption from roadmap-driven features versus internal-only features. The roadmap features had about 30 percent higher adoption in the first month. Luna: That makes sense — members feel ownership, so they're more likely to use and advocate for those features. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the loop: transparency builds trust, trust drives engagement, engagement leads to better products, and better products reduce churn. FieldNomics is now at about 1,200 members in their community, and they've kept the public roadmap the whole time. Luna: So the practice scaled with the community. Lucas: It did. And they've added a monthly 'roadmap review' livestream where the product team goes through updates and answers questions live. That's become one of their highest-engagement events. Luna: I wonder if there's a size limit. Could this work for a community of 10,000 members? Lucas: It gets harder, but not impossible. At that scale, you'd probably need to segment — maybe separate roadmaps for different product lines or user segments. The key is to maintain the personal touch. FieldNomics's success came from the product manager being genuinely present and responsive, not just posting updates. Luna: So it's less about the tool and more about the commitment to the conversation. Lucas: Exactly. The roadmap is just a container. The real value is the trust that builds when you show your work, including the parts that didn't work out. I think that's the lesson every community manager should take from FieldNomics. Luna: And it's a reminder that community members can handle more honesty than we often give them credit for. Lucas: They can. And when you treat them like partners, they start acting like partners. That's the shift that makes public roadmapping more than a tactic — it becomes a relationship strategy.