How To Add A Feature Request Form to Your Product

Feature requests are a gift to product managers. Think about it! Customers care enough about your product to take the time to give you valuable feedback. If you never receive any feature requests, it's either a sign that your product is extremely successful or that not that many people care about it. Having a feature request form in your product where users can easily drop their feedback is a low-hanging fruit that you should pick right away.

Having a structured way to collect feedback is much more efficient than getting it unstructured via email. It's much easier to find it later and get an overview of what is most requested and should be next on your roadmap.

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Why you need a place for customers to send their feature requests

There are several good reasons to have a place for customers to drop off their feature requests:

• It's a signal that you actually care for people to send their missing features
• It keeps the data nice and structured, so it's easier to find it later on, compared to getting it in an unstructured format via email.
• You can ask for extra context and avoid going back and forward over email.
• You can connect your form to other tools, such as your project management tool, or send a Slack message to your team when there are new requests.
• It's easy to follow up with people who suggested a feature after it has been implemented. People love this!

How to create a feature request form using Reform

Reform is a form builder that's built around simplicity. It comes prepacked with templates that are relevant for startups, product development, customer development, sales, and so on.

It's easy to create a feature request form with Reform. Just follow these steps:

1. Create a Reform account.
2. When asked to create your first form, pick the "Feature request form" template.
3. Click the "Form settings" button and add your brand colors and logo (or leave the default colors).
4. Publish the form by upgrading your account.

That's all there is to it!

After you've published your form, head over to the "Share" page to grab the URL for the form or copy the code snippet to embed it on your own website.

Here's how the Reform template looks (this is an actual form - feel free to fill it out):

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How to embed the form into your product

When adding the form to your product, you have two options: You can either add a link that links to the hosted version of the form (each form in Reform has its own URL) or you can embed the form directly into your product (like the one above).

If you look at the screenshot of the Reform form builder above, you can see that there is a link in the sidebar saying "Request a feature". That link goes directly to our Reform form where people can share their missing features. That's how we've decided to do it within Reform itself and it is the easiest solution. All it takes is a link.

If you don't want people to leave your product or website, you can also embed the form directly. If you head over to the "Share" page in Reform, there's a code snippet that you can copy and drop into a page on your website or in your product.

What to do with the feature requests after you've received them

After receiving a new feature request, you need to do something with it. Obviously. If you opt to use Reform, you'll get an email every time someone submits the form. However, Reform also has integrations with tools such as Slack, Notion, and Zapier.

A few ideas of what to do:

• Post a message in your team Slack channel whenever there is a new response. This will keep everyone in the loop about what features are being requested and how frequently.
• Send all the requests to a database in Notion. This way you can easily tag, filter, and process them and figure out how they fit into your roadmap.
• Use Zapier to send responses to any of the 4000 software tools on Zapier's platform. Your imagination is the limit on this one.

Why it's important to keep track of who requested what

If you never do anything with all your feature requests, there's not much of a point. Hopefully, you are going to implement some of them, and when you do, here's the most important thing: Tell your users about it! Especially the ones that suggested it in the first place.

Your customers will love to learn that you listened to their requests and that they had a positive influence on your product. Make sure everyone who suggested a feature gets a personalized email with an update and a "thank you" for taking the time to share it with you.

Good luck on your product journey! 🙏

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