2023 W36 - Feedback.rows.com

Humberto

Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!

Last week we launched a significant revamp of our support system — and then upgraded our internal process for processing users feedback.

The new home for feedback is at feedback.rows.com!

There's 3 components to this.

Part of the solution was a new feedback tool which we adopted and deployed previously as feedback.rows.com, and which now became the main feedback loop for our product. This is a place for feature requests, product feedback and spreadsheet questions.
Part of the solution was killing other tools. We replaced our old forum.rows.com with a new questions board.
Part of the solution is a process. For example, users send us hundreds of emails, and we do dozens of calls with them every week. For every product question and feedback, we now tag them in the appropriate point on the feedback page. This ensures better communication and closing the loop! Another process improvement is that our team can now synchronize the user requests with our product issues (on GitHub).

Why we did it is simple: the volume of feedback grew a lot with our platform evolution.

The previous system was too unstructured. We handled many emails, messages and tickets, but there was no automatic following up with users after features got released or were upgraded. This worked well for a thousand of users, but at 100s of thousands, this becomes heavy.
We were missing out on users interactions on top of other requests. A user asking for a feature is one thing. Others commenting and upvoting it makes it stronger!
We have experimented a lot and now it's time for efficiency. We tried many platforms, and the forum was cool even... in 2017. I feel like the future has a different answer for spreadsheet questions (AI + Community) and we want to get there one step at a time.
We wanted to a bit of our product roadmap with users without opening getting into predicting the future (we prefer to live in it).

Now for some cool stuff! We can't get to all requests fast, but some of them are important, or just smart or creative

For data sources, our users really want us to add TikTok, Notion, Banking services, Webhooks and the ability to load other spreadsheets automatically.
For importing, a user suggested importing PDF -> spreadsheet. It's a real problem that lots of SMBs and Enterprises have to manually load tables from public files onto their spreadsheets.
There's also some nice UX ideas, like an endless scroll for viewing shared spreadsheets on mobile and beyond.

Now back to building the best spreadsheet!

See you next week

- Humberto