Expert Guide to Idea Tracking for SaaS and Digital Businesses

Idea tracking—like it sounds—refers to the practice of keeping track of your ideas. The term itself is most commonly used by digital-first companies such as software, consumer tech, ecommerce, and other digital experience brands.

In today's world, it's almost impossible to imagine idea tracking without the right software.

Idea tracking tools can help you source and collect ideas, sort them and prioritize them, and track them all the way through to completion.

In this guide, we dive into some of the strategy behind idea tracking and share some excellent idea management software—from simple and affordable tools to more robust enterprise platforms.

What's in this guide:

• Key benefits of idea tracking

• Idea tracking for customer feedback (+ tool suggestions)

• Idea tracking for marketing, operations, and other projects (+ tool suggestions)

• Idea and innovation tracking for large enterprises (+ tool suggestions)

• 5 ways to validate and prioritize ideas

• How to track idea completion and share your successes

Key benefits of idea tracking

When you do idea tracking right, here are some of the benefits you'll get to experience:

• Allows you to source ideas from your customers.

• Allows you to source ideas from multiple employees (especially the ones who interface with your customers on a day-to-day basis).

• Makes sure that you don't lose great ideas or let them fall through the cracks.

• Makes it easy to attribute various business initiatives back to the original source of the idea.

• Allows you to thank and credit contributors for their ideas.

• Helps you show customers that you really care about their needs and desires.

Idea tracking for customer feedback

There are different types of customer feedback, which is why it's so important to keep track of everything you receive.

You can track customer feedback and ideas in a board like this, so that customers know which ideas haven't been considered yet, which ones are under consideration, which are planned, and which have already been built.

It's important to continuously update your idea board and label new customer ideas so that customers know that you value their ideas.

You should also comment on customer ideas and ask for additional questions. This helps you understand their idea better while also making it clear that you value their input.

Best idea tracking tools for customer feedback:

Here are some feature request tools and customer idea survey tools that are great for tracking ideas and improvements:

1. Frill

Frill is a customer feedback tool that includes idea boards, roadmaps, and release announcements in one place. It is a dedicated idea tracker because you can track ideas from your customers to approved to in production to complete. You can create whatever statuses you'd like for your board's columns.

2. SurveyMonkey

With SurveyMonkey, you can create idea forms and surveys for your customers to complete. You can then reuse these surveys monthly or annually so you can continue to track ideas in one place. If you utilize multiple choice questions, it will be easier to track the popularity of different ideas. But it's smart to use some open-ended questions as well, so that customers can submit ideas freely.

3. Typeform

Typeform is similar to SurveyMonkey, except the UX is different. Customers will see just one question at a time, making the survey experience a little simpler and more straightforward. By re-using the same Typeform over and over, you'll be able to track customer ideas in one place.

Product feedback forms and survey tools can help you collect customer feedback in one place, but they don't make it easy to track the progress of an idea, so make sure to use something like Frill, which offers idea and roadmap boards. They're kanban-style, meaning you can track the progress of each idea in columns.

Idea tracking for marketing, operations, and other projects

When it comes to managing ideas for your business or job, you need a different type of platform.

Small businesses don't need a dedicated idea management tracker (see the next section below), but instead can get by with a project management tool.

All you need to do is create a separate column in your Kanban board and call it "ideas." Put any new ideas in there and chat with your team before deciding to build them.

You could also create a separate project board for ideas and add different columns for your idea tracking process.

Here are some columns you could use:

• New

• In Consideration

• Approved

• Planned

After you move an idea to the "Planned" column, you would then add it to the backlog of whatever project board it should go to, such as a content marketing board or an operational improvements project board.

Best idea tracking tools for projects:

All of these tools can be used by small businesses and enterpreneurs for tracking ideas.

1. ClickUp

ClickUp is a great tool because you can toggle between different views for the same data. This means you can take a look at your ideas in a list view, calendar view, board view, and more. By having your ideas inside of ClickUp, you can easily move them over into action mode when you're ready.

2. Notion

Notion is great for tracking ideas, projects, internal information, wikis, etc. For example, you could make a doc with ideas for a certain project, and then turn each idea into its own project or task when the time is right.

3. Asana

Asana offers similar features to ClickUp and is a popular project management tool that can easily be used to track ideas. Make a separate board for idea tracking, or just add an "idea" column to each of your project boards so no idea slips through your fingers.

Idea and innovation tracking for large enterprises

Enterprises have a much harder time of collecting and keeping track of ideas, so they need to use dedicated processes and tools, instead of their project management software.

Whitecollar workers at enterprise organizations can be kept very separate from the customer service and hands-on work that frontline employees do. That's why enterprises need to source ideas directly from frontline employees. They might have ideas on products, brick-and-mortar store organization, customer service improvements, and tons more.

Best idea tracking tools for enterprises:

These tools fall more into the idea management software category, because they're aimed at helping very large organizations to source ideas from employees across every department and function, even their on-the-ground, frontline staff.

1. Brightidea

With Brightidea, organizations can manage employee ideas in the Idea Box product, where you can collect, sort, and track ideas. There are also separate products for digital whiteboard brainstorms, managing incentivization programs, and tracking experiments and new innovation.

2. HelloIgnite

HelloIgnite is an idea-crowdsourcing platform. The platform is designed for organizations with a lot of frontline employees, all of whom hold immensely powerful information on what customers really want.

3. Planbox

Planbox is an innovation management solution with features for idea tracking, tech scouting, new corporate ventures, employee engagement, and continuous improvement management.

5 ways to validate and prioritize ideas from customers

Here are some smart ways to prioritize feature requests and ideas from your customers:

1. Let customers upvote each others' ideas

Feature voting is a smart way to prioritize ideas. The idea with the most votes is the most popular and should be built as soon as possible.

To let your customers vote on ideas, you need to use a customer feedback tool that includes upvoting.

To increase the engagement with your feedback tool, use single sign-on (SSO) so your users can login with the same credential they use for your app or website. If you want, you can even allow users to upvote with being signed in.

2. Do what you can to reduce customer churn

You should always prioritize ideas that have the potential to reduce customer churn.

If it's clear that some of your best customers will leave unless you implement an idea, then you should put that at the top of your list.

“We often look at the prospect sources that give us the most conversion and prioritize the requests coming from this source. But our most recent feature updates were aimed at reducing customer churn. We therefore prioritized the feature requests from churned customers. Earlier segmentation of customers definitely helps when it comes to this.”

– Alina Clark, Co-Founder and Marketing Director of CocoDoc

3. Consider the competitive landscape

Do your competitors already satisfy this idea?

If you've fallen behind your competitors, you might need to prioritize customer ideas that will help you play catch up.

But before you go copying them, ask yourself: do you want to be like these competitors?

Just because competitors offer something, it doesn't necessarily mean that you should. Sometimes your competitors aren't very innovative or worth copying. Or they might serve a slightly different target audience.

So take this advance with a grain of salt.

4. Make sure the idea is aligned with your ICP

Sometimes a request is surprising but for the most part, we have a good idea of what our customers want from us. We usually prioritize requests based on what will have the biggest impact on our clients. That could come from the number of requests we’ll receive for a specific idea, or it could be something major that we need to fix ASAP.”

– Lindsey Allard, CEO & Co-Founder of PlaybookUX

5. Prioritize customer requests already in your roadmap

It's smart to prioritize customer ideas that you were already planning on building, or that align with your current product development well (and can be easily tacked on).

Essentially, if something is already in your roadmap is very highly requested, you should bump it to the very top of your priority list, as long as another idea isn't mission-critical.

How to track idea completion and share your successes

When you finish the task or project associate with an idea, make sure to track that too!

Here are some things you might do:

• Move that idea over to your "complete" or "launched" column in your roadmap.

• Comment on the original idea, let that person know its complete, and thank them for their idea. Also tag any customers who also commented with their thoughts on the original idea so they know its launched too.

• Write a release note and publish it in your changelog so all of your customers know about the update (and see that you are a customer-centric organization).

Letting ideas fall through the cracks is a major waste. Follow these tips all you'll be able to not only track ideas but actually use them.

Want to make your users happy? Track customer feedback and feature requests with Frill.