If you’ve been following our journey for a while, you’ll know that Beyond Typicals originally started out as a planned feature for Beyond CAD that was built into a fully functioning, separate application. Pre-launch we started to get early versions of Beyond Typicals into the hands of beta testers and a consistent trend emerged from nearly everyone that tried out this section creator:
Non-stop feature requests.
Don’t get me wrong, these users were gushing about the functionality and potential of this software and sharing impressive stories of project wins and client kudos from using Beyond Typicals. That said, nearly every email had a list within the email or attached via document of features and fixes that would make the application even better.
As much as possible, I kept up with these requests and sent the easy, urgent fixes to our dev team for quick integration in upcoming patch updates. Other requests that were more difficult or less urgent were added to lists and prioritized accordingly for our developers to get to as soon as possible. We especially tried to tie priorities and responsiveness to paying subscribers vs trial users.
Eventually, however, the requests became overwhelming, and a folder was created that soon contained many emails and attachments with dozens of requests that had never been fully vetted, prioritized or added to any lists for our Beyond Typicals developers.
Part of the problem is that not every request is equal. Some are legitimate requests that we had never considered. Others are items on our own internal lists that the users aren’t yet aware. Others are already available, and the users don’t know it, and yet others have already been requested by other users. It seems that much of these requests and communication were unnecessary and redundant, and there must be a better solution.
After discussions with users and research, I decided that a public roadmap was in order to better organize and prioritize all of these feature requests. After some research, I found that Sleekplan seemed to have the features I was looking for, and I started transferring the developer lists as well as the unread emails and attachments with the many other requests into this new public roadmap. I started sending this out to some of the more active users and had positive feedback that this was a good direction to manage these requests.
This roadmap offers the ability for users to review other requests (thus eliminating duplicates) and vote requests up or down. They can also create new requests and comments as necessary.
Perhaps most useful is the ability for our team to communicate our plans with the growing user base of Beyond Typicals.
This roadmap will continue to improve and evolve over time, and we hope that you will assist us by contributing your own votes and requests! For now, at least, you can always access the roadmap by
Learn more about Beyond Typicals in the videos below or by visiting the product page.