Pendo feedback and feature requests

[er1k]

I’m seeing more and more topics around criticising Pendo and it’s issues. So I thought of creating a one topic that would maybe gather all ideas around the platform together. Maybe through this we can actually make this platform work.

I know about the topic Feature Requests: How your feedback makes Looker better but it’s more about how we share things in Pendo and not how we want Pendo to work.

Some of my first ideas that would help Pendo to work better:

1.  Get Looker developers/PMs to actually contribute to Pendo. I’m pretty sure that Looker isn’t building currently 3 new features which of 1 is background color changing and 1 is dashboard theme. Would be nice to have the same things we seen in release notes also in Pendo.

2. Better overview of top ideas. Currently I don’t see any possibility to check what are most voted or most discussed ideas in Pendo.

3. Get rid of old stuff. The latest release that pops us as unread for me is some feature that was released in 7.0. Why am I even seeing this?

4. Add categories to ideas. Is it a bug, is it a new feature request is it related to visualization? Let us filter by those requests

5. ​​​​​​Let people speak by their names and not Anonymous-123

6​. Give us a way to learn about new ideas. Once I log in then I should be able to see what are some new things that people are suggesting. Maybe kind a force us to upvote/downvote every idea so that I will only see some ideas where I haven’t voted yet?

7. Fix releases. Let us to see what was built in what version not only mention it as a free text in Request status message.

​​​​​​​8. Integration with community. Maybe post ideas also as a feed to Community page without possibility to comment on those. Well I’d like to comment here but I guess having info in one place makes more sense. So that people would contribute in Pendo.


Maybe someone else have also some other ideas?

Btw, don’t know which is the best Category for this topic. Feel free to move it to better place.

[er1k]

9. Force Looker team to update Planned tickets at least. This is LookML dashboards folders and subfolders. One of the most popular request. We are now soon ending Q1 in 2021 but this Suggestion is simply laying there without any additional info. 

10. Add dates. I don’t see dates, when suggestion was added, I don’t see dates for Looker team comments and I don’t see dates for user comments.

[er1k]

@michael Is there a better place to address this feedback? Maybe some PM could reply here or should I send it privately to some email instead?

[Dawid]

I agree with you @er1k  on all the points. Pendo was supposed to revolutionise the product feedback loop with the Community and nothing has happened, which is very disappointing. I understand that takeover by Google probably meant a major shift in priorities, roadmaps, and feature prioritisation (I think we all felt the change). 

Personally I don’t mind hearing “this will not happen” as I think bad news is better than no news, silence, and the feeling of being in the dark while all we want to do is help make the product better..

[IanT]

+1 from me regarding the overall message to this post.

I can’t see you pendo having more exposure/engagement than the forum but it would be great if it did, maybe that’s something that should be worked on.

[er1k]

@izzymiller Maybe you can help us to get some feedback about Pendo plans and are those listed things relevant for Looker people?

[michael]

Hey all, thanks so much for consolidating all this feedback - some really great points raised.

I agree there are still big opportunities to make Pendo more updated, explorative, and social. Building straighter lines between Product and users offers a ton of potential in collaboration and driving Looker’s evolution even further.

I understand that some are underwhelmed with where the experience stands today, and that’s fair. We absolutely want to make the feedback experience as effective and valuable-for-all  as possible.

I’ve sent a note out to some folks who work directly on our Pendo feedback experience, and hopefully will be able to loop them in here. Additionally, I will dig in and see what I can provide in terms of Pendo feedback roadmap. I’m also very curious to learn which of these points are being actively worked on currently!

We will follow up on this

[er1k]

@michael any update here? 🙂

[michael]

Hey @er1k! Our team that owns our feedback experience let me know that they would be responding here. I’ve just sent them another note on this as well. 

Thanks for your patience ?

[Mintz]

Hey all,

Thanks for the really thorough and helpful post about how Pendo is working (or not) for y’all. Some of what you’re describing is definitely not how we want things to work and addressing our processes is very much on the docket. Certain other things are limitations that come from Pendo’s product itself, but I’ll definitely take the info and make requests of Pendo that they address the issues.

Let me generally say that I know that submitting stuff into Pendo probably feels very much like putting requests into a black box. That is not how we want it to feel, but is largely driven by some decisions we (well, mostly I) made about where to put limited resources. Specifically, I decided to put energy into reading and tagging every request (more than 1,300 so far) so that we can efficiently get them in front of the right product team. 

That’s meant not putting energy into communicating back to the community as well as I’d like. But given the choice, I decided I’d rather make sure PMs are actually seeing the right requests first. Now that all the back-end pieces are up and running, the next step is making Pendo a useful place for requesters. Some of the things that we need to do to facilitate that I already knew, but your feedback definitely pointed out some additional things we need to do, so thank you.

Hopefully that explains at a high level what’s been happening with Pendo. Now, let me respond to your points one by one:

1. We haven’t figured out a great process to update Pendo easily based on release notes, especially because each thing we release doesn’t necessarily map 1:1 to a request. But we are woefully behind in updating it more generally and definitely going to fix that. In terms of PMs engaging, I don’t think I’d expect continuous engagement from PMs, but we’ll definitely get them in there with their thinking about the most popular requests.
2. That’s a limitation of Pendo, but a great point. I’ll pass on to them.
3. Yup, basically same as 1.
4. Hopefully there are no bugs in Pendo. Anything we find that’s actually a bug is getting dealt with separately. In terms of tagging, it’s happening, but I didn’t think about the fact that there’s no way to see it for y’all. That’s another great point that I’ll pass on to Pendo.
5. This is something Pendo is thinking about how to address, but is fundamentally driven by the way that we’ve implemented Pendo. We don’t pass any identifying info to Pendo that’s not pseudonymous. So they don’t have your email or name (although of course we can untangle your hashed identifiers in our systems so we know who’s requesting what). But I’ll check in on the status with them and see if they have any new thoughts.
6. This feels quite related to 2 and 4 and I’ll also ask them about it.
7. Yup, there are some limitations in what Pendo lets us do here, but I think when we get stuff more up to date it’ll certainly be better.
8. That’s interesting. I can think about whether there might be a way to post “trending” or “most popular this quarter” as community posts. We definitely want to drive discussion to Pendo for keeping it all in one place, but posting here might be possible.
9. Just an extension of 1 and 3. Definitely something we’re going to address. Won’t be perfect, but will be a lot better.
10. That’s very strange and not something I realized. I’ll raise to Pendo, cause they certainly have the dates.

Please let me know if this all makes sense or if I missed anything.

[er1k]

Thanks, @Mintz for taking the time and answering the raised points.

While all of the answers make sense then I think this quote says it all - “In terms of PMs engaging, I don’t think I’d expect continuous engagement from PMs”

So this means that there will not be any back and forth discussions. I submit my idea, maybe get some validation questions from you and after that, it will still stay in the parking lot since there is no easy way for users to check new ideas/new comments and engage. Also, PMs are not expected to engage so it’s back to start.

Also not sure if before or after this comment I see now two new Releases in Pendo and the solution for “Impersonate user for debugging” is simply “This is already possible in Looker” - not giving any indication to when it was released and where to find information about it, etc.

I really hope that Pendo will find some ways to be useful but for myself, as a community member, I currently don’t expect any value from it. 

[Mintz]

Hey @er1k ,

Let me be a bit clearer what I meant by “continuous engagement.” I do want to get to a place where PMs are sharing their thinking on the feature requests that have the most traction in Pendo. But given the limitations on notifications because of how it’s configured, I wouldn’t expect a back and forth to happen there. I honestly think that the limitations of the platform would make that frustrating for everyone.

What I do expect (and what we’re already seeing) is that when a product team is ready to start working on a particular user problem, they’ll use Pendo as a starting place for finding users who are invested in getting it solved. And there, I’d definitely expect ongoing engagement. That might look like user studies, surveys, meetings, sharing mockups, or beta testing. 

Hopefully that’s a bit clearer.

-d

[Dawid]

But since Pendo is only used by a fraction of users and community, why look for it there rather than the community?

[er1k]

Thanks, @Mintz for further clarification. Looks like the biggest blockers to make it as a community-driven tool are limitations by Pendo.

@Dawid community worked great previously and it was easy to contribute there. Shame that the decision was to change it. I currently like the idea of megathreads about some functionalities. Either this about Pendo or Maps topic. It gives a combined overview and makes it easier to talk with people from Looker, like with @Mintz in this topic.

[er1k]

@Mintz Hey, now around two months have passed since the discussions. Do you have any updates here cause it feels like everything is still the same as before the discussions?