I’ve submitted a KaiNexus feature enhancement request, now what happens? Great question! Let’s take it from the top.

There are two channels from which you can submit a product feature enhancement request to KaiNexus. The first is by reaching out to your KaiNexus Customer Experience lead. The second is to reach out to our KaiNexus support team directly via support@kainexus.com or Submit a request through the Feedback option available in the User Menu drop-down within the KaiNexus app.

Once that feature enhancement request has been submitted, your customer experience lead or support person will submit the feature enhancement request in our internal KaiNexus instance. That’s right, we eat our own dog food and it’s delicious! After it has been logged in our internal KaiNexus, our Product team will evaluate the feature enhancement requests. If our Product team needs further details or clarification, they may reach out to the CE or Support resource who initially submitted the feature enhancement request and if that person needs more information, they may reach back out to the customer. KaiNexus receives hundreds of product feature enhancement requests a month so we recommend being as detailed as possible when initially submitting your tickets to KaiNexus. Covering all the WH questions (who, what, why, when, where, and how) is an awesome starting point, for example  what problem will the feature enhancement solve or what opportunity does the feature enhancement create?

If it is determined that the feature enhancement will not be accepted, the Product team will close the Improvement out in KaiNexus. This could be a duplicate that is already logged in our system, it could be that the product already addresses this in a different way, or it could be that we don’t feel the feature enhancement request is critical to spreading continuous improvement for a majority of our customers.

If it is determined that the feature enhancement will be accepted, the Product team will complete the Improvement in KaiNexus and then add the details of that Improvement to a ticket in our JIRA software. JIRA is where our Product and Development team will work together to capture and organize all KaiNexus feature enhancement requests as well as manage our product release cycle.

Now that the feature enhancement has been added to JIRA, our Product team will hold a work session with the Development team to discuss the feature enhancements in more detail and determine the level of effort. After determining the level of effort required to develop those feature enhancements, our Product team will then hold a work session with the Customer Experience team to assess how much impact each of those feature enhancements would have on our customers. This allows us to begin to prioritize which feature enhancements we want to include as part of our next release.

Prioritization becomes a bit of a balancing act as there are many factors that are considered. For directly requested feature enhancements from customers, we must look at the level of effort to implement the feature, the number of customers that will be positively impacted, the size of those customers, and the severity of that impact. In addition, we also want to make sure we are making decisions based on the future direction of the product, improving performance, architectural maintenance, security, as well as the ability for further adoption and spread.

Ideally we would like to scope our releases based on a theme, such as Reports for example. We would choose the highest impact Report feature enhancements to be included as part of that release. This helps minimize waste such as context switching for our Development team, as well as maximizes the functionality, efficiency and unification of design in that area of the product.

The final step from here is for our Product team to hold another work session with the Development team to properly scope out the feature requirements before allowing our amazing development team to get to work on making your enhancement requests a reality in KaiNexus. A KaiNexus release typically consists of between 50-75 feature enhancements, with an average of 1 release per month.

So how long does this take from submitting a ticket to seeing my product enhancement idea in KaiNexus? Well as you can see from above, this is a very detailed and thought out process, so the speed at which an idea can make it through the cycle can be anywhere from a day to a year. Typically though, for those critical features that aren't terribly complex and that lots of people would benefit from, the turnaround time is around 1-3 months. As the KaiNexus team continues to grow, we strive to tackle more and more complex product enhancements to help further support both our own, and your organization's mission to spread continuous improvement!