Feedback

What a Feedback room is

A Feedback room is a product-feedback board. People post requests, vote on them, and comment. Your team triages them behind an admin view, ranks them against the revenue they represent, drags them across a roadmap, and publishes a changelog that tells every voter when their request shipped.

It is the only room type built for an audience outside your organization. A Feedback room has a portal — a link anyone can open, with no account and no sign-in — so customers can post and vote alongside your own team.

Add a Feedback room

1. In the space's sidebar, click + and pick Feedback.
2. Name it and set the room's visibility, which controls who inside your organization can see it.

The room arrives with one board already in it: Feature Requests, public, with the prompt "Tell us what to build next."

A brand-new room opens on the Admin view rather than the board, because the portal starts switched off and there is nothing for a reader to see yet.

Two views of the same room

The room has two faces, and the Admin button switches between them.

• The board is exactly what a customer sees on the portal. It is the same component — only where it gets its data differs — so there is no guessing how a change will look outside.
• The admin workspace is the triage side: internal posts and comments, companies and revenue, prioritization scores, and settings.

Boards

A board is the top level of organization inside the room, and each one has a type:

• Feedback — people post ideas and vote on them.
• Roadmap — columns you name yourself, with cards dragged between them.
• Changelog — updates you write and publish.

The room starts with one of each as built-in tabs. Extra boards you create with + sit between them.

Each board has a privacy setting:

• Public — appears on the portal.
• Private — internal only, never on the portal.
• Invite — only the people you add to it.

A board can also decide whether guests may post anonymously. Turn that off and a visitor has to give an email address before posting.

Posts

A post is one request. It carries a title of up to 200 characters, a body of up to 20,000, a status, a category, an owner on your team, a linked customer, and an ETA.

Three flags shape what happens to it:

• Internal — the post never appears on the portal.
• Pinned — it floats to the top of the board.
• Spam — it is hidden from the portal.

Duplicates are merged, not deleted. Merging points one post at another and keeps its row and its votes, so a request that arrived five times still counts five times and nobody loses the thread they were following.

When you write a post, the room looks for similar ones already on the board and shows you up to five — matching on words longer than two characters, at a ratio of one half or better.

Statuses

Statuses are rows you define, not fixed words. Each one has a colour and three switches: whether it appears on the roadmap, whether new posts land in it, and whether it counts as complete.

A new room seeds six:

Status	On the roadmap	Notes
Open	—	Where new posts land
Under Review	yes
Planned	yes
In Progress	yes
Complete	—	Counts as complete
Closed	—

A roadmap board you create yourself seeds its own three instead: To do, In progress, Done.

Every status change is recorded — from, to, an optional note, who did it, and how many people were notified.

Votes, comments and subscribers

Members vote as themselves. Portal visitors vote as a browser identity, so one visitor's votes stay theirs without an account. An admin can also vote on behalf of a named customer, which is how a request that arrived by email or on a sales call gets its weight on the board.

Comments are threaded and written in markdown. An internal comment is visible to your team and never leaves the workspace, so triage notes and the customer-facing reply can live on the same post.

Voting or commenting subscribes you to the post automatically. Subscribers are who gets told when the status changes and when a changelog entry that links the post is published.

Companies, customers and segments

The admin Users view is where requests stop being anonymous.

• A company has a domain, a plan, and an ARR figure in whole units per year.
• A customer belongs to a company, optionally links to an Openbook account, and carries a plan, an MRR figure in whole units per month, and an NPS score.

A segment is a saved audience built from rules — a field (mrr, arr, plan, company, domain or nps), a comparison, and a value. Rules combine with AND, in the order you wrote them. Pick a segment and the Feedback view re-ranks itself around that group, dropping the posts nobody in it asked for.

This is the answer to "what do our biggest customers actually want", which a raw vote count never gives you.

Prioritization score

Score factors are your own criteria — reach, effort, confidence, whatever your team argues about. Each factor has a weight, defaulting to 1, and a direction:

• Benefit factors add to the score.
• Cost factors subtract from it.

A post's score is the sum of each factor's value times its weight, with cost factors negated. Sorting the admin Feedback view by score puts the arithmetic in front of the argument.

The roadmap

The Roadmap view is the statuses marked "on the roadmap", as columns, with posts as cards you drag between them. Moving a card changes the post's status, which is what notifies its subscribers — the roadmap is not a separate copy of the truth.

The changelog

A changelog entry has a type — new, improvement or fix — a body of up to 40,000 characters, and labels. It moves through three states: draft, scheduled, and published.

Entries link to the posts they resolve. Publishing an entry notifies everyone who voted on those posts. That is the loop closing: the person who asked for the thing hears that it shipped, without anyone keeping a list.

The public portal

The portal is the room's outside face, at a link of the form /feedback/<token> where the token is 36 unguessable hex characters.

Turn it on and configure it from Settings:

• Name and tagline.
• Prompt title and prompt body — the heading and text above the post box. They default to "Create a Post" and "Let us know how we can improve."
• Logo and brand colour, which defaults to a mid indigo.
• Public — the master switch. It starts off.
• Show roadmap and show changelog — whether those two tabs appear.
• Allow guest posts and allow guest votes.

Visitors have no account. The portal remembers them in their own browser, along with a name and email if they gave one, so their votes and posts stay theirs across visits.

What a visitor can see is narrow by construction: only boards marked public, and only posts that are not internal, not spam and not merged away. Internal comments are filtered out before the response leaves the server.

Rotate the token to revoke every link you have ever shared. There is no other way to un-share a portal URL that has already gone out.

A switched-off portal answers exactly like a wrong token. Nothing in the response confirms that a token is real, so nobody can test a guess.

Limits

• Post title 200 characters; post body 20,000; comment 10,000; changelog entry body 40,000; board description 2,000; a status-change note 2,000.
• A guest's name is capped at 60 characters and an email at 160.
• The admin post list returns up to 200 by default and 500 at most.
• The portal returns at most 200 posts in one request, and shows at most 50 voters on a post.
• Analytics count the last 30 days, with the top 10 posts and the top 10 companies by ARR.
• The default Trending sort is the vote count decayed over 30 days, so a new post with a few votes can outrank an old one with more.

Tips

• Leave the portal off until the board has something on it. An empty portal reads as an abandoned product.
• Merge aggressively. Merging keeps the votes, so there is no cost to consolidating and a large cost to leaving five copies of one request unranked.
• Fill in companies and MRR before you argue about priorities. Segments and scores are only as good as the revenue data behind them.
• Publish the changelog even for small fixes. The notification to voters is the part that earns the next round of feedback.
• Use internal comments for triage. They keep the reasoning next to the request without putting it in front of the customer.

FAQ

Can customers use this without an Openbook account? Yes. That is the point of the portal. They post, vote and comment as guests, remembered by their own browser.

What happens to votes when we merge two posts? They are kept. The merged post keeps its row and its votes and points at the survivor.

Can we keep some boards internal? Yes — set a board's privacy to private and it never appears on the portal, or to invite to limit it to named people.

How do voters find out their request shipped? Publish a changelog entry linked to the post. Everyone who voted on it is notified.

How do we take a portal link back? Rotate the token in Settings. Every copy of the old link stops working immediately.