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We have fully transitioned to the method of feedback described below. While you can of course discuss new and desired features right here in the online Community, in order to get your vote counted and officially surface your idea to our product team, please follow the instructions below.
We are in the process of migrating all old Discourse feature requests to the new portal. When that’s done, we’ll have an archive of old FR’s here in the community.
Your Feedback Is Important To Us
We know that every company says your feedback is important to them, but it’s hard to think of a major advance that we’ve made at Looker that wasn’t directly tied to customer feedback.
Customers told us they needed better-looking, faster dashboards, so we rebuilt our dashboard infrastructure from the ground up. Customers were coming up with amazing workarounds to use scheduled data delivery for alerts, so we built native alerts into Looker. Customers started embedding Looker in other environments, so we developed Powered by Looker.
That’s why every team at Looker—from Product to the Department of Customer Love to Customer Success—takes customer feedback so seriously: We know that the next great innovation is probably lurking in a request from a customer.
But as Looker’s customer base has grown, the stream of great customer info has become a flood. And we want to make sure that our systems can still extract valuable data from this flood and route it to the right place so it can make Looker better. That’s why we’re rolling out a new system for gathering your feedback and requests.
Got Product Ideas? Share Them!
Our new system allows you to submit your feedback directly, to add your vote to ideas others have submitted, and to see what’s been released recently and what’s coming soon.
For us, this makes sure that we can organize the feedback that’s coming in, hear the unfiltered needs of our customers, and gauge interest in various features. It also tells us which users to reach out to when we’re developing new features to get their feedback and dig deeper into their usecase.
For you, it gives you an opportunity to add your voice directly into the product development process, a way to make sure that your needs are communicated fully and accurately, and a place to discover new features you may not have even known existed.
To be clear, customer feedback is one of several critical inputs to our product planning process, but it’s not the only one. Just because a request is popular does not mean it will float to the top of our queue. Read on to understand more about what will happen once you submit a request.
How To Submit Feedback
We’re rolling the new system out slowly so we have the opportunity to refine our processes. So if you don’t see the link to submit a product idea yet, don’t worry, you can still reach out to your friendly DCL member or your Customer Success Manager with your idea and they’ll pass it to the appropriate person.
Once you’re on the new system, you’ll see a link in the help dropdown in Looker that says “Product Idea?”
Click that link and you’ll be taken to your request dashboard. From here, you can see what’s coming, what others have suggested, and what’s recently been released. You can also submit a new feature request (and if others have already suggested something similar, we’ll suggest similar requests so you can add your vote or your comment).
When you submit a request, give as much context and information as possible about the problem you’re having and what you’re trying to accomplish. This context is absolutely critical for making sure we really understand the problem and can think about solutions that would address it.
Telling us “I want to control the width of lines on graphs” is far less helpful than telling us what you’re trying to do. Some people might want thicker lines for displaying charts on televisions, while others might want to use line width to show confidence intervals. If we don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, we might misprioritize your request or even build a solution that doesn’t actually solve your problem.
A few tips for submitting good requests:
Comprehensively describing the problem you’re having is much more important than describing the solution you think will solve it.
Make sure it’s clear what business problem you’re trying to solve and for whom.
Sharing screenshots or examples of ways you’ve seen the problem solved can be helpful.
To read more about how you can submit the most impactful feature requests, RStudio has a great guide.
What Happens After You Submit Feedback
We review requests regularly to read and tag them, but you shouldn’t expect a direct response immediately. Our roadmap doesn’t change that frequently, so if a feature isn’t already on it, the most likely situation is that we’ll mark it as “Awaiting Feedback”. Until a request is reviewed and tagged, it will not be visible to other users. You may also find that we edit the language in a feature request to make it easier for other users to find it and add their thumbs up, or to add information about existing workarounds.
This means we’ll keep an eye on the request, see if other users are running into similar problems, and think about how we can address it in the future. So if you see a request that you’re interested in, be sure to add your “thumbs up” to the request. That helps us gauge demand and lets us know who we should reach out to about the feature in the future.
As we adapt this new system, we’ll work to find the right cadence for reviewing requests to make sure our Product and Engineering teams can stay focused on building Looker, while also staying in-sync with customers’ needs. As we lock these down, we’ll update this post with those cadences. We may also establish vote thresholds after which a request will receive an “official response.”
We’re also excited about this new system because of the ways it will improve our ability to communicate status back to you and our ability to follow up with questions when we’re designing new features. While we’re launching the new system, we don’t want to make any firm commitments about what shape that will take, but as things progress we’ll update this post.
Legal stuff: When you provide us any sort of feedback (like suggestions, comments, corrections, ideas, enhancements, feature requests, etc.) you agree that such feedback is given voluntarily, and that Looker may use, disclose, reproduce, modify, commercialize, license, distribute and exploit the feedback freely, in its sole discretion, without any restriction or obligation of any kind. And to be clear, anything that qualifies as your confidential information or your data does not count as feedback.
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