Hi Jeff,

I feel a FAQ coming on. :)

I'm going to re-post my responses to some very similar recent questions.

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For the questions:

- Which features will you be adding in the future?
- Can you share your roadmap?
- Can you make a list of the most requested features so users can vote on them?
- Can you tell me which features you're working on now?

This is the response I posted in another thread:

"I'm sorry we don't have a roadmap available; we tend not to pre-announce features (even I personally don't know what we could be launching next week :)

Unfortunately I'm not even able to share what our developers are working on right this second (even though I do know that ;) Just because we might work on a feature today doesn't give any indication when that feature might be available (priorities might change, or it might just take a lot longer than expected).

Perhaps most importantly, it doesn't even indicate if that feature will be available in the future (not everything that we work on ultimately becomes a feature on the site; we might prototype or even fully develop something before deciding against launching it). We don't want to disappoint anyone by making promises for features that we may not end up fulfilling.

I should also probably mention that feedback from RTM users is extremely important to us (we do read and consider every post on the forums and all suggestions we receive), but there are many factors that we have to consider when deciding what to develop next. We know very well which features are most requested (a quick look at the forums will reveal that :) and we do take this into consideration."

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For the questions:

- Why haven't you added feature X?
- Why is it taking you so long to add feature X?

This is the response I posted in another thread (regarding sorting options in this case):

"We're still very much aware of the requests for additional sorting options (along with the many, many hundreds of different requests that you guys send us ;)

Most new features require a minimum of one week for development and testing, no matter how trivial an enhancement might seem. Some features require up to six months or a year (for the bigger stuff like mobile clients that folks are very fond of requesting :).

If that's multiplied out by hundreds and hundreds of different feature requests (no exaggeration!), you'll begin to see why we might not have reached the potential feature that you're a fan of (we'd have enough development to keep us busy for 20+ years...).

Please keep in mind that everyone has a different favourite feature that they'd like to see added to RTM; so if the next feature that we add isn't the one you wanted, please remember that to someone else, that feature is incredibly important (we wouldn't have developed it if it wasn't! :)"

One more FAQ to address the specific question in the first post:

- Can you make a list of the most requested features and indicate their status (whether a feature is being worked on, and when it might be available)?

This is addressed in my previous response:

"I'm sorry we don't have a roadmap available; we tend not to pre-announce features (even I personally don't know what we could be launching next week :)"

as well as my comment about not being able to share what we're working on right now (see reasons in above post for details).

But let's ignore for a minute that our policy is to not pre-announce features. :)

The reason that we can't share a roadmap is that there simply isn't one. Yes, we know which features are most requested (anyone can tell that with a quick glance at the forums :) but we don't know which ones we'll be developing and subsequently launching in the future (and that's the truth!). That depends on a whole bunch of factors.

Unfortunately I can't even take a guess at which features we'll have in the future (unless someone wants to lend me their time machine so I can go check the site ;), let alone tell you when these future features will be available, sorry. :(

Thanks Emily, I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

And while I appreciate the re-posts to the "somewhat" general responses, I guess I was hoping for a more "community friendly" answer.

We really do love RTM. And I'm sure others like myself want to quit trolling around for the "holy grail" of task management and settle down with the RTM love of our life. It's just a bit difficult to have faith that "this is the one" when so many of the things on our "honey-do" list go quietly into the thread abyss.

And you can tell there's a bit of frustration with at least some of the users, since there are several threads that respond with "yeah, we asked for that a while back, please note the XX number of threads below asking for the same thing." Those posts are a bit discouraging if ya know what I mean.

Anyhoo. Like I said, so many of us love RTM and can't wait for the new features to be released. We appreciate the time, dedication, blood, sweat and tears you and your team have poured into this service.... a service I'd happily pay MORE for (as I mentioned in a previous post.)

Thanks again,

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I do appreciate the frustration, but we also get a little bit frustrated being constantly asked (or demanded :) to reveal information that simply doesn't exist about future features. :)

As I mentioned above, feedback from RTM users is extremely important to us (we do read and consider every post on the forums and all suggestions we receive), but there are many factors that we have to consider when deciding what to develop next; community input is simply one factor.

If you're looking for a product with development that is solely community driven (i.e., the developers take the list of most requested features and simply work down it, ignoring all other factors), I'm sorry to disappoint but RTM is not that product. :(

Many of RTM's most used features would not have been developed if we just worked down a list of the most requested features; I'm not sure that we had any requests for the feature that ended up being RTM for Gmail, and it's now one of the most popular ways that people use RTM. Likewise, Smart Lists were not a big request, and neither were locations.

Unfortunately there's not really anything that we can do about users being frustrated that their favourite potential feature hasn't been developed yet. No matter how hard we work (and even if we spent the next 20 years doing it!), there will always be more features that could be added and there will always be people grumbling that we haven't added them. :)

Thanks again for replying.

I'm looking forward to all that RTM is... and will become.

- Jeff

I'd love to see RTM implement a tool like crispyideas.com or Pligg - a method for us to submit feature requests and then have the community vote on them.