How do you grant access to beta features to some of your users?

Heya @nico_lrx – great questions!

• Selecting users: this can be as simple as grouping together customers that have requested a particular feature. Keep a list in spreadsheet or Trello (or even tag them in Gmail). We've used a transparent roadmap at Buffer (https://trello.com/b/WEsDUGRv/buffer-reply-transparent-product-roadmap) and often start there w/ customers that have upvoted a feature or are following a card on that board.
• Collecting feedback: If the sample size is small, email is great. Easy to collect feedback, setup automated reminders to follow up (using followup.cc or followupthen.com). I've also used private Slack groups and setup in -app links to a Typeform or similar to collect feedback.
• Enabling features: Typically this is done via feature flags. If your product has an admin interface (I've built custom ones as well as used off the shelf solutions like https://activeadmin.info and forestadmin.com), you'd can use that to enable or disable select features for customers. Then, in your app code, you'll want to selectively show or hide those features based on any enabled feature flags for a given customer. As others noted, once you've rolled out the new feature to all customers you'll want to clean up those feature flags and remove any un-used code. Lastly, if you're doing this at scale, you may want to check out some of the feature management apps like launchdarkly.com. This gives you an interface for controlling feature rollouts and even allows you to roll out to a percentage of all users etc. Great for slowing rolling something out, testing it, and continuing if no issues popup.

Hope that helps!

Hey, UpStamps helps teams and developers managing their projects using feature management to progressively deliver features to users with confidence. Check it out

Our customers can enable pre-releases in the app. It's a toggle in the Updates tab, it looks like this. If enabled, the app includes releases tagged beta when it updates.

If something is really experimental, we create a dedicated build that we send to a selection of users who asked for this feature. We keep track of who's interested with MailChimp and send download links by email. We're currently doing this for a Windows version of the app.

I read a piece about how flickr did it and that was just flags on the user and switches through-out the app. Sounds messy, if you want to clean them up oncethe feature is fully accepted, but having loads of different versions of the app out there is just as messy.

In the webapp I'm working on for almost 8 years we have the same and fare quite well. It's not just for new features but also for user-level-restricted features in general and has some finer grains to grant access to users via other objects (like a group, product, subscription etc).

Picking users, well, find the most active ones, have a chat with them if they are interested in the new features.

Good questions.

@ plainflow.com we run pilots with companies who request particular features (might be particular integrations or some extra capabilities) that we think are aligned with our product direction.

We have two ways of doing it:

1. Bigger companies have a compartmentalized infrastructure on our product so we can deploy a different feature set.

2. Some time we build little out-of-the-box products and put them in their hands, if the response is good we embed them into the product at a later stage.

Do you provide a special channel for feedback?

Zoom.us recorded calls + email