If you’ve heard of Userback, you probably know it for visual feedback—annotated screenshots, session replays, and bug reports with full context. And yes, that’s a core part of what we do.
But here’s what many teams don’t realize: Userback is a complete product management platform. Beyond collecting feedback, it helps you prioritize what to build, communicate your roadmap, and close the loop with users when their ideas ship.
This article walks through how it all works—from Feature Portal to public Roadmap to Surveys—and why it matters for product teams who want to build with confidence.
The Feature Portal: Where Ideas Become Priorities
Most feedback tools stop at collection. You get a pile of bug reports and feature requests, and then… you’re on your own to figure out what matters. The result is usually a “feedback black hole” where great ideas get lost in spreadsheets or Slack threads.
Userback’s Feature Portal changes that structure entirely. It transforms your feedback from a messy inbox into a centralized hub where users can submit ideas, vote on existing ones, and discuss use cases with your team and each other.
Designing Your Feedback Taxonomy
A common mistake teams make is dumping everything into one bucket. To make your Portal truly useful, you need a structure that mirrors how you actually build product.
1. Categories that map to ownership
Don’t just use generic tags like “Bug” or “Feature.” Instead, create categories that map to your product areas or squads:
- Core Platform: For stability, login, and infrastructure issues.
- UX/UI: For workflow improvements and design tweaks.
- Integrations: For requests about connecting with other tools.
- Mobile: Specific feedback for your app experience.
This ensures that when feedback comes in, it’s already routed to the right mental bucket (and the right Product Manager).
2. Statuses that manage expectations
Your status workflow communicates reality to your users. Userback allows you to customize these, but a best-practice flow often looks like this:
- Under Review: We’ve seen it, but haven’t decided yet.
- Planned: It’s on the roadmap (users can get excited).
- In Progress: Devs are building it right now.
- Shipped: It’s live! (This triggers the “Closing the Loop” notification).
Why voting is your “Signal vs. Noise” filter
Voting isn’t just about popularity-it’s a prioritization signal. When 47 users vote for “Dark Mode” and only 3 vote for “PDF Export,” you have qualitative data to back your roadmap decisions.
This is crucial for stakeholder management. When a sales leader demands a specific niche feature, you can point to the Portal: “I see why that’s interesting, but we have 150 paying customers asking for the integration we’re building next sprint. We need to solve for the majority first.”
Closing the Loop: The Feature Most Teams Miss
Here’s a stat that should bother every product team: most users who submit feedback never hear back.
They take the time to share an idea, vote on a feature, or report a bug-and then silence. No acknowledgment. No update when things change. Nothing. This teaches your users that providing feedback is a waste of time.
This is a missed opportunity. Because when you do close the loop, something powerful happens: passive users become engaged advocates.
The “Release Note” Formula that Drives Adoption
When you mark an item as “Shipped” in Userback, you have the option to send a notification to everyone who voted for or commented on that idea. But don’t just say “It’s done.” Use this moment to drive adoption.
Here is a formula for a high-impact closing-the-loop notification:
- The Hook: “You asked, we listened.” (Acknowledge their contribution).
- The Value: “The new export feature saves you ~5 hours of manual data entry per week.” (Remind them of the pain point).
- The Action: “Click here to try it out in your dashboard now.” (Direct link to the feature).
The “No” is as Important as the “Yes”
Not every feature request belongs on your roadmap. Sometimes, you have to say no. The Feature Portal is the perfect place to do this respectfully and publicly, preventing the same request from coming up over and over.
When you move an item to a “Closed” or “Will Not Do” status, leave a comment explaining why:
“Thanks to everyone who voted for this! We’ve investigated building a native Linux app, but right now our focus is on making the web experience faster and more robust for all platforms. We won’t be building this in 2025, but we’ll revisit it if our Linux user base grows significantly.”
Users appreciate transparency more than silence. They might be disappointed, but they will respect the honesty.
Building a Roadmap That’s Connected to Feedback
Roadmaps are great for communicating what’s coming. But too often, they live in a silo-disconnected from the feedback that should be driving them. You might have a roadmap in a slide deck or a Trello board, but your users can’t see how their requests relate to it.
In Userback, the Roadmap isn’t a separate entity-it’s a visual extension of your Feature Portal. Every item starts as an Idea in the Portal. As you progress its status (e.g., from “Under Review” to “Planned” or “In Progress”), it automatically populates your Roadmap. This means your Roadmap is always in sync with the actual status of your feedback, visualizing the flow from “Idea” to “Shipped” without manual duplication.
Data-Driven Prioritization (RICE + Votes)
How do you decide what makes it onto the roadmap? Many teams use frameworks like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort). Userback provides the data for the “Reach” and “Impact” parts of that equation.
- Reach: Look at the vote count. How many users will this actually touch?
- Impact: Look at the comments. Are these requests coming from your enterprise accounts or free trial users?
By combining your internal strategic goals with the hard data from the Portal, you can build a roadmap that balances “Keep the Lights On” work with “Growth” features.
Public vs. Private: A Hybrid Strategy
Not every roadmap needs to be public. In fact, total transparency can sometimes backfire if competitors are watching. Userback gives you full control over visibility, allowing for a hybrid strategy:
- Public Roadmap: High-level themes and “committed” features. This builds trust with customers and prospects. “Look, we are active and shipping.”
- Private Roadmap: Detailed internal planning, technical debt, and “maybe” features that you aren’t ready to promise yet.
- Selective Visibility: You can even create views specific to certain user segments (e.g., a “Beta Testers” roadmap that shows more experimental features).
Beyond Roadmaps: The Two Speeds of Feedback
The Feature Portal and Roadmap handle reactive feedback-ideas and requests that users bring to you. This is “Slow Speed” feedback; it builds up over time and informs long-term strategy.
But sometimes you need “Fast Speed” feedback. You need answers now. That’s where Surveys come in.
When to use Surveys vs. The Portal
Userback includes both, so you don’t need a separate tool like SurveyMonkey or Typeform. But knowing when to use which is key to a healthy product loop.
1. The Portal (Passive / Reactive)
This is for “Slow Speed” feedback where the user seeks you out.
- Type: Feature requests, bugs, long-term ideas.
- Trigger: User has an idea and clicks your feedback button.
- Best for: capturing the ideas you didn’t know your users had.
2. Surveys (Active / Proactive)
This is for “Fast Speed” feedback where you prompt the user.
- Type: Satisfaction scores (NPS), validation, friction points.
- Trigger: You trigger a question while they are using a specific feature.
- Best for: getting immediate answers to specific questions.
Proactive feedback with in-app surveys
Userback’s Survey feature lets you ask targeted questions at the right moments. Instead of waiting for users to speak up, you can deploy:
- NPS (Net Promoter Score): “How likely are you to recommend us?” – The standard metric for overall sentiment.
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction): “How easy was it to export your report?” – triggered immediately after the user completes an action.
- Micro-Surveys: Short, 1-question surveys to validate a roadmap idea before you build it. “We’re thinking of building a Dark Mode. Would you use it? Yes/No”
This combination ensures you have the full picture: the ideas users are shouting about (Portal) and the silent friction points they aren’t telling you (Surveys).
Breaking Free from the “Franken-stack”
We see it all the time. A product team starts small, and over time, they acquire a “Franken-stack” of tools:
- Jira for bug tracking.
- Trello or Notion for the roadmap.
- Typeform for surveys.
- Canny or Upvoty for feature voting.
- Intercom or Email for communicating updates.
That’s 4-5 subscriptions, 4-5 logins, and worst of all: data silos. Your survey data doesn’t talk to your roadmap. Your roadmap doesn’t talk to your bug tracker. You spend hours manually copying context between tools.
Userback was built to eliminate this sprawl.
The benefits of consolidation
- Single Source of Truth: All feedback-visual, voting, survey-lives in one user profile. You can see that “User A” reported a bug last week, voted for a feature today, and gave you a low NPS score. That context is invisible when data is split across tools.
- Lower Overhead: One subscription is cheaper than five. One script tag on your site is faster than five.
- Better Developer Experience: Userback integrates directly with Jira, Linear, GitHub, and Azure DevOps. Your PMs work in Userback to triage feedback, and your devs stay in their code tools. The sync happens automatically.
What’s Coming: AI-Powered Feedback
We’re not stopping at just collecting data. We’re actively building AI capabilities to help you understand it.
Soon, Userback will leverage AI to:
- Auto-categorize incoming feedback so you don’t have to tag everything manually.
- Analyze sentiment to flag angry users who need immediate attention (before they churn).
- Summarize themes from hundreds of comments, giving you a “TL;DR” of what your users want this week.
The goal is to move you from “managing feedback” to “acting on insights.”
See It in Action
You can keep juggling spreadsheets and disconnected tools, or you can switch to a platform that handles the full lifecycle.
The best way to understand the difference is to see it.
Book a demo and we’ll walk through how Userback can replace your current “Franken-stack” and give you a unified view of your product.
Or if you prefer to get your hands dirty, start a free trial. You can import your existing CSV data and have a Feature Portal live in under 15 minutes.
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