The new Collaborative Roadmap and transparency

Question

We're a couple of weeks into the Roadmap now, and while I was hoping it would be an improvement over the former iteration, I'm starting to have doubts.

The Old Ideas forum:

* It felt like a black hole where ideas would go to die.
* But, you could at least search for and view discussion on various great ideas that simply lingered there untouched by Instructure for years. This let you connect with peers which could sometimes lead to resolutions via workarounds.

The New Roadmap:

* Now it feels like it really is a black hole for ideas, where light and time can't escape.
* You can't see anything anyone else proposes and they can't see what you propose. 
* This means there's no discussion about various thoughts people have. We can't collaborate with each other, so it doesn't feel very collaborative.
* There's no indicator that someone at instructure has even looked at or considered your idea.
* The only ideas we get to see are the ones that are "moving forward" on the roadmap that allow us to vote. We can't even see any discussion from other users on these few approved ideas.

Are we still at the point where the roadmap process can be changed? This feels like a step backward (which felt really hard to do) from the previous iteration. What is going to end up happening is that people will continue to post ideas in the forum where actual discussion can take place anyway.

Back in the day I participated on a text LP mud — basically an old multi player text game. The game devs provided the players with a channel where the players could complain about things in the game, hopefully to get fixed.

Amusingly, we later found out that the channel was visible only to players, it was hidden to the game developers intentionally, so the player complaints basically went into the void. (At least other players could see the complaints and they could discuss them amongst themselves)

Now, I'm absolutely not saying that this is happening here, but it's not a great sign that I thought of this while mulling over the new roadmap.

leward · Answer

@Todd_E

I totally agree as did most of the participants in the EAP for the collaborative roadmap.  Below is my response to the Blog post about the collaborative roadmap, which received a similar response from @Ruth McFarland.

Somehow other vendors manage to maintain a legitimate customer ideas process with voting.  It seems to me that between AI and an engaged community that would undoubtedly be willing to assist with triaging new requests, there should be a more transparent solution that wouldn't overtax Instructure staff.

As a long-time customer, active Community member, and Co-Labs EAP participant, I want to respectfully share some concerns regarding the new 'Collaborative' Roadmap.

While the new interface is polished, the decision to make user contributions private—visible only to Instructure staff—feels like a significant step away from the transparency that was the hallmark of Instructure when we adopted Canvas in 2014. By making ideas private until the 'Under Consideration' stage, Instructure loses the immense value of peer collaboration. In the previous 'Ideas' model, the community could refine, troubleshoot, and add institutional context to a concept before it reached your product teams.

In my experience with recent EAPs, customer engagement often happens too late in the cycle. This frequently results in features that institutions are hesitant to enable because they don't quite hit the mark or fail to account for complex, real-world workflows.

Transparency isn't just about sharing a roadmap; it’s about being listening to your customers individually and collectively and demonstrating the connection between our needs and your development plans. I worry that moving toward a 'black box' submission process will only increase the gap between feature design and institutional needs. I’d love to see a return to a model where we can support and elaborate on each other's ideas from the start.

mae_case · Answer

You are not alone. I really hoped this new Collab site would be like, or at least close to Anthology's "Idea Exchange", which does literally everything you describe: anyone could submit ideas, vote on other ideas; see statuses and reasons why something was/was not considered; if there were multiple posts for the same ideas or features on a product, they would then be linked together by the devs. People could comment directly on ideas with their thoughts/feedback and track their bookmarked/"favorite" ideas through the whole process. The best part was that the Anthology team would reply directly to these ideas - and believe me, there were hundreds every day - regarding their status and reasoning; even ask some follow-up questions to take back to their team.

It CAN be done.

Ruth McFarland · Answer

@Todd_E Thank you for sharing this and for being part of the community for 8 years. I can understand why this change feels like a step back from the peer-to-peer connection you valued.

As our customer base has grown, the previous process hasn't scaled well; too much valuable feedback was getting lost in long threads. With the new Collaborative Roadmap, we’re intentionally evolving to support customer collaboration with our product team at scale. This way, your feedback is more directly connected to the people building Canvas and can be tracked, prioritized, and acted on more effectively.

That said, peer-to-peer collaboration is still a core part of the Community, and we encourage ongoing discussion and idea-sharing in the forums. We’ll also be publishing a quarterly roadmap recap to share the feedback themes we’re hearing and how they’re shaping our direction. Here's a link to the first one and going forward, you can expect more direct recaps of what was shared and submitted through the portals.

Really appreciate you sticking with us and continuing to share your perspective.