We are developing and running our growing freistilbox infrastructure with a tiny team. This limited capacity requires from us careful prioritization and task management so that the right things get done at the right time. And let’s be honest: We don’t always succeed in that regard. Several times, we got feedback from customers saying that…

• …they weren’t sure what we were working on (or if we were working at all), or…
• …they knew what we were working on and didn’t agree that it was the most urgent issue at the time.

Both kinds of feedback are warning signs. They mean that either we were spending time and effort on things that didn’t matter nearly as much to our customers as they did to us, or we might even have had the right goals but had failed to communicate our efforts properly.

It’s all a matter of transparency. Transparency is important because it is the precondition for trust. In the case of product development, transparency also helps us to effectively focus our efforts and let our customers know that we’re working on the right issues.

That’s why we decided to make our product roadmap publicly available.

The URL http://roadmap.freistilbox.com takes you to a public Trello board where we publish our current product development. The board is divided into three lists:

• Planned work: Things we’re planning to tackle next
• Work in progress: Things we’re currently working on
• Finished work: What we got done recently

For each new feature, each improvement of an existing component and each known problem, we’ll create a separate card that will go through these three phases. That way, you can see exactly what we’re doing to make freistilbox an even better hosting platform.

We don’t want the roadmap page to be a one-way channel, though. With a free Trello login, you are able — and explicitly invited! — to comment and vote on any card. So, if you have questions or feedback on a specific project, please let us know!

The best ideas for improvements come from our customers and they aren’t always obvious to us. So, if there is a topic close to your heart that you feel we should put on our roadmap, please post a suggestion to our Ideas and Feature Requests forum on our Help Center website!

We’re very excited about this new way of communicating our efforts to improve freistilbox so that you can work more efficiently and sleep more peacefully.

We’d like to thank all our customers for their continued loyalty and their feedback that helps us improve. We’ve always been working hard to justify your trust, and with our freistilbox Roadmap page, you can now see and influence what exactly will be keeping us busy.