Hornbill Roadmap
Hornbill encompasses a complex ecosystem involving various components, including the core platform, integration libraries for cloud and IT operations, and a range of business applications available in the Hornbill App Store. The platform, as well as each of these application are developed by dedicated teams, ensuring the right subject matter expertise is applied to each application. This decentralized approach to development ensures that each component can evolve independently.
Creating a unified roadmap for the entire Hornbill ecosystem would be impractical. Such a document would amalgamate the development timelines and updates of the platform itself, the cloud and IT operational integration libraries, the IT Operations Management (ITOM) integrations, the ITOM product suite, and the individual applications offered in the App Store. Given the distinct development cycles, team responsibilities, and the detailed nature of updates each component undergoes, a single roadmap would become overly complex and challenging to navigate for all stakeholders.
To address this complexity, Hornbill has adopted a more granular approach to its roadmap publications. By organizing the roadmaps by product, Hornbill ensures that information is accessible and understandable, with each product/application roadmap having specific focus. Customers can easily find specific roadmaps relevant to their interests or usage within the ecosystem. This organization aids in setting clear expectations regarding new features, updates, and enhancements for each component/application of the Hornbill platform.
Customers can access these published roadmaps within the Hornbill platform itself, in the Hornbill Solution Center. Hornbill offers this transparency to foster a deeper understanding of our commitment to innovation and customer support, ensuring users can anticipate changes and plan accordingly.
To access the roadmaps:
- Open Configuration using the cog at the bottom of the left-hand menu bar (or with CTRL+SHIFT+S on your keyboard).
- Click the down arrow next to My Personal Settings, then select Hornbill Solution Center.
- Scroll down and click Roadmap Library.
Roadmaps
Each roadmap is presented as a visual Kanban-inspired board organized into columns containing features. Each column represents a different stage of development of the feature.
Incoming:
Items in this lane mean the enhancement/change has been fully understood (by Hornbill dev teams), has been documented, and is ready for inclusion in active development. But is not yet under active development, in effect these items are the pipeline of changes for the development teams. It takes quite a lot of effort around any feature request before it is ready to be added to the roadmap (see Getting Enhancements Added to a Hornbill Roadmap below). There is no specific time associated to when an item in this lane will be moved to the 90-Day Commit lane, and is dependant on a large number of factors discussed in the section Roadmap Inclusion Policy below.
90-Day Commit:
Any item in this lane means the item is in the Hornbill development teams planning window. As well as scheduling, development team discussions, more detailed design specifications and even prototypes are all things that happen in these 90 days. However, as the title of this lane suggests, we are committing to getting actual development work underway within 90-days of the item entering this lane.
In Progress:
Items in this lane are under active development, that means one or more developers is working on code, integration, testing and iterative cycles of the same. This generally means items here, are likely on beta instances, and are in some form or another in the product (pre-customer release) and under active development. Sometimes it is possible for items to remain in this lane while we make the feature available to customers in “Preview”. Features in preview generally means, a feature has been developed and is made generally available for customers to try out, typically by enabling through a feature flag/option/preview button. For some changes, especially those that involve significant UI changes that will likely impact (we always hope for the better of course) customers day-to-day use and/or workflows, we like to provide early access, to solicit feedback and suggestions that may help improve the change before we finally commit to production.
Completed:
Items in this lane means the work has been completed by development and is now in the product. Items are kept in this lane for 90-days after completion, after which they drop out of the lane automatically. You should always remember that, depending on the roadmap you are looking at, items in this lane shown as complete may have other dependencies, or require other applications or components to surface this capability. For example, we may implement a feature in the Hornbill ESP Platform that enables an application to implement something, for example, we may add a feature to Email templates editor, but for you to see this feature, another application may also need to make changes. we do not include “internal” items on customer facing roadmaps in order to keep customer-facing roadmaps meaningful, but its sometimes unavoidable that these things can bleed through from time to time.
Roadmap timelines for feature development
After asking for a roadmap, the next question is almost always “When will I get the things I asked for?” As is the case for any software company, there is no simple answer to that question. The official position is that we never apply — and we advise our customers NOT to expect — any service-level commitments on feature/enhancement requests. Of course, with our Customer First value held close to our hearts, we do our best to include as much, and develop as quickly, as we can. Hornbill is a broadly scoped solution, with complex and deep capabilities serving a wide range of our collective customer’s needs.
Technology and security landscapes are moving targets that we have to continuously adapt to. We have strategic, commercial, and competitive imperatives that we must meet, security posture evolution, and continuous improvements in terms of reliability and scalability. As well as all of those considerations, we also focus on delivering as much as we can to support individual customer needs.
Times between releases can be anything from days to months, depending on what we are doing, although we aim to keep release cycles for each product and application as small as possible. Once a week is a typical release cadence we prefer. So, the answer to the question, how long does it take to get my feature in the product is really “as soon as we can, given all of our other priorities”. Ultimately, if you have a business-critical need for something that is not in the product, then you should speak to us and we might be able to help, but in all honestly, we do not allow individual customer needs re-prioritize our roadmaps because it would be irresponsible and unfair on other customers to do so. So we are likely to respond with something along the lines of “in that case, perhaps Hornbill is not fit for purpose for your needs at this time”.
Roadmap Inclusion Policy
Purpose
This Roadmap Inclusion Policy outlines the criteria, processes, and guidelines for including features, enhancements, and significant bug fixes in our product roadmaps. Our aim is to ensure a transparent, collaborative, and strategic approach to product development that aligns with our company’s vision, customer needs, and market trends.
Scope
This policy applies to all products and services developed and maintained by our company. It covers the inclusion of new features, enhancements to existing features, and significant bug fixes in the product roadmaps.
Criteria for inclusion
- Strategic alignment. The proposed item must align with the overall strategic goals of the company and the product’s vision.
- Customer value/impact. The item should have a demonstrable impact on improving customers’ general satisfaction, solving customers’ pain points, or delivering value, determined in the context of customers collectively, not individually.
- Non-prescriptive. The item should not prescribe a specific function but should instead be expressed as a product enhancement/addition in terms of business value.
- Market trends. Consideration is given to emerging market trends and technologies that could enhance the value we deliver to our customers and give us a competitive edge.
- Feasibility. We will assess the technical, resource, and time feasibility of implementing the proposed item in the context of the overall solution.
- Regulatory and compliance needs. We will ensure the product complies with relevant laws, regulations, and standards required by our customers as well as our own quality standards.
- Security and privacy. We will consider enhancements that improve the security and privacy posture of our product.
Process for inclusion
- Starting with a discussion. One of the most important steps to adding an item to our roadmap is getting to the point of complete understanding of the requirement. ensuring that requirement is fully aligned with our roadmap, general direction, and Criteria for Inclusion. Internally originated items that are included in the roadmap for development would come out of numerous internal conversations, meetings, working groups as well as furthering our strategic and maturity needs. For external enhancement requests, we have a very specific process we follow… please see Asking for enhancements to be included in the Hornbill Roadmap
- Review and prioritization. The Product Management team will review submissions based on the above criteria. Items will be prioritized based on strategic importance, customer impact, and resource availability.
- Stakeholder feedback. Shortlisted items will be shared with relevant stakeholders for feedback and further validation.
- Approval and scheduling. The Product Steering Committee will make final decisions on the inclusion and scheduling of roadmap items.
- Communication. Approved roadmap items will be communicated to all stakeholders, including teams and customers, through appropriate channels, adding these items where needed to the Incoming lane in the appropriate roadmap.
Updating Hornbill roadmaps
Roadmaps are dynamic documents that will be reviewed and updated regularly to reflect progress, changing priorities, and new insights. You can view our published roadmaps at any time to see the latest development activity that applies.
Feedback and suggestions
We encourage feedback and suggestions from all stakeholders to continuously improve our roadmap planning and execution process. Internal stakeholders will always use our internal workspaces, while customers should always use our community forums to submit feedback, suggestions, ideas, and questions about product enhancements.
Governance
This policy is governed by the Product Management team and is subject to periodic review and updates to ensure it remains relevant and effective in guiding our roadmap planning and development processes.
Requesting enhancements or features for inclusion in the Hornbill roadmaps
We are always excited to hear about product enhancements or suggestions. The collective wisdom of our customers is an important source of knowledge, ideas, and experience. To provide the most value to the widest possible audience, we have to carefully manage enhancement and feature requests, ensuring we give each request consideration, not only on its own merit, but in the context of the whole product, its strategic roadmap, and our customer community.
Every customer-originated enhancement or feature request starts with a discussion. Sometimes, simple enhancement requests are self-evident; for example, a request like “would it be possible to add a keyboard shortcut to invoke the print command” would hardly require a discussion at all. However, in practice, enhancement requests are rarely that straightforward and tend to be nuanced in some way. Each customer’s use of Hornbill is different, because each customer’s organization has unique ways of working and using Hornbill to support that work. Hornbill’s products are very customizable, so for the most part, tailoring can be done by a customer to meet their specific needs without product changes being required.
For the avoidance of any doubt, any discussion that leads to an enhancement request would lead to a clear and well documented (in the discussion) definition of what the requirement is, almost certainly summarized by one of Hornbill’s product teams clarifying what has been understood as the requirement. This is what would constitute a discussion with a clear outcome that leads to a product enhancement request.
It might be that a particular part of our solution is not customizable at all, or not customizable enough to meet a specific need. Or it might be that there is a function that does not even exist, which could be added to make the product more useful/valuable to a customer to help a specific use case. In our experience, customers will generally (and rightly) think about solving problems or improving efficiency/workflows in the context of their own organization, and more often than not, what makes sense in one context, does not always make sense in another context.
In order for us to clearly understand what is being asked for, this often means getting a more thorough understanding of how a customer’s specific scenario applies to the request, and then, once we understand that requirement fully, and the value such a change would add, Hornbill’s product teams then need to consider that change in the context of our strategic roadmap, overall use case, and the generally understood landscape of how our product is used more widely by our customers.
When asking for a product enhancement, it’s important not to be prescriptive in your request, but rather, help us understand the business use case. For example, if you ask for a widget X or function Y, that may well be meaningful and obvious to your own use case and meet a specific need you have, but we will likely not understand that more broadly, and so it’s unlikely we can progress that request into an accepted feature request. We will always seek to understand the business value, so if the business requirement (i.e. what you are trying to achieve and what business outcome you expect from the product change) is not apparent in the foundation of what you are asking for, then it is difficult to assess the request against our Criteria For inclusion and therefore may not be answered.
When asking for an enhancement, please make sure you first express the enhancement in terms of business need and business outcome. You can also include a suggestion as to specifically what you might change to achieve that. Doing this helps us better understand the need, and opens the possibility that we might be able to suggest an alternative or even better way to achieve the same outcome.
How we manage feature requests received from customers or partners
Apart from exceptional circumstances where it would be inappropriate to do so (e.g. if there are security concerns or real commercial sensitivity for a specific organization), we ONLY accept feature requests via our community forums. That is, if you would like to see a change to the product, the starting point is to raise it on the forums. It is not uncommon for a customer to ask their account exec for enhancements, but we always ask that the question be posed in the forums. This is because we do not track internal requests for features that have not been committed to a roadmap. In fact, we purposefully do not just log one-liner enhancement requests, because doing so creates a huge list of requests that nobody understands, and that essentially ends up as a big undeliverable backlog.
Instead, we take each and every enhancement request as a discussion. This affords us a number of things.
- Our forums are connected to our internal workspaces. If you ask a question on, for example, the Hornbill ESP Platform forum, your post will be relayed to an internal Hornbill workspace and all developers, product stakeholders, Support, consultants, and others will see the question you have asked.
- With your question posted on the forums, we now have a direct communication channel between you and our internal product folks, as well as anyone in Hornbill that needs clarification or has suggestions or other feedback.
- ith your question posted on the forums, all other customers who have interest in what you are asking about will also see your question. They may have other ideas or contributions, or they may even offer support for the thing you are asking for.
- Because we relay these questions into our internal workspaces, there is a very good chance this will trigger some internal conversations, and will almost always trigger some kind of response back on the forum. This could be a request for more information, or a better understanding of what is being asked for. It might include one or more suggestions as to how you can achieve the outcome you want in an alternative way, or it could even be a flat No, we would not add that.
Sometimes though, you should keep in mind that you may not get any response from Hornbill. We do not offer SLA commitments on enhancement requests. But despite that, if you feel something should be added to the product, you should ask anyway. Even if you do not see a response, you are raising awareness of your requirement or suggestion, and that will be seen by our engineers and product teams. Sometimes ideas and suggestions are really good, but the timing for inclusion is off. It can be as simple as that.
We will always do our best to respond to every request, but we are not perfect, and things can get missed. When this happens, please feel free to bump it every now and then if you have not seen any response in a couple of weeks or more.
Things you can do to improve the chances of getting your feature request included
There are things you can do to improve the chances of getting a response, and even get your requested feature included in the product.
Timing. For example, if we are doing a lot of, say, email-related changes, and you ask for something email-related, the email system is currently top-of-mind with the developers, so your ask might naturally just drop into that.
Specificity. The more specific you are, and the easier your request is to get into the head space of the product people/developers at Hornbill, the more likely your request will make it through. We are all busy people, and as we mentioned before, it can be a lot of work/time mentally to translate a requirement for a customer-specific scenario into a viable piece of code. So if the nature of your ask is very specific and self-evident, then it’s likely to be easily understood by our developers. When the ask does not need translating by a business analyst, so long as it meets the other criteria in our Criteria for inclusion then this is likely to be included.
Generalized. The more generalized the function — the more it will deliver against the Customer Value/Impact for customers in general — the higher the likelihood for inclusion. Conversely, if your requirement is highly specific to your organization, but you can meet that need by asking for a more generalized customization capability that would help your specific need, and if that more generalized customization capability would be generally useful to customers overall, then that would help move things forward.
Strategic alignment. We are generally moving toward our strategic product goals, primarily driven by the competitive landscape within which we operate and the aspirations we have in the marketplace. Anything you ask for that is aligned with those goals is more likely to make it into the product.
Work with us. At the heart of our mission is a simple truth: our success is intertwined with yours. When it comes to product improvements, we are committed to understanding your needs deeply and accurately, ensuring that any product updates or enhancements we consider are perfectly aligned with what you require and our products’ strategic goals. We believe in the power of collaboration; your insights into your business challenges are invaluable to us. After all, you’re the experts in your field, and by sharing your expertise, you help us refine and improve our solutions. We think of enhancement requests as a partnership, and we invite you to join us in a collaborative process. The better we understand your needs — through clear communication and engagement — the more effectively we can work together toward implementing solutions that truly meet your requirements. Our engineering and product teams are ready to consider any requirements, but this journey requires mutual effort and understanding of our process. Remember, every step we take toward enhancing our product is driven by a desire to add more value to your business. We’re not just looking for feedback; we’re seeking to learn from your experience, and to innovate and evolve in ways that support your success. Engaging with us, sharing your insights, and being open to the collaborative process not only helps us meet your needs more effectively, but also ensures that we continue to deliver solutions that empower you and your business. Let’s work together to create something exceptional.
FAQs
I have asked for something to be added to the product on the forum and I have not had any response from Hornbill.
We do not commit to any specific service-level agreements for product enhancement requests. Please know that even if you do not get a response, by asking the question you will have raised awareness of your requirement internally at Hornbill. Try to follow the guidance above to improve the likelihood of getting a response and/or getting your ask included. If your issue remains unanswered and you feel it is business critical, then please talk to your account manager; we may need to recognize that Hornbill is not able to meet your specific business needs at this time.
Why is there no movement in the roadmap items?
The latest roadmap for respective products is distributed to your instance each time the product or application is released to the ‘live’ stream. It is possible for the delivery of features to be one release out of sync, simply to do with a combination of timing and general roadmap content management. The roadmap provides insight as to what’s coming, and what’s already been delivered. The timestamps on the card indicate the date/time the card makes it into its current lane.
I noticed that a card not seen before appeared in the Complete column.
This can happen when a request doesn’t start on the left-most lane. It is common that, as we are developing our strategic roadmap or addressing usability issues, security issues, or other unplanned changes, that encounter items that we consider “roadmap noteworthy”. In such cases, we will add a card to the roadmap, implement it, and move it to Complete before the next release of that product/application. What want all “roadmap noteworthy” changes to make it into the Complete column so you can see what has been delivered.
As a significant Hornbill client, we’ve encountered a critical business need that isn’t currently addressed by Hornbill. Is it possible to adapt the product to meet this requirement?
At Hornbill, we value feedback and the needs of all our customers, regardless of size. We strive to balance individual requests with the overall strategic direction and benefit to our entire customer base. While we carefully consider every request, including those from our larger clients, our commitment is to ensure that any modifications or enhancements we make to our product are in the best interest of all our users. We’re always keen to explore how we can meet your business-critical needs and invite you to share your requirements with us. Together, we can discuss potential solutions or workarounds that align with our product roadmap and serve the wider Hornbill community.
If our organization is open to funding specific development of product features, can Hornbill accommodate tailored development of product features to meet our specific/urgent needs?
At Hornbill, we’re dedicated to meeting our customers’ needs and are open to discussions about how we can support your unique business requirements. While we primarily focus on delivering features that benefit all our customers and align with our strategic roadmap, we do offer bespoke development and consulting services. These services are designed to address your specific needs either directly through Hornbill or via our extensive partner network. Our aim is to find the best solution that aligns with your goals without deviating from our core product strategy. In cases where bespoke development can contribute to the broader utility and customizability of our platform, we might integrate such enhancements into our product. This approach ensures that we continue to evolve Hornbill in a way that benefits all users while addressing specific customer needs through tailored solutions.
I’m quite busy and don’t have the time to participate in the Hornbill user community. Is it possible to contact my Hornbill account manager to submit a feature request instead?
We understand that your time is valuable, and we aim to make our support and feature request processes as efficient as possible. For feature requests, we encourage using the Hornbill Forums. This approach ensures that your ideas are openly discussed and thoroughly evaluated by both the community and our product teams. Direct requests to account managers or through support tickets are redirected to the forums to ensure transparency and to foster community engagement. This method helps us in gathering comprehensive details and understanding the context of each request accurately. We’ve found that this collaborative approach significantly enhances our ability to make informed decisions about product development. For guidance on effectively submitting a feature request and increasing its chances for inclusion, please refer to our Work with us section. Our goal is to maintain a clear and open channel of communication with our users, ensuring that every suggestion is considered with the attention it deserves.
Why do roadmap items in the Complete column not show which release each item is associated with?
Our roadmap is designed to showcase the progress of engineering tasks, both ongoing and completed. Due to the nature of our release process, which is carefully structured through a four-stage pipeline, it’s challenging to assign a fixed release number to each completed item immediately. This is because any given build in our pipeline might be delayed or revised if it encounters testing or validation issues. Such delays can vary, affecting when a completed item is officially released. To find out precisely which features or updates have been included in a specific build or version, the best resource is our product release notes. These notes (also available in our Solution Center) are meticulously updated to include details on the features, changes, and fixes in each build. They serve as a comprehensive guide to what’s new and improved in every version of our product, ensuring you have the most accurate and up-to-date information. We understand how important it is for you to stay informed about the latest developments and enhancements to our product. That’s why we’re committed to providing clear, detailed release notes alongside our roadmap, helping you navigate and make the most of our evolving solutions.