Ryan over at 37signals did a great post recently about why they included certain features in a sprint.
“The best part of building ‘as little as possible’ comes after launch. Every feature you skipped or held off on is free open space in the app for later development. Instead of a lot of baggage and maintenance, a bare-minimum release means new possibilities for feedback.”
We believe the same thing. In our last sprint (we call it a “milestone”) we wanted to add a context view to messages in conjectPM. We released a very minimal implementation that just showed messages for the same topic in a chronological order in the same window.
In the past we would have shown that to “early access” customers and improved the functionality based on their feedback. This time we wanted to try a different approach. We wanted to start an interaction with all our users and we wanted to use the application as a medium for that discussion.
That’s why we included a big “under construction” sign asking for feedback.
We really got some very helpful feedback. Of the roughly 400 people who used this feature, over 30 took the time to send us their input.
For a next step we are thinking about making the product even more interactive as a feedback channel. We are thinking of showing mockups of planned screens and measuring where people click because they want to use the functionality (I know, it is still a rough idea, it needs some more thinking 
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How would you gather feedback from your users? Of course we are interested in your feedback . To make that more easy, next week we are going to convert this blog to wordpress, so you can leave comments. Until then, drop me a line at cb at conject . com.
Update: We moved to wordpress – comments are now possible, and welcome.
