Export the email addresses of everyone who requested a feature

For years, product managers have struggled to close the loop by updating users about the features they've requested.

It's not that it was impossible to do, but the complexity of manually keeping track of who needs what (and each feature's status) in spreadsheets, Jira, Zendesk, Intercom, or Salesforce was prohibitive.

And yet, there's nothing like being able to send a customer a personalized message about a feature you've just shipped and how it will solve a need they have! 💌

In this article:

• When you might notify users
• Export emails of all who've requested a feature

When you might notify users

You may decide to notify users at various points in time:

• When a feature they care about is planned.
• When you're seeking to conduct problem interviews to arrive at a better understanding of the underlying need behind a feature request they've sent you.
• When you're seeking to test solution ideas by getting feedback on mockups, a prototype, or a beta version of a feature.
• When you begin working on a feature and want to heighten anticipation of its imminent launch.
• When a new feature is now available to use.

Two ways to notify users

There are two ways to notify users of feature updates:

• If the feature is added to a Portal, you can apply updates to the card, which can also be emailed to all who requested the feature. Learn more
• If the feature is not added to a Portal, you can follow the steps below.

Export emails of all who've requested a feature

In Productboard, you can export all users' emails associated with a feature.

Users may either be associated with a feature if an insight of theirs was highlighted and linked to that feature, if you've manually scored that feature's importance to the user using User columns, or if the user voted on that feature's Portal card.

Regardless, you'll see all such users in a feature's details under Insights. This is the same place you'll find the export email icon:

Notify users by email

By dropping these emails into your email client or marketing automation tool of choice, you can update the feature's progress. (Remember to ask for feedback to inform future iterations and enhancements!)

Notifying users via Intercom

Do you use Intercom to send in-app or email communications to customers?

Follow the steps below to quickly tag (in Intercom) all users who requested a particular feature. Then use audience logic to target those users in a manual message.

Steps

1. In Productboard, export all emails requesting a given feature (see above).
2. In the CSV export, add a new Tag column.
3. Apply the name of a tag as the value for all rows beneath this column. (e.g., requested-advanced-filtering)
4. In Intercom, navigate to Platform > People. Under More, select Import.
5. Import your modified CSV: Help Intercom identify the column representing each user's email. This is the unique identifier Intercom uses to identify that these are existing Intercom users whose records should be updated. Make sure Intercom includes your Tag column in the import. The other fields in the CSV can be ignored for now.
6. Complete the import, create a new Intercom message, and update the audience logic to include all tagged users.
   

   Note: depending on the number of users you're "importing", it may take several minutes for all their records to be updated in Intercom.

See also

• Close the feedback loop with Portal card updates