Our Ideas Philosophy

💡 The philosophy

Community, not audience

You, the Tana community, are an invaluable part in helping us build and improve Tana. We value every bit of feedback we receive. We believe that any time you spend sharing ideas and feedback about Tana with us is an effort to improve it, and we truly appreciate it.

We want problem requests, not feature requests

Feature requests are super common in software development. Our process instead has a particular emphasis on problems.

The most reliable way we have found to improve Tana, as well as unlock new things Tana can do, is to focus on the detail of ideas as problems. Problems help us see surprising connections and helps us apply Tana's unique technical structure to solve them.

Great solutions come from seeing a problem in a new or different way, and it's why we get so much value out of users explaining the reasoning of their ideas as much as the idea itself. Why a particular feature would be useful, what is the mission critical problem it solve help us see more paths towards solutions. Even if an idea is common, an unusual description of the problem can lead to breakthroughs.

We have built this into our process. We want problems to have a prominent role in how we ask for new ideas from the community.

The path from problem to idea to feature is complex

A great idea travels a difficult path in the design process at Tana. It's assessed against a range of criteria such as technical feasibility, resources and time of the team, alignment with vision for Tana, potential impact for users.

This process means that even great ideas for how to improve Tana may end with no, or not right now, or look so different by the end of this process that it's hard to see the idea that they started as.

Your ideas have a larger range of possible outcomes than yes or no, and they will influence Tana in ways that sometimes aren't obvious.

Some features won't be built anytime soon, or at all

We are an opinionated team who are trying to reinvent how humans, teams, and computers work together. We are early on our path, but have strong views and are pushing hard towards making them a reality.

Some ideas don't fit. We will try to communicate clearly why a particular feature is not in our thinking, and why we select the paths we do.

Strong opinions, quarterly held

We work in 3 month quarters. Each quarter has a specific objective set by the Tana founders and leadership team, driven by feedback, data, and our teams collective thinking in our Tana workspace.

This objective converts into projects across the entire team, and we spend the next three months trying complete those projects documenting all our exploration out outcomes in Tana.

At the end of the quarter, we start the process again, with an updated focus and set of objectives driven by feedback and our learning.

✅ The Process

Submitting ideas

1. Go to ideas.tana.inc. To submit, vote and comment, and log in via google (more options coming soon)
2. You can submit requests by selecting 'Submit an Idea'.
3. Submitting an idea is built around five steps:
   1. Idea title (describe your idea in one sentence)
   2. Feature category (what category best describes the idea you are submitting)
   3. Explain the problem as you see it (what is the problem that is at the heart of your idea)
   4. Why is this a problem for you? (This is a push from us to see if can get more insights into motives, and behaviours)
   5. Suggest a solution (Describe a way to solve the problem)

Browsing and voting

You can browse other ideas, and filter by things such as category, popularity and recently submitted.

You can comment on other ideas, giving extra context to the problem or solution.

You can upvote other ideas. We are experimenting with limited votes per user. We are giving each user 2 votes per month (6 per quarter). The goal of the limit is to help us see clearer prioritization with different ideas.

Review submissions

Your submission will be available for other community members to vote and comment on.

The team will review submissions and categorise them. We will do this regularly but without a dedicated schedule.

We will also let you know if we need more information for any specific request, by tagging it with the category 'needs more information'.

Connection to the team

The Tana team work in Tana, and every idea we decide to tackle is sent to the Tana team workspace, and the status gets changed to 'transferred to team workspace'.

If the request has been transferred into the Tana Team Workspace, it means that it's actively in the design conversations, but it doesn't mean we will necessarily release it. The design process is hard, see our Idea Philosophy for more information.

Communicating ongoing status

We will explore new ways to communicate our thinking on submitted requests. To start we are going to have a quarterly communication, where the team review and discuss particular ideas. The format for this will either be live event, or an AMA style with the product team.

Expectations

We are early stages in this process and we will continue to iterate to find better ways to use community ideas, and will make changes as we go. We value all effort applied to making Tana better, and we are excited to explore with you all.