Ideas Portal - boon or bust?

Feedback Idea Discussions
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We’ve all been there - we think of an absolute game-changer of a feature request, spend way too much time writing it up, post it to the Ideas Portal, and… nothing. Right? Am I the only one who feels that I’ve submitted dozens of Ideas over the years (I’d love to show receipts, but between changing employers and not being able to see specific users, and the portal changing platforms multiple times, I can’t actually see all of my past submissions) but hasn’t seen a single one actually make it to production?

I did some analysis (very manual, so I had to limit the data a bit).

Of the top 100 Ideas in the portal by popularity (Shipped Ideas are automatically filtered out, but I’m also excluding one in Not Being Considered and 3 in Already Exists states):

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Ideas with the most votes are being left on read with no meaningful updates for extended periods of time - over a year and a half on average with no updates, for the things that the most users have said they would like to see in the products. And the “months open” average? That’s artificially skewed, with 37 of the top 100 Ideas having been created on Feb 11-13, 2021, which I’m guessing was when SailPoint migrated to Aha and ported things over from the previous platform.

There’s 345 Ideas marked as Shipped. Of these, only 20 had over 100 votes, and 280 of them had 25 votes or fewer. Were these Ideas with fewer than 25 votes actually prioritized over more popular Ideas, or are the PMs not really giving too much weight to popularity of Ideas? The Top 100 Ideas have an average of 128 votes, with the highest-rated IIQ Idea having 631 and the highest-rated ISC Idea having 521. Why aren’t these being prioritized? Why aren’t we seeing updates on these? Only 3 of the top 100 Ideas have updates by a SailPoint employee within the past 6 months.

If we’re going to be directed to the Ideas portal by CSMs and SAs, we need to know that those Ideas are actually going to be looked at and considered. If we’re supposed to tell our customers or our internal leaders that we’ve submitted their feature request to the Ideas portal, we need to know that these Ideas are actually going to go somewhere. If we as Ambassadors and Expert Ambassadors are going to tell others in the Developer Community to submit something there, we need to know that we as Ambassadors are actually recognized as power users, influencers, and people who have in-depth knowledge and understanding of the platforms and are best-suited to make recommendations about changes to said platforms.

It’s great that SailPoint takes feedback, it would just be better if we could trust that they’d actually do something with it.

I’ve listed the Top 100 Ideas in a Google Sheet, available here for anyone who’d like to look at the data.

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Thank you for creating this topic @sup3rmark and for substantiate your opinion using clear metrics!

I think that the concept of an idea portal in itself is a good idea. For me it helps to see what functionalities other customers/partners require. And it is also a good place for potential new customers to go to see what SailPoint is currently not supporting (any ideas not labeled as shipped), provided they have access to the idea portal. And it can be a good tool for SailPoint to know what to focus on for development as it shows what current SailPoint customers are struggling with.

We are of course not present at SailPoint meetings when decisions are being made on what functionality will get priority, so what I am saying could be a bit speculative, but I can imagine that the following (incomplete list of) things play a role when determining what will be developed first:

  1. Is the topic “sexy” enough to be presented on Navigate? Every year, new announcements are made to show SailPoint is still market-leader in IGA. Would a topic like “We now have read only admin access” or “You can now out of the box delete source accounts on a lifecycle state change” be topics that would be considered presentable, or would this only trigger a “wait, this wasn’t possible yet?” reaction from potential new customers or perhaps shareholders? Perhaps this is why we are getting more ideas like AI entitlement description generation (where I would argue that responsibility of description generation of these foreign objects should occur at the application level itself instead of on an IGA tool)
  2. Does the idea involve refactoring ISC? Perhaps it is more easy to create new functionality (an AI to suggest account correlation) instead of fixing current functionality (removing the default account correlation step that can’t be removed and leads to undesired correlation). If ideas are to fix a core issue with ISC, I can imagine it is quite difficult to solve it while tenants are constantly used. Changing bad behavior in a transform is difficult, if some customers have already build workarounds on this behavior and now expect this behavior to exists to achieve the desired outcome. Even though it requires more time, these ideas should in my opinion still be addressed.
  3. Different product teams do different things. If the access request center team is very busy filling an important functionality gap, they can’t work on another popular topic, and the NERM team would not be able to work on this, because their core topic would be to focus on NERM, meaning they might look at the highest voted NERM idea, even though this has way fewer votes than the access request related ideas. One could of course argue that the access request center team should then get more team members to be able to meet the customers requirements on this core IGA topic.
  4. What is on the wish list of new customers? I can imagine new customers looking for an IGA tool based on a wish list. It might therefore contain bold wishes, but might miss more obvious granular functionality. If you hear a tool supports account deletion and lifecycle state management, you might assume you can trigger account deletion based on a lifecycle state change and therefore not have something specific like this on the wishlist. Similar to a wishlist saying “requesters of access can see the current status of the request” which does not contain “They should be able to see the members of the governance group that approves the access.”. If these wishlists are not detailed enough, it might only appear on the radar when they are already a customer. To prevent disappointment, it would be good to also focus on these, which can be covered in the idea portal.

I think that the idea portal can be improved by doing the following things:

  1. Make a decision on its anonymity stance and be consistent. If I create an idea or comment on one, I am marked as a guest for other customers/partners. SailPoint employees can see my name and we can see theirs. But I notice that not all SailPoint employees are aware of this semi-anonymity, causing them to respond to messages by addressing me by name. I would suggest to either drop the whole anonymity clause for new ideas/comments (after proper communication) or to ensure that SailPoint employees are trained on not revealing this anonymous data while replying.
  2. If SailPoint uses this idea portal to track needs of the customers, they should not interfere it by promoting certain ideas (pinning them in the idea portal or even pushing them in the production tenant UI to org admins). To me this would appear more as a “We know we want to build this already, now lets get people to vote for it such that we can show we actively listen to customers needs”. And whether intended like this or not, an idea 50% of the customers agree with, that is found by only 100 people will get around 50 votes. An idea 5% of the customers agree with, that is found by 10000 people, will get around 500 votes. So a quite desired idea with less visibility will get way less votes compared to barely desired ideas with huge visibility. So SailPoint should not give some ideas more visibility over others if they want to get an honest overview.
  3. Structured interaction on ideas with 100+ ideas. What if SailPoint creates a policy saying that every X days (90?) SailPoint must respond on the ideas with 100+ votes that have not been shipped yet, explaining where they are the idea. Are they still in the research phase? Perhaps customers want to join the in discovery sessions and offer input. Are they stuck on something like a dependency on the creation of an API by another team? For example if they say they can’t do read-only admin access yet as the UI is not ready yet, perhaps customers could respond that for now they are fine with the create/edit/delete buttons still being there initially, but that they will just result in error messages. Just because it would help customers to get the core of the functionality available earlier. And even if this back and forth will not lead to faster completion time, it might result in more understanding on the customer side on why it is taking longer than expected.
  4. Perhaps a distinction can be made on ideas for real new functionality (things like owner certification, sunrise access requests and not trying to provision a child entitlement (1K invoice approval limit) if a parent entitlement (10K invoice approval limit) is already owned), ideas for very small enhancements (supporting filtering on name contains in SOD policies, supporting pagination for launchers, let v2026 API’s refer to owners in a constant format). Perhaps smaller quicker enhancements can be picked up with fewer votes?
  5. When I report a bug to SailPoint Support, I often hear it is working as designed and to create an idea instead. For example If an access request approver sees a matrix of approval items, and then double clicks on approve on one request item, they accidentally approved two items as the second request item quickly took the place of the first request item. This is not a type of bug that creates a null pointer exception, but still a critical flaw in the design that should be resolved sooner rather than only if enough people vote for it. I think the idea portal should focus on new functionality and enhancing current functionality, not on fixing broken things.
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Idea portal is actually a good platform to understand more creative and different perspectives thoughts. We can say let us allow more reach to audience/professionals so that decision comes fast based on voting under experts monitoring.

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In theory, yes. But in reality?

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@angelo_mekenkamp (or should I say, Guest :stuck_out_tongue: ), you and I are on the same page as usual! I agree with all of the points you made. I especially like the “structured interaction on ideas with 100+” votes suggestion. This could help avoid the optics of suggestions going stale, as long as those interactions are meaningful updates on status. I also agree that “feature requests” could be differentiated from “enhancements.”

I think that there should be targets for SailPoint not just for updates, but to commit to a certain number of user-proposed enhancements and feature requests per quarter or per year.

While not particularly feasible, it would also be nice for Ambassadors and Expert Ambassadors to have more voting power than other customers. Maybe give Ambassadors two votes and Expert Ambassadors 3 votes per Idea, in recognition of our involvement in the community and expertise/experience. Maybe Certifications through SailPoint University could merit additional votes, as well.

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Haha, let’s then focus on where we (currently) disagree then @sup3rmark :wink:

I am not enthusiastic on the idea of giving (expert) ambassadors more voting power compared to others. We already experience people “cheating” to get quick ambassador points for the other benefits and this suggestion might incentivize this even more. I do think (expert) ambassadors can (or should) have influence on the roadmap of SailPoint by providing clear arguments in the forum on why certain ideas are important, which will result in more votes by convincing other customers/partners. Also we can join in discovery sessions to explain our position on an idea, current or future hurdles, and how it can lead to a successful implementation.

I am also not enthusiastic of demanding passing certain metrics when it comes to ideas. SailPoint can and should focus on improving their products without such target demands. They could (and should) use metrics of the idea portal in making their decisions, but by introducing mandatory targets, they might focus more on meeting those goals (rushing implementing ideas?) rather than focusing on improving the product.

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Good points, thank you!

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It would be great if someone from SailPoint could chime in here…

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