Gradle is an open source build system that can automate the building, testing, publishing, deployment and more of software packages or other types of projects such as generated static websites, generated documentation or anything else. The company behind Gradle is Gradleware and they are a Get Satisfaction customer.

I recently discovered how they are presenting their product roadmap, which is directly linked to community topics that are relevant, and I love it. In a nutshell what they are doing is presenting their roadmap as a collection of headlines, a summary, and a status with each discrete item linked to a topic in their community that is also synced with the status of the item.

I love it because it directly connects community activity with the development process and this is not trivial. We have long held that each topic type in our core platform – Question, Problem, Idea, and Praise – has a distinct lifecycle and outcome as well as “touching” a different part of a company; for ideas submitted in the community what the community expects is a proactive stance on the idea, even if it is that it is not being considered, and the product management and engineering organizations are primary constituents within the company.

Of all the topic types the Idea topic is the most challenging in my opinion because the outcome has, potentially, the longest timeline to conclusion. This is not particularly surprising for people who are engineering centric, even if in the same breath they acknowledge that Ideas are high value content in a community because what it does, when implemented holistically, is shorten the product cycle while also delivering a better product as a result.

Gradle has very neatly connected community and product roadmap in a visible way that, at the same time, connects people in the community with the product management process for the product they are advocates of. Gradle’s approach is one that any company can use and I would encourage you to look at it (as we will!).