Today, we’re doing something new called Founder Chat. Every week, we’ll ask either @bram, our co-founder and CEO, or @omaes72, our co-founder and CRO a question about how we do certain things in Baserow, and why. Join the conversation and ask follow-up questions in the comments!
A new feature idea can have different origins, this could be something we come up with internally, a request in the community, an issue that’s created on GitLab, or when speaking to users. Luckily, most of the requests already match our plans. This might be because we’re an alternative to Airtable, and we’re building similar features.
Our goal is to become the open platform to create scalable databases, applications and workflows without coding. If a feature request does not align with that goal, then it will not make it on the roadmap. Although, it’s not always as straightforward as that. A user might request something like “I’m using Baserow to do my bookkeeping and I need it to generate invoices.” Generating invoices does not match our goal, but if we implement a customizable PDF generator, then it’s more in line with our goal, and it can be used to generate an invoice.
Before creating the 2023 roadmap, I manually went through all the 500+ open issues as a refresher, to find common requests, remove duplicates, close already implemented ones, and start the discussion on some of them. Even though this is a lot of work, it has proven to be useful.
There isn’t an exact science in figuring out what goes on the roadmap. We hear many great ideas, but you also need to say “no” sometimes. We have a good idea what the product should look like in a couple of years, and we try to stick with that, instead of becoming a jack of all trades.
to you.