Coda needs to communicate better about its roadmap

Suggestion Box
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This coming from a place of love, but there’s no two ways about it:

Coda is failing at communicating effectively with us about its roadmap for the product, what features are being worked on, and what are its priorities.

I appreciate that the company has a ‘shipping’ culture, and I do love seeing “[News from Coda] Launched:” in my inbox as much as the next guy, but:

  • “Suggestion Box” section of the community is broken: Great ideas get thrown in, but often posts are well-intentionally duplicated because of slightly different wording. Things have accumulated over the years, and there is usually minimum interactions from Codan.

  • More importantly, there is no public roadmap. Something that was requested from the Beta days. We have no idea what is being worked on right now, what is being considered, and what is completely off the table.

Here’s an example from another product that I love: Streamlit. A simple and clear page, built and published using their own product, laying out plans over different time horizons and completion status.

If only there was a tool that Codans could use to quickly put together a public roadmap and feature request tracker. A tool that allowed you to build cool features such ranking, voting, and merging of similar requests, and then publish it as a web page with a single click… one can only wonder what that tool could be :thinking:

Feel free to share your favourite roadmap pages from other similar products below !

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I concur! :fist:t3:

(might as well someone would make a public community doc that would act as a streamlined feature request and status observation)

  • the community suggestion box section is also clouded with resolved/launched features in mixed with the request. a feature tidying up would be a nice touch.
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I agree totally with you!
Public roadmap and better communication about whats in development and whats planned is almost a must! Coda is really letting us down on that front…

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I was also wondering why the documentation of Coda is not in a Coda Doc :thinking:

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There is clearly a lot of division in the tech industry over whether to publish roadmaps or not…but it does seem quite at odds with the Codan’s generally engaging nature here as well as there great support.

And yes, there are some really critical improvements that many here have pleaded and agitated about for a long time now on which there is pretty much silence from Coda.

And the lack of knowledge here is really inhibiting to those of use that champion and plan the use of Coda in our organizations.
I for one am honestly working on a wing and a prayer that some of these updates will arrive within the next year, and if they don’t I’m going to be facing some very significant challenges with how we use Coda…and so yes, some insight into the roadmap, even with very vague or no real timelines (just a priority list) would be so very much appreciated.

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The main thing I’m hoping for is an estimate on when the mobile app will be redesigned. It’s rough having to go from a great experience on desktop, to dreading any time when I have to open Coda on my phone.

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I hadn’t heard of streamlit until you mentioned it - pretty cool tool. Thanks!

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i’ve asked for this since day one!

i will not repet again why a PUBLIC roadmap would be extremely good, because i have already 4 or 5 post where i say that, we need a roadmap to be able to know where we are going, if not we will NEVER be future-proof, in an environment that is already pretty unstable, but in a nutshell i like the pirate boat metaphor.

It’s like we’re in a boat mission, where everyone of us have his own little boat, but we’re all under the flag of coda’s pirates team, following the big captain boat, that is guiding us in the fog.
In this condition, we have no idea where we are going, and no real voice in this regards to ask or cooperate, we have to trust the captain that is closed in his room in the big boat and that doesnt come out, if not for telling his crew immediate action needed for immediate goals, there is no option to “become indipendent” either 'cause we’re a single person in a little boat, and building just for ourself a big boat that is capable of sailing by itself would require big investment, a bigger crew of pirates etc

The captain under suggestion of HR put a “suggestion box” with a flower on it just outside of his office, nobody really knows where those little piece of paper ends, some says he roll blunts with them, some that he’s really not capable to read, etc, pirates stories you know

So, while we navigate we cannot choose were to go, because if we get distant from the main boat there will be an high risk of loosing ourself in the fog, we have to follow the directions given, but we have no effective way of communicating with the top level (sending messages into outer space is not like communicating with aliens)

I think this conditions make life at the directional level way easier to manage.
From their perspective nothing in the hands of the small boats could change this, and if you do not make promises, there is no way to break them (genious, it remember me my cheating ex lol)

But you all will have noticed how “somehow” some enterprise collaboration were valued more than others from other inputs (i will not unroll this further, who got it got it), so the idea is that the bigger is the boat that ask, the more valuable “somehow” is that request.

At this point i wonder, but if we could join mechanically all of our boats, with some woods and screws (real pirates would use nails probably), and at that point free our anchors to stop us all together, would the main captain ships notice and evaluate the requests in a more realistic manner? Following the priciples i’ve seen in the past they should :slight_smile:

This is i hope an funny story to see the problem in a more detached and empathethic view, for technical reasons why a roadmap is needed there are other 100+ posts made from 40+ people in the last 4 years, but they never worked, so maybe a story will, also if just a simple “you cannot change things and working tools overnight” would be enough to stop this bad behaviour…

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Wish I could give this 100 votes.

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This would be great! The current closest thing I’m aware of is their Product Betas page

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Linking threads together:

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Thanks for the link @jeo, and to add: This suggestion was first made over 5 years ago.

Back in those days, we used to have more engagement from Codans in the community, and Coda’s CEO @shishir seemed supportive of the idea:

Nothing makes me happier than talking roadmap with our enthusiastic users :smiley:. Just did a fun meetup in NY with a few of you and got great reactions and feedback to some of our upcoming demos.
We’ve heard your feedback on a more public roadmap and are discussing a few patterns for how and when to do it. Stay tuned.

I have stayed tuned since.

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+1 from me! Much needed!

I am building out massive documents with cross docs to overcome team sharing issues… If coda releases more granular permissions soon I am going to be wasting a lot of time building and wasting money. It would be nice to know how much time I realistically need to invest in this or keep creating band aids knowing the update is on the horizon.

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@Mario If this doesn’t deserve and garner a reply then we I think we are truly all destined to be sailing blindly in the fog for eternity!

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ahahahaha thanks @Evan_Price1 , told between me and you my messages never worked, to receive answers from codans you have to be 110% positive and with really simple question, that doesnt bring anything new in the picture and for which they can produce politically unexceptionable response :slight_smile:

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I know I am a bit of a dissenting voice here but I don’t think a public roadmap would be that useful.

As per the video linked above, they are pivoting feature design based on feedback a lot. I suspect if they stared posting this it would lead to only more grief as people kept getting disappointed that feature X or Y didn’t end up shipping for good reasons that were hard to foresee.

A very broad long term strategic priority map might be quite useful: “we will move more towards enterprise security support” or “The next year’s theme is supporting larger tables” etc because it might provide some direction as to the broad use cases you might want to consider putting Coda to. But I don’t think its good practice in general to be designing your doc around the assumption you are getting some specific feature a year from now that doesn’t exist yet.

The main metric I want to see is continual improvement. While lots of useful surprises are constantly dropping, it gives me the confidence to take the gamble (and it is a gamble!) on building my operational processes on-top of what is effectively Coda’s infrastructure, because I can know it will keep improving.

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James you make some great points ! I think that your suggestion of what the theme of the year or quarter is would be a really helpful insight rather than specific features as I can understand why that might stress the codans.

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Just a heads up Micah_Lucero, I think you are missing the word “Mobile” for Mobile App. I still understand what you mean, but others may quickly glance over it. Also I totally agree with you. If Coda could match Notion or Office OneNote’s mobile experience…it would be lights out. Right now Coda on a mobile app is so slow and clumsy, I literally take quick notes elsewhere and have to sync it to Coda at a later point in time or with a tool like Zapier.

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Haha I do the same! I use todoist to capture the notes because its super fast and then use Zapier to add them to a table in coda. A hack but its a great work-around for anyone looking to capture notes on the fly without having to wait for that slow load time and spinning icon.

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These are good points.

I believe Coda won’t update their roadmap publicly because they’re trying to determine a successful revenue model. If the roadmap includes certain features and then those features are removed, it will create community distrust.

To be candid I still think the pricing model for Coda is amazing for intrapreneurial people in their large organizations that want to make a difference in their org processes with a modern tool, but the recent shift to paid-packs gives me a feeling that Coda is moving to an Atlassian Confluence model. Where there is little transparency, and a bunch of extra paid add-ons. This is also known as a platform-model where you build the base foundation of the software and then people have to pay extra for the features they need. The biggest gripe I have about this model is that it never works as seamless as it’s thought to work. Try to integrate an add-on into Confluence and it generally is clunky.

Fortunately there’s a few open-source Coda/Notion alternatives that are coming into the market in second-half 2023. I’m likely to start shifting to those tools as the mature (and I’ll know what they’re maturing into, because I’ll see their roadmaps on github.)

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