How Framer uses Canny as their single source of truth for user feedback

We love businesses that strive to provide a full-cycle solution. This is exactly what Framer does—it’s an all-in-one software that helps teams design everything.

Aroa Gil Bo started out doing sales at Framer, and then moved to customer success—a much more technical position.

Being in CS enabled her to focus more on feedback, as well as helping engineers and designers figure out what to build. Soon after, she moved on to become a product lead.

She now manages a team focused on collaboration and onboarding.

Having worked in both sales and customer success, she understands the importance of feedback and keeping in touch with your users.

“I know how frustrating it is to feel like customers aren’t being listened to—both for them, and for us.”

Back when Aroa was working in customer success, a lot of feedback started rolling in.

She realized they needed to make the process of managing feedback easier and more efficient.

In addition to collecting feedback, she also wanted to be able to dig deeper into it.

“I wanted to know not only what was being requested, but who requested it. That way, we could estimate the weight of a request better when prioritizing.”

At first, she tried creating projects for feature requests in GitHub. Within the project, they logged the votes each request received, and additional comments.

While this solution worked fine, it wasn’t quite what Aroa had in mind. Since GitHub wasn't made for collecting feedback, it always felt like a workaround. There still wasn't a dedicated process in place.

Feedback and feature requests not having a dedicated home was a problem.

It was hard to organize, manage, and sift through all incoming feedback. Bug fixes, feature requests, feedback were all mixed together in the same place.

And, logging requests and feedback was starting to waste the team’s precious time.

“We had to go in and manually record feedback and votes for users. It took a lot of time that we could have spent doing more important things.”

Once Aroa realized that GitHub wasn’t a good enough solution for the team, she started looking for a better way.

After a bit of research, she came across Canny, and decided to give it a try. They transferred their feedback management from GitHub to Canny easily.

“The Canny team made it very easy for me to set up. They sent over resources and supported the whole process. Also, I didn’t need a developer—I did the whole thing alone.”

Besides getting set up, involving everyone else was also a breeze.

“Inviting users was super straight forward, as was inviting other people in the company, too.”

Canny quickly became the independent, single source of truth for user feedback and requests that the team had been looking for.

After setting up, the founders at Framer said everyone should use Canny to update project statuses and get an overview of customer feedback.

Besides general feedback and requests, Canny has also been useful for one-off cases to gather specific feedback.

“For example—we can create a board to test a beta with only some customers, and then open it up later for everyone.”

One of Aroa’s favorite things about Canny is how easy it is to set up boards and customize them.

Today, all teams at Framer use Canny for communicating new features to users, scoping and prioritization, and keeping in touch in general.

One of the main benefits of using Canny at Framer has been less time spent on indirect communication, and more insights for the entire team.

Instead of telling the product team that they have to do something because people are asking for it, they can go and see it for themselves.

Transparency and keeping in touch with their users has also been a big plus.

The team has the opportunity to be more direct about the things that they’re building. Before, it was mainly through marketing.

“Now, we communicate on product-related things directly with our customers.”

The whole company is more connected overall, and can easily refer to Canny as the single source of truth for all user feedback when needed.

Every cycle, they review all the features that have been requested, and decide what's going to be built.

“Planning is a lot easier that way, and we do it all together.”

Aroa is also confident about the long-term business impact of using a tool like Canny to gather and prioritize feedback, since they now know exactly what their customers really want and need.

“In the long term, this translates into more product usage, because we’re focused on building the most useful features for our key users.”

As for advice to anyone on the fence about using a product like Canny, this is what Aroa had to say:

“Building a product in isolation doesn’t produce results. You can keep on guessing, but then you'll never get it right. Instead, create a platform where you can just ask and listen. That way, you’ll do it right the first time, and don’t have to keep iterating.”