Turning Your Feedback into Better Prioritization and Release Processes: Our Path Forward

[shirenv]

Ideas, Customer Discovery Sessions, and Early Adopter groups are exciting, but our efforts go beyond that. Here’s how we’ve been further strengthening our partnership:

Steps We’ve Taken

• Attention to Quality and Change Management: You asked for higher quality in our releases, and we’re responding. We’ve refined our workflows, strengthened our review process, and implemented mandatory technical and cross-functional readiness checks before any feature goes live. The result? More confidence in every release. Our March release for Canvas was a success, and since January, we’ve reduced bug SLO violations by more than 20%.
• Consistency in Communication: Clear, purposeful communication is key. To ensure updates are easier to follow and more relevant, we’re making changes to The Product Blog. You’ll now see more focused content from our product teams—highlighting discovery efforts, the value of new and upcoming features, and ways for you to provide feedback.
• Customer Discovery Sessions (CDS): We’re expanding this program to hear from more of you. Watch our video above for more!

Looking Ahead: What’s Next?

Our commitment to partnership doesn’t stop here. Here’s what’s in our scope next:

• Listening: We’re committed to improving how we collect and act on feedback. Right now, we’re refining a process that is thoughtful, scalable, and sustainable—so your input isn’t just heard, but drives meaningful change.
• We’re rerouting UX bugs from the Ideas pool into a separate process. We know that “small” usability issues can cause major pain points, so we’re treating them differently than innovation ideas—allowing us to tackle them faster and more efficiently. 
• What about ideas and how they influence the roadmap? The work we’re doing here is all about more tightly connecting what you share with what we prioritize. I talk about that in our video above.
• Creating Together: Beyond hosting more CDS and formalizing Early Adopter groups in 2025, we’re asking: How can we better support you through change? How can we give you more chances to test and shape key releases before they launch? These are the questions guiding our next steps. 
• Celebrating Success: Our Advocates program is getting a refresh! We’re focusing on amplifying your stories, experiences, and contributions in meaningful ways. And we’re always looking for new ways to celebrate the milestones we achieve—together.

Thank You for Being Part of the Journey

Stay tuned for more updates, and as always, we welcome your thoughts on how we can continue to grow together!

Shiren Vijiasingam @shirenv 
Rachel Orston @rachelorston 
Michael Lysaght @MichaelLysaght 

[valentinesking]

Shiren,

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to "What's Next..."!

Val King, the ID
Sr. Instructional Design Project Leader
The Wharton School at UPenn

[mjennings]

Thanks for all your work and for working to keeping the processes transparent! I am excited and looking forward to comes next.

Matthew Jennings
Director of Instructional Technology
UAB School of Nursing

[Jeff_F]

I've appreciated when we have been able to opt in to notable pending changes via a feature option setting. This enables us to change at a pace we are comfortable with. This is key as we have three campuses with two different models using the same system. Thanks!

[RobDitto]

@shirenv, I'm sorry to need to disagree with you about quality in the March release. We now have issues with functionality which used to work reliably in the past:

• EGG-860 (no longer possible to disable "Allow self sign-up" in course Groups)
• Case 11994568 (updated quizzes in a Blueprint template no longer sync changes to child sites after initial sync - no issue ID yet)

Maybe quality overall is better for most customers, and we're simply having unusually bad luck. 

[audra_agnelly]

This month, I spent days fixing teachers broken images in New Quizzes after an off-cycle update was pushed out. There was no documentation in the release or deploy notes about this update going out and I only knew this was related to an update from following a New Quizzes product thread in the Community. Why wasn't that in any release notes and why was it pushed out to users outside the normal change schedule? That doesn't exemplify "Consistency in Communication". And, why, when Canvas breaks things does it takes weeks or months to fix them for impacted users?

[Renee_Carney]

@RobDitto 

Thank you for always asking questions and holding us accountable in this partnership. 

In the recent update to  Group Set fields to provide a more consistent and accessible experience we introduced an unexpected issue. Our team has swarmed it and I believe a hot fix went out today - will you check please? 

The Blueprint issue predated the March release and we do have a workaround available. Your CSM will be reaching out shortly to provide the necessary details and support. Do let us know if you're running into something different. 

[Renee_Carney]

@audra_agnelly I want to acknowledge the importance of the questions you're asking and thank you for asking them. We're working with the product team now to get them answered. 

[RobDitto]

@Renee_Carney Thanks for your response; that's deeply appreciated!

Confirmed, we're again able to turn off "Allow self-signup" in group categories which previously had that set. I'm so glad it was possible to swarm.

We'll reach out to our CSM regarding the Blueprint workaround.

[KNGoh]

Excited with the UX bugs categorisation. Sounds like a great opportunity for quick wins that the community will appreciate.