Welcome to the Depot

We're very excited to announce the launch of a new project today, and one we hope will be appreciated by many of our customers.

So, welcome to the Depot: a furtive glance into the secretive and sometimes musky world of FreeAgent development.

We're often asked for more clarity on what's currently going on behind the scenes. Get Satisfaction is great for hearing feedback and requests but it doesn't provide outwards visibility on current and upcoming dev priorities.  The Depot should help with that, with the added twist of letting you get involved as well.

So it's a Product Roadmap right?

Well yeah but, no but...It's a snapshot of what currently in development, and some of the stuff we're considering for the future, but the Depot is intentionally not a fixed and comprehensive list of all current or forthcoming features.

Why not? Well, we're still of the opinion that a definitive, public roadmap would do more harm than good in setting up expectations about what is to be delivered and when. You may or may not agree with that, but we're making that call.

We're constantly re-evaluating our development priorities based on user feedback,  so it just wouldn't make sense for us to set things in stone with a public roadmap. I do believe there's a happy medium between public roadmap and complete radio silence and hopefully it's the Depot.

So how do I have my say?

Simple really, you'll see 3 different statuses on the items on the Depot board: Delivered, En Route and At the Depot.

Items that are marked At the Depot are sitting in our development backlog; work hasn't started on them yet, but they're near the top of our list. If you've got a bee in your bonnet about a particular feature you can let us know by hammering the I WANT IT button with impatient fury.

Nice, but I want to see the votes

I can totally understand that, but it's not how it works. Your votes will allow us to gauge interest in particular bits of functionality, but it's not the only factor in deciding our development priority, so we don't want to set an expectation that the features with the most votes will automatically jump to the top of our list.

Again, you may disagree with that, but it's how we want to play it. I can promise you we'll be keeping a very close eye on what you're voting on though.

On a lighter note

We also hope you have fun using the Depot, as we wanted to create something that expressed the personality of the company. Yeah, we're making accounting software, but if you've ever met any of us, you'll hopefully agree that we're a pretty laid back and friendly bunch, and we wanted the Depot to reflect that.

Robbie, our interface designer, has done an amazing job bringing the functionality and playful design together into something we hope will become a great meeting place for the company and our customers.

I'm sure people will have some strong opinions about the Depot, and we can't wait to hear them.

Head on over to the Depot.