What happens to your idea after submitting it to the ESO Ideas Portal

Every idea submitted to the ESO Ideas Portal starts the same way: someone in an agency or department hits a wall, sees a better way to do something, and tells us about it. What happens next is less visible, and we want to change that.

Your feedback matters

Once the Product team reviews an idea and adds it to the portal, all our customers can review and leave further feedback. The idea card gives everyone a quick read on the problem as we understand it and invites customers to rate its importance to them and add more context.

Direct feedback is also just one signal of importance among several. An idea with little feedback can move ahead of one with more, because roadmap decisions weigh strategic fit, technical feasibility, and timing alongside customer demand. A smaller, well-scoped idea might ship quickly. A bigger one might carry more weight but take longer to get right. Feedback count alone does not capture that difference.

What our Product Management teams are weighing

Behind each idea, our Product Management teams work through a wide range of inputs: usage data, technical dependencies, trade-offs, and the strategic value a solution delivers across the ESO community, not just for one department or agency. Getting to the right answer often means discovery work, prototyping, and user testing, and doing that well takes time.

Two things commonly slow an idea down, and neither is about whether we value it:

Complexity. High-impact ideas tend to come with more complexity. That can make them look slower-moving next to a quick win with less feedback, even when the quick win is the smaller ask.

Dependencies. Some ideas depend on other product teams or internal systems that are not visible from the portal. In other cases, the right technology is not ready yet, so we hold the idea until we can deliver it well, rather than deliver it before it’s ready.

How we decide what is ready to move

We do not evaluate ideas on gut feel or on the loudest signal. Our Product teams follow a structured evaluation process to test whether an idea’s underlying problem is well understood, whether the evidence behind it holds up, and whether it truly fits where ESO is headed before it earns a place on the roadmap. That discipline is part of why some high engagement ideas take longer than expected, and why some quieter ones move faster than you would guess. We would rather be right about what we build than fast and off the mark in the wrong direction.

Closing the loop

When the idea you have left feedback on, moves into discovery, design, or development, our Product teams will update the Ideas Portal and you will receive an email.  That is how we keep the loop closed and the conversation open as an idea evolves.

In the meantime, the portal itself gives you a live view and a brief description of each idea as it takes shape.

The takeaway

Feedback is a valuable, real signal of interest and demand. It is also one input among many that every software and technology team weighs when deciding what to build next. We encourage you to keep reviewing our Ideas Portals and keep telling us what matters to you. Together, that is how the roadmap gets built and how we keep innovating with purpose.