Nextdoor turned a Slack feedback channel into a working Jira pipeline

Nextdoor's engineering teams work in Slack and track in Jira, and one specific workflow was causing disproportionate pain: product feedback.They had a dedicated Slack channel where feedback was collected, which is the right design. People will tell you things in a channel that they will never file a ticket about. The problem was everything after collection. Tracking each piece of feedback, managing it, and communicating status back became a chore, and doing it by copy-paste was error-prone.They looked at building bots in-house. It was either insufficient for the job, or expensive to build and maintain, or both.

Nextdoor kept the channel exactly as it was and put Troopr behind it.People submit product feedback the way they always have. Troopr creates and updates the corresponding Jira issues automatically. Real-time bidirectional updates mean the whole conversation, media attachments included, is captured in Jira, and every update to the Jira issue is communicated back to the relevant people in Slack.The intake stayed frictionless, which was the whole point of using a channel, and the tracking became reliable.

Engineering and product teams at Nextdoor handle product feedback more efficiently, without asking anyone to change how they report it.The design principle generalises. If you want people to give you signal, do not make them file a form. Make the channel the form.