Our Product Roadmap and how to submit ideas and improvements

Our Product Roadmap and vision

At Arbor, we’re always looking for new ways to help schools and trusts work better. When we develop new features in our MIS, we design them to be intuitive, and to help school staff work faster and collaborate more at all levels.

Our Product Team’s vision is to empower school and central team staff with the data, insights and time they need to drive real change. The team divide their time between two types of work:

  1. Strategic: Powerful new features that often require work over multiple terms, and have a transformative impact on how you use your MIS
  2. Responsive: Continuous improvements based on what you tell us is working, and where we can improve

We work in this way to make sure we’re balancing our long-term goals on transforming the way you work, with the ability to react quickly and proactively to your needs.

 

How we gather your feedback

If you have an idea for a new feature or a way to improve an existing one, we’d love to hear it. There are two ways you can share it with us:

  • Submit your product idea directly in Arbor - Head to Help & Learn with Arbor in the left-hand menu > Share product idea to tell us how an existing feature could be improved, or share an idea for a new way that Arbor could save you time. Schools and trusts can submit ideas from the School and MAT MIS. Support Partners can submit ideas from their Arbor demo sites.
  • Customer Satisfaction Survey - You can see full details on these here: Surveys from Arbor
How we action your feedback

We run a termly roadmap planning process. Once a term we analyse the ideas our customers have submitted and look for patterns and themes to give us an understanding of the features that would have the most impact for our customers.

Some of the popular ideas are smaller in scope and can be released quickly, while others feed into our process for considering larger innovations, which may take several terms to complete. Any ideas we aren't able to prioritise are kept in a backlog to be re-considered in the next termly roadmap planning cycle.

What happens after you submit feedback?

Because we get a lot of product feedback and suggestions, we're not able to update you individually as to whether we're working on your suggestion. 

Look out for your customer newsletter via email each month, which includes a roundup of all the features we’ve added or improved. You can also bookmarks our Change Log.

 

 

How to submit your feedback

Share your product ideas directly in Arbor

1. Open Arbor and navigate to the sidebar.
2. Click on ‘Help & Learn with Arbor’, then select ‘Share Product Idea’.

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A pop-up will appear with two options:

  • Improve an existing feature – Let us know how we can improve a feature or tool already in Arbor.
  • Suggest a new feature – Share an idea for a new tool or functionality that would save you time.

Need immediate help instead? Tap ‘Help Centre’ to explore support options.

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Once you choose an option, you’ll see a short form with four fields and an optional checkbox:

  • Summary of your idea – A one-liner describing your suggestion. If possible, mention the part of Arbor it relates to.
  • Description – Be as detailed as possible. Explain the reasoning behind your idea and the problem it would solve.
  • Your job title – This helps us understand your perspective and needs.
  • Your email – So we can follow up if needed.
  • Include environment data (optional) – Checking this box allows Arbor to automatically pull relevant details (like what page of the MIS you're on), and gives us really helpful context for your idea. 

After submitting your idea, a confirmation message will appear for five seconds. Our team reviews all submissions, and your feedback is invaluable in shaping the future of Arbor.

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Complete your termly customer satisfaction survey

Every term you’ll receive a quick survey from us giving you the opportunity to let us know how Arbor is impacting your day-to-day. We gather this data from all our schools to help us measure the impact we’re having more widely. 

You can see full details on these here: Surveys from Arbor

 

 

FAQ

Can you submit feedback for me?

The Arbor Support Team won't be able to submit feedback on your behalf. We encourage users to submit their own feedback using one of the methods outlined above to ensure that we know exactly what you need and why.  

I’ve submitted feedback but not received an update.

Because we get a lot of product feedback and suggestions, we're not able to update you individually as to whether we're working on your suggestion or whether it has been released.

Is my idea already possible using Arbor?

Before you get in contact with us, please ask yourself these questions:

  1. Have you searched or looked at the How-tos in the Help Centre to see if what you’d like to do is already possible, perhaps in a different way than in your previous MIS?
  2. Have you posted in Arbor HQ to ask other schools how they manage this in Arbor?
  3. Has your school booked training to learn how to tailor Arbor to your needs?
Something in Arbor is broken, how do I let you know?

If something in Arbor is not working as it’s supposed to, please report this using the Contact Us form at the top of the page.

 
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