Building a community-led product roadmap

One of the best things about product planning at Quadratic is our extremely opinionated user base. We send our active users personal emails asking what they'd improve in Quadratic, and their responses are massive, thoughtful, multi-paragraph emails from which we can glean new ideas and patterns. We also receive feedback through feedback forms in the application, feedback from prospects in feedback and sales calls, and developer input on GitHub as a source-available project.

Simultaneously, as the builders of Quadratic, we are opinionated on where the best spreadsheets and data tools are needed to take their products. The product team is tasked with digesting opinions and feedback we're hearing the most, which is the most valuable, what beliefs do we have indpendent of feedback, and when is the scope of a feature too large to justify building just because a user says it's important. Below is a look into our core beliefs and the user feedback that has directly influenced our roadmap.

Note: our roadmap is a living, public project on GitHub. Issues are added and removed daily to improve Quadratic.

What are the core beliefs represented in our product roadmap?

When our founding team endeavored to build a better spreadsheet, some core beliefs informed the initial product vision. These beliefs were informed by our team's experiences doing analytics in past companies and interviewing data people in and out of the network. These beliefs led to the first versions of Quadratic and our pre-seed round in 2022.

Some of these beliefs include:

• Most organizations pursue automation in or out of their spreadsheets, often powered by Python.
• Citizen developers are spreading throughout organizations, disrupting all sorts of prior workflows; they should be empowered by better tooling.
• Despite the rise of code and data tooling, most analytics end up in a spreadsheet; export to CSV is the most commonly used feature in many BI tools.
• Developers are no longer sitting back and using the tools assigned to them; they're testing, building, and self-hosting modern tools that then spread like wildfire across their organizations.
• Developers have pull in orgs, but when they leave, the tools they leave behind are hard to maintain.
• Existing spreadsheets have performance issues (data limitations, clunky UX, outdated feature sets, etc.) Modern technology enables us to build a better sheet.
• Existing spreadsheets aren't a great collaborative experience. In the age of great collaborative tools like Figma and Notion, this should change.
• Quadratic is growing in the age of AI. Analytics will be done in a spreadsheet, empowered by AI, not in a chat interface.
• Open-source and source-available projects enhance users' trust and help build community.

These beliefs informed a clear initial roadmap, highlighted by the following features, most of which exist in Quadratic today:

• A performant, web-based spreadsheet that runs locally and smoothly at 60fps with Rust + WASM + WebGL.
• The ability to handle millions of rows of data directly in the browser.
• Python built into the spreadsheet in an intuitive way that feels native to the spreadsheet, with excellent developer experience.
• Charts and graphs (currently via Python + Plotly, expanding support in the future, native eventually).
• Real-time collaboration with your team in the spreadsheet.
• AI built-in to help users write code and build better analytical functions.
• (WIP) Live connections to wherever a user's data lives via SQL, Python requests, or custom data connectors.
• (WIP) AI that enables automating significant percentages of a typical user workflow.
• (WIP) Self-hosted and on-prem solutions for enterprise organizations.
• (Long-term WIP) the best core spreadsheet experience available.

How does the Quadratic community inform this roadmap?

GitHub

We receive feedback in various formats. One of our core sources is GitHub. As the only modern spreadsheet building with our source code available, we're privileged to have developers of all kinds contribute both feedback and code. The feedback we get through GitHub is developer-focused, usually centered around technical questions, deployment options, open-source/contributing specifics, etc.

In-app feedback forms

We present contact forms in various places for users to tell us what they love and what they don't. This exists both on our marketing website and in-app. Forms usually receive the direct papercuts users experience in-app. These are usually bugs that we push to the top of our roadmap and resolve within a few hours, sometimes within a few minutes.

We've implemented many QA tests, monitoring, and other key infrastructure to minimize bugs, but it's not uncommon for something to slip through the cracks. Users will always push your product to the limit and find the places you didn't think to go in testing. Once they do, we implement the fix and add their edge case to the test suite. This class of user feedback is an essential element for improving Quadratic.

Prospects

During sales calls, there are sometimes obvious things that many enterprise users can't live without. Some of those features they've told us about include:

• SQL data connectors (WIP).
• SOC 2 compliance for enterprises (we're in the final stages of implementing SOC 2).

Solicited feedback

We spend a lot of time with personalized outreach to users, asking what they think can be improved. It's a lot of effort and time spent digesting feedback, but it's clearly worth it to us. Where some products might get crickets any time they try to solicit feedback, our community is extremely passionate about letting us know where we need to improve. It's especially obvious what to build when we hear the same feedback repeatedly.

In these situations, we have no choice but to bump that feedback to the top of our roadmap. Some features we shipped recently that were constantly getting asked for include:

• Inline formulas instead of a multi-line editor by default.
• Relative references.

Some features we are actively working on were also consistently asked for by our general community.

• DateTime support.
• Cell ranges in Python.

Summary

Roadmap construction at Quadratic is all about balancing our obvious user feedback with our opinionated view on what will make Quadratic the best possible spreadsheet.

If you want to influence our roadmap, feel free to contact us and let us know how or what we can improve in Quadratic. As you've learned above, user feedback is the primary driver for what we build next.