Nowadays products usually don’t have open issue trackers. Users go straight to support if they find a problem in the product, if they don’t know how to use something, or if they just want to propose a feature. JetBrains makes tools for developers, so our users are developers!

We at JetBrains have an open issue tracker. Bugs, feature requests, usability problems: everything is there. People can discuss issues with each other and folks from JetBrains. People can vote for features or share their particular use-cases.

In my talk, I will go through the pros and cons of an open issue tracker system and try to inspire others to try it not only in software products. I understand that it can be scary: everybody will know how many bugs there are! And the whole process of decision-making becomes really transparent! But this really helps us to understand the needs of our users, to collect real open honest feedback from them, and keeps those who make the product on the same page as those who use it.

Today JetBrains makes some of the most intelligent and powerful tools on the market. Our products are used by millions of developers worldwide, and you’ve probably heard of some of them: IntelliJ IDEA for Java; ReSharper for .NET; PyCharm for Python. We are also the creators of Kotlin, a JVM programming language.