JetBrains ran YouTrack's roadmap and bug tracker fully public, letting votes set priority

YouTrack, JetBrains' project management tool, was built for internal use before its public release in 2009. That same year, JetBrains published the product's roadmap on a dedicated public tracker and invited feedback from early adopters, an unusual move that most software companies still avoid because it exposes unfinished plans and unresolved bugs to competitors and customers alike.

The public tracker turned into a prioritization mechanism, not just a transparency gesture. A request for a Knowledge Base feature, letting teams keep documentation next to their tasks, had been gathering votes since 2011. It resurfaced when JetBrains published its 2019 roadmap and customers asked for it again. Rather than build the feature with full functionality from the start, the team scoped the first release to what its most active voters actually needed, then shipped it in mid-2020.

The same approach shaped YouTrack Lite, built over roughly a year to resolve a conflict the tracker had surfaced: small teams wanted a lightweight tool, while large enterprises wanted deeper functionality. Instead of picking one side, JetBrains shipped two interchangeable views on the same underlying project data, letting each user choose without splitting the customer base.

Publish the roadmap and tracker, let votes rank requests

Public votes turn scattered, hard-to-compare requests into one ranked list the team can act on.

Scoping a release to what the most active voters asked for avoids building unused edge cases.

Publishing commitments in the open creates pressure to follow through, which builds customer trust.

Engineers see raw customer feedback directly on the tracker instead of a filtered summary from support.

When a backlog is too large to prioritize by argument, making the tracker itself public turns scattered requests into one visible ranking both the team and customers can point to.

By 2021, YouTrack had grown to more than 7 million users while still running its roadmap and issue tracker fully in the open, a practice unusual enough among tech companies that JetBrains' product marketing lead was interviewed about it. The Knowledge Base and YouTrack Lite both shipped as scoped, publicly tracked releases rather than open-ended rebuilds, and the same public-tracker process has continued to run new feature requests through years of visible voting before they're built.