As part of our All about Etsy FAQ series, Kelly, aka kfarrell, will be presenting this post on the steps taken toward making a site feature a reality. Kelly, who is on the Product Team, wrote up a response to a frequently asked question: "Where do new ideas for Etsy site features come from and how are they implemented? Who decides and when?"

At Etsy, ideas come from many different places. One of the most fertile grounds for new ideas is our very own Forums, where users can suggest new features or tell us how the old ones could be made better. We also get feedback through our annual survey, Storque articles, talking with Etsians, and the creative minds of our own staff.
    
The Product Team is in charge of organizing ideas and developing them into actual designs. We research how something should work by looking at other sites that are already doing it, reading about how similar things have been done in the past, talking to people who have experience in that particular area, and asking the Etsy community as a whole for feedback. Once we know how a feature needs to work, we write up detailed documents and screen designs to send to Engineering.

The software engineers develop the ideas into working features, and then they test the new feature to make sure it works as expected, and also tests all the old features to make sure the new one didn’t change anything that was working before. Testing can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on how complex the project is. Once the project passes QA, it’s handed to our sysops (the folks who maintain Etsy’s databases and servers) for implementation.

After a new feature is launched, we watch for any bugs that snuck by QA. We take the feedback we get from new features, and the process starts over with the Product team creating design documents for any changes we want to make. 

And that, dear friends, is how an idea grows into a feature! It's a lengthy process, but well worth the wait. Enjoy Etsy!