One of the most rewarding things about working at Polycom is that, from time to time features that you request actually appear in products.   It's not quite as hard as trying to get a bill to become a law, but there are multiple steps.  How does it happen?  

It all starts with an idea.  Once you have an idea, and understand how/why it would be used and develop a short business case to support it, the idea goes into a request tracking tool. Once tracked, it joins other feature requests to be prioritized by the product manager and several other key influencers.  They decide together whether this request is more important than other requests.  Typically, the product manager ends up with a stack-ranked list of requirements for a release. 

With a finite number of engineering resources, the development and product management teams weight the requests and levels of effort to deliver the requests.  They come up with a plan for development of a set of features into a release.   Then the developers develop, the testers test, and the documentation is written.   Generally products go through a beta testing process and we almost always run it internally too.   All the while we make necessathroughry changes or improvements to provide the best possible products to our customers.  

Finally the product is ready for release and then, the big day comes.  The product is released and becomes generally available.  Finally, the loop is closed, and you end up with a message like this in your email from our feature request tracking system:  

While I can't talk about this specific feature request (yet), it is very satisfying seeing the words "Implemented in release" and knowing your idea has jumped all the hoops and was deemed good enough to be delivered as part of a product or solution. 

If you have an idea for a feature request, please contact your Polycom partner or sales engineer. Alternately, send me email and I'd be happy to create it on your behalf.  Like making laws, not every bill becomes a law and not every feature request gets into a product, but we can begin the journey.   Who knows, some day you might get an email saying your idea has been "Implemented in release".