Digg Like User Interface as a Product Management Tool

Yahoo!'s Yodel Anecdotal blog provides an interesting take on gathering user's feedback. Yahoo! has built a brand new Yahoo! Suggestion Board to collect users' feedback for its various web properties.

From a product management stand point, this is a great use of the Digg concept. Instead of providing the traditional disconnected feedback form where users provide feedbacks one at a time without any understanding or context of previously submitted feedback, the Yahoo! Suggestion Board concept provides an avenue to directly involve users in the prioritization of features/enhancements by letting them vote, comment, and make suggestions on what really matters to them. This is a great use of community building and the architecture of participation to better listen to the voice of your customers and make your users the drivers for how a company's products should evolve.

Yahoo! is getting quite an earful for reaping off the Digg user interface, but this is a creative a powerful use of such concept to put users' at the center of future products enhancements.