Problem Statement: The current permissions/licensing structure of Aha is cost prohibitive for companies with larger business review teams who need update feature descriptions prior to development (i.e. moving features through stage-gate prior to approval and development). As such, the only way to manage these updates is to put this on the shoulders of a Contributor or Product Manager; this is time consuming and overtasking IMHO because in many cases (like ours) the people in these roles have additional responsibilities.
Note: This this update/edit feature descriptions ability information beyond the existing reviewer commenting functionality. Today, only the contributor or PM roles can edit/update feature descriptions.
Potential Fixes
Note: This role/ability, IMHO, should not have the ability to manage the feature itself (e.g. change other options such as its release, tags, initiatives, etc.; or perhaps a very limited set of choices.) That kind of management is suited to the Contributor role.
Business Benefit
Thank you for the idea. We currently have 4 tiers of users permissions within Aha! (product owners, contributors, reviewers and viewers). We have spent much time gathering feedback from the community in constructing these permission levels. As noted, the Reviewer role provides the ability to collaborate through to-dos and comments. One suggestion would be to have the reviewers create to-dos to streamline the process of managing the updates. Additionally, we would recommend leverage feature templates to automatically add the feature description text noted in your description.
At this time, we do not have plans to make changes to the user permissions model based on community feedback and our current priorities. We hope you can understand.
I'm going to push this! I strongly suggest that four tiers isn't enough. I need something between Reviewers and Contributors because in some cases, Reviewer is too restrictive and Contributor is too powerful. The features template you suggested is only helpful if the user can make and edit to the feature description. Otherwise, it's always on the shoulders of PMs and Contributors to do this work.
Now, the feature template would be extremely useful on the idea side, but that doesn't seem to be implemented.