Introducing the npm public roadmap and a new feedback process

npm is the world’s largest package registry, powering the world’s largest development community—JavaScript. Without them, npm would not be where it is today, and we know that maintaining open lines of communication and bringing transparency to our decisions is integral for the future of npm and JavaScript. We’ve seen that when we work in collaboration with our community, it helps better inform our products as evidenced by our ongoing OpenRFC process for the npm CLI. This process has helped steer improvements to the CLI, resulting in many of the features we launched last week with npm v7.0.0.

With that, we are extremely excited to announce the new npm public roadmap repo and public feedback process.

The npm product roadmap

Our product roadmap repo is where you can learn about the features we’re working on, the stage they’re in, and when we expect to bring them to you. It’s important for us to show a full picture of all of npm, so this roadmap includes roadmap items for every part of npm including the CLI, documentation, the registry, and the website. Head over to the roadmap project board to see what we’ve got planned for the next few months.

Get involved in the process

Our public feedback repo is where you can open a discussion to share suggestions for how the products should be improved and discuss those improvements with the community, including members of the npm product team. You don’t need to have a solution to the problem you are facing to kick off a discussion. We hope to foster productive and collaborative conversations, so please check out how to give good feedback if you want some guidance on how to start a successful discussion.

What happens next

Once you kick off a discussion, the npm team will do our best to make an initial response within seven days. From there, we will work with you (and the entire community) to ensure we understand the current capabilities npm is missing and explore the space for potential solutions to your problem statement:

• If the npm team determines that we are going to prioritize a feature to solve the problem that you’ve identified, we will open an issue and track its development in the public roadmap.
• If the npm team determines not to pursue the problem that you have identified, we will open an issue describing our reasoning so our decisions can remain transparent.

We know that there is still a lot of work that can be done to make working with JavaScript even more intuitive and whimsical than it is today. We are excited to embark on this process to design that future with you.

Written by

Myles Borins

@MylesBorins