Proposal Statuses

Every proposal in an idea bank has a status that indicates where it is in its lifecycle. As the researcher, you control status transitions to communicate progress to participants and manage voting.

Status Overview

Draft

Proposals start in Draft status when created by the researcher. Draft proposals are hidden from participants, giving you time to refine the title and description before publishing.

Use draft status to:

• Prepare proposals before a voting session begins
• Review participant-submitted proposals before making them visible
• Stage ideas you’re not ready to share yet

To publish a draft, change its status to Open.

Open

Open proposals are visible to participants and actively accepting votes. This is the only status where voting is allowed.

While open, participants can:

• View the proposal title, description, and current vote counts
• Vote for or against the proposal
• Change or remove their vote

Keep proposals open while you want to gather votes. Change the status when you’ve made a decision or want to end voting.

Accepted

Change a proposal to Accepted when you’ve decided to build the idea but haven’t shipped it yet. This greenlights the proposal for development, distinguishing “we will build this” from “still open for input” and from “already shipped”.

Use accepted status when:

• You’ve evaluated the proposal and committed to building it
• The idea is on your roadmap but not yet delivered
• You want to track decided-but-unshipped work separately from open voting

Accepted proposals are not shown to participants and are not open for voting until the public roadmap feature surfaces them. Accepted is a pre-implementation status, so it remains fully re-scorable: the score is kept, stays editable, and is recomputed when you change the idea bank’s scoring configuration — exactly like Open and Draft proposals.

When the work is delivered, change the status to Implemented. If you decide not to build it after all, move it back to Open (or to Rejected/Closed).

Rejected

Change a proposal to Rejected when you’ve decided not to pursue the idea. The proposal is removed from the public voting page and voting is no longer allowed; existing votes are preserved for your records.

Use rejected status when:

• The idea doesn’t fit your product direction
• The idea is technically infeasible
• The idea duplicates another proposal
• You’ve evaluated and decided against it

Consider adding a note to the description explaining why the idea was rejected.

Implemented

Change a proposal to Implemented when you’ve built or completed the idea. Implemented proposals appear in the public changelog, celebrating the contribution and showing participants that their votes matter.

Use implemented status when:

• The feature has been released
• The suggestion has been acted on
• The idea is now part of your product

This status helps build trust with your community by showing that popular ideas get built.

Closed

Closed is a neutral end state for proposals where you want to stop voting without communicating a specific outcome.

Use closed status when:

• A voting period has ended but decisions are pending
• The proposal is no longer relevant
• You want to archive old proposals
• The idea was superseded by another approach

Status Transitions

Draft → Open → Accepted → Implemented
              → Rejected
              → Closed

Accepted → Open
         → Rejected
         → Closed

• Draft → Open: Publish the proposal for voting
• Open → Accepted: Greenlight the proposal for development
• Open → Rejected/Implemented/Closed: End voting with an outcome
• Accepted → Implemented: Mark the accepted proposal as shipped
• Accepted → Open/Rejected/Closed: Un-greenlight, reject, or close an accepted proposal
• Transitions between Rejected, Implemented, and Closed are allowed if you need to correct a status

Voting Restrictions

Votes can only be cast or changed on Open proposals. Once you change a proposal to any other status:

• Existing votes are preserved and visible
• No new votes can be cast
• Existing votes cannot be changed or removed

This ensures vote counts are final once you close voting.

Participant-Submitted Proposals

When participants submit proposals (in Open Voting mode), new proposals start with Open status by default, making them immediately visible and available for voting.

If you prefer to review submissions before publishing, you can change participant-submitted proposals to Draft status, review them, and then change back to Open when approved.

Learn More

For deeper background on managing ideas through their lifecycle, see our Knowledge Base:

• Idea Bank - How to categorize and manage ideas (Candidate vs Parked)
• ICE Score - A framework for prioritizing which proposals to implement