Most companies will tell you they’re customer-obsessed. Fewer can point to the actual mechanism. At GitKraken, it isn’t a quarterly survey or a roadmap council. It’s a Slack channel where developers vent about their Git workflow, and the desktop team is already in there reading it.

What actually happens when a developer hits a wall

When something about a Git workflow doesn’t work the way a developer expects, whether that’s five worktrees piling up from five AI agents or something as ordinary as how an issue syncs from Jira, that friction usually gets said out loud somewhere. At GitKraken, somewhere is an internal Slack channel the desktop team watches directly, not a feedback form that routes to a backlog nobody revisits.

How does GitKraken decide what to build next?

“When we get feedback in our internal Slack, someone shares a piece of feedback, and all the developers are adding on, reacting to it,” says Trevor Polidore, Product Manager for GitKraken Desktop. “It really fuels us.”

That’s the whole mechanism. No committee has to approve that a piece of feedback is worth discussing. It just gets reacted to, argued about, and built on, by the same engineers who’ll be the ones writing the fix.

Why “we’re not trying to make any guesses” is the actual strategy

It would be easier, in a lot of ways, to decide on one correct way to use Git and build for that. Polidore is explicit that GitKraken doesn’t work that way:

“GitKraken Desktop has tried to accommodate all the different ways of working, whether you’re using AI or not,” he says. “We’re not trying to make any guesses. We’re trying to help people out and take away the overhead and the headache of managing their Git workflows and their agents to get things shipped.”

One example: cleanup that started as a complaint, not a roadmap line

The automatic worktree cleanup that shipped in GitKraken Desktop 12.4, tearing down a worktree, its branch, and its upstream the moment a pull request merges, wasn’t pitched to the team as a headline feature. It came out of exactly this loop: developers running multiple AI agents in parallel kept running into the same mess, said so, and the desktop team built the fix. We wrote more about that specific problem in Every AI Agent You Add Leaves Something Behind to Clean Up.

If you’re the one hitting the wall

The loop only works if the feedback actually reaches someone who can act on it. If something about your Git workflow is more annoying than it should be, that’s worth saying, in our Slack community, or on our feature upvote board. It won’t sit in a queue. It’ll get reacted to.

FAQ

How does GitKraken gather product feedback from developers? The desktop team monitors an internal Slack channel where customer feedback is shared and discussed directly by the engineers building the product, alongside a public feature upvote board.

Does GitKraken have a public feature request board? Yes, developers can submit and upvote feature requests directly.

Does GitKraken build around one standard Git workflow? No. GitKraken Desktop is built to accommodate different ways of working, including AI-assisted and non-AI workflows, rather than assuming a single correct process.