Product Next Door: Community Feedback Meets Product Roadmap — ServiceNow IRM Edition

[SujanDutta]

We've been wanting to do this for a while. Product Next Door is a new series where we build a new bridge between community and the product team, a place where we can have spotlight on ServiceNow products — not with polished marketing slides, but with actual community members who use these tools every day sitting across from the people who build them.

For episode one, we went straight to one of the most in-demand areas of the platform: Integrated Risk Management. IRM is where risk, audit, and compliance converge — and if you've worked in that space, you know it's not simple territory.

Who Was in the Room

On the community side: 3 ServiceNow MVPs who carry specialisation in IRM: Vaishnavi Lathkar, Martin Jensen and Dinesh Kumar Raghu.

Representing the product team: Utkarsh Goswami, Director of Product Management for IRM — someone who's been working on this product line for 12 years and doesn't shy away from honest conversation.

What the Community Actually Appreciates

Before getting into the wishlist, the community spent time sharing what's genuinely working. A few themes came up repeatedly:

The unified platform story resonates. Before IRM, risk, compliance, and audit teams were often operating in disconnected tools. Getting a real-time view of enterprise-wide risk exposure used to mean manual effort. Now it's a dashboard view. That alone has changed how teams approach audit readiness — moving from scrambling before audits to maintaining continuous preparedness.

Workflow automation has been a game changer. Assessments, compliance checks, and issue remediation that used to require heavy manual coordination are now largely automated. Less human error, faster turnaround, and more time for strategic thinking instead of administrative work.

The ITSM and CMDB integration is something competitors can't easily replicate. When your environment changes, your risk context updates automatically. That's a meaningful differentiator.

And the maturity map — a simple but effective way for customers to see where they are today and chart a path forward.

Enhancement Ideas from the Field

This is where things got interesting. The community came prepared.

Assessment template versioning topped the list. Regulations change constantly, and right now updating a template while preserving audit history is painful. The ask: major/minor versioning, like you'd expect in a document management system. Utkarsh confirmed this is already in the works.

Question-level comments and flagging came up from multiple angles. Reviewers need to be able to annotate specific responses, flag items for follow-up, and maintain a comment thread at the question level — not just at the assessment level. That collaboration layer is coming.

Drag-and-drop template designer with preview mode was Dinesh's ask. Right now, setting up assessment templates requires configuration expertise. A visual designer — where admins can build, preview exactly what respondents will see, and adjust before publishing — would meaningfully reduce errors and speed up rollout.

What Utkarsh Demoed

Rather than just responding to the wishlist, Utkarsh walked through several live capabilities and roadmap previews.

AI Response Assist — already available. This one's worth paying attention to. When a new assessment comes in (say, a SIG questionnaire with dozens of questions you've answered before), AI Response Assist drafts responses by pulling from past assessments — both Smart and classic formats — and from attached documents like SOC 2 reports. Each suggestion is ranked by relevance and source-tagged, so you can verify exactly where the AI got the answer. If there's no relevant source, it stays silent rather than guessing. An 89% completion rate with full audit traceability was shown in the demo. That's a significant time save for third-party risk teams.

Regulatory Change Management (roadmap) — responding to Martin's ask around importing local laws and contractual obligations. The direction: a live regulatory change monitoring dashboard where alerts flow in from configurable RSS feeds and regulatory sources, and the system automatically surfaces which controls, policies, and citations are impacted. GenAI provides compliance posture forecasting — what happens to your compliance score if you implement these controls? This area is getting heavy investment.

Risk Heat Maps & 360° Data Explorer — multiple viewpoints on enterprise risk (IT, resilience, and more), with drill-down into individual risk records to see historical trends alongside current appetite. A hierarchical visualization showing risk flow from downstream to upstream entities is also coming before year-end.

Smart Assessment Simulation — admins can now run a full end-to-end simulation of how an assessment will look to respondents before publishing, with AI-assisted questionnaire generation that pulls from regulatory documents or URLs to suggest relevant questions.

AI Data Explorer — natural language queries over your risk data. Ask a question, get a visual breakdown, pin it to a dashboard, share it with a peer. This closes the gap between data analysts and risk leaders who need answers without writing queries.

The Bigger Point

What made this episode work wasn't the feature list. It was the fact that Utkarsh knew exactly which community feedback had already shaped product decisions — and called it out by name. The feedback loop is real here.

Product Next Door will keep doing this — taking the conversations that usually happen in private beta feedback sessions or internal Slack threads and putting them on the record. If there's a ServiceNow product area you want to see covered, drop it in the comments.