There’s been alot of talk lately on the idea of prototyping and demonstrating a product to solicit feedback.  The catch?  The product isn’t actually built.  This goes hand in hand with the MVP concept practiced by lean startups.

I was on BackType today, and I just witnessed an awesome example of this concept in action.

BackType is a search engine that indexes millions of comments across social media platforms and lets you query for particular topics that interest you.  Cool, right?  I performed a search query for “analytics”, and the resulting page had a small tab called “Trends”.

Curious, I clicked on it and was brought to this page:

Drat, it’s not released yet!

Brilliant!  BackType has given me an excuse to come back and check to see if the tab is active.  Even better – they were able to collect my expectations before the feature has even been released (or built!).

This is product management crowdsourcing at its finest.

Well done, team BackType.