This week, it seemed like the world stopped holding its breath and got back to work.

Historically, Parabol has seen a significant “pop” in adoption the first week of a new year. You can see that trend clearly in the metrics at the start of 2020. This year was different. Our metrics were nearly as quiet as they were when folks were on winter break. It was clear, the world was rightly focused on more important, and more tragic matters.

The “pop” manifested itself this week, aided by our launch of Sprint Poker to folks who signed up for our early access program. Signups this week were at the highest level they’ve been in 7 weeks. If these metrics are any guide, we’re in for one heck of a 2021.

At first blush, web and user engagement metrics seem slow, but they are 30 day figures and still account for data during the holiday break. Zooming in, traffic is nearly equivalent to pre-holiday break levels (about 8% slower, if we’re to be precise).

…started work on new navigation concepts with a focus on starting and finding meetings, and an eye to our future roadmap. We’re working on some navigation improvements in the app to address a few concerns. 1) Meeting participants sometimes have trouble finding their meetings in the app. 2) Folks want to create recurring meetings and be able to link to them. With a meetings view folks can find, add, and edit their meeting series across meeting types: retrospectives, daily scrum, and story point estimation

…opened several new roles to hire. Parabol currently has 9 jobs open!

…published or had published some great new posts. We wrote a post for our own blog How to Counter Recency Bias in Your Sprint Retrospectives and had a guest post published on Agile Sherpas entitled Why Marketing Teams Should Run Retrospectives

…Shipped v5.31.0 to production. Some super useful updates for our users went out in this release including the ability to make Retrospective reflection cards in Group and Vote columns able take up the entire width of the screen to ease sorting, automatically detecting and “linkifying” links pasted into discussions, and more intuitive meeting template editor controls.

…released Sprint Poker to early beta users. We’re very eager to hear feedback from the few dozen teams who’ve now got access to our latest meeting type.

…conduct a number of late-stage interviews with job applicants, and hopefully kick off a Batting Practice or two

…kick off Sprint 72. We’ll be focused on future designs, bug fixes, and performance enhancements

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Leave a public response here, or write to us.