#404 How We Use Parabol

This week, we played a game using Parabol.

At Parabol, we use our own tool for just about everything. While we rely on it for the usual activities like retros and estimations, we find Parabol great for organizing and prioritizing ideas, so we get pretty creative with it.

Here are some ways we’ve put Parabol to work that are a bit less traditional, along with some templates we use:

I find staring at a blank page tough, especially at the beginning of planning. That’s why this is my favorite way of using Parabol. It gives me a structured starting point, making it easier to generate and organize ideas around the company’s priorities. Plus, it’s great for gathering input from other teams.

Planning team retreats used to be messy and it was hard to get everyone’s input. Now, we use Parabol to gather ideas, prioritize activities, and ensure everyone has a say in the agenda. It’s turned retreat planning into a collaborative activity.

We use our sprint poker tool to input the projects we want to work on and prioritize them. This helps us understand where to start and create a balanced, properly prioritized backlog.

Parabol has become our go-to for processing user feedback. We use it to document comments, identify common themes, and plan actionable improvements. Our feedback is now better documented and organized, making it easier to spot when a feedback or request has been mentioned multiple times.

We hold our peer-to-peer feedback sessions using Parabol. Each person chooses what they want feedback on, making it valuable and personalized.

But this week, we really stretched it by trying to solve the debate of what the best sandwich is using our tool. We used our retro tool to brainstorm the best sandwich qualities. Once we had those defined, we used sprint poker to vote on the top contenders. The result? We’re not there yet, but we’ll let you know!

Using Parabol isn’t just about testing our product; we find it a very useful way to collect ideas, structure information, and facilitate decision-making, regardless of the specific task.

Do you use Parabol in a creative way? We’d love to hear about it and learn more ways to make the most of our tool.

We saw an increase in weekly meetings while the rest of our metrics remained flat. This week, we are excited to see that our user count has passed 500K! 🥂🎉

…reached 500K+ users!

…continued refining and getting feedback on our in-progress Insights Feature. …began planning our upcoming retreat with the growth team.

…had a company-wide game to determine the best sandwich 🥪 using Parabol.

…do maintenance on our site on Saturday the 20th at 22:00 UK time // 2 PM US Pacific time, during which our site might be down for up to 2 hours.