#428 – Demo Day

This week we had a demo day, where we showcase the progress of what we’re building halfway through a 6-week Shape Up work cycle. We’ve already released some of this work to production! Here’s a round-up of what we’ve been shaping.

We’re very happy to finally ship the ability to add images and GIFs to Retro cards. This has been a long-standing request from users. This work has involved switching to a new editing interface that will be used in the cards, comments, and notes throughout our software.

On our roadmap is the ability to take meeting notes in Parabol. To lay the groundwork for this we’re improving our editor capabilities. In addition, we’re conceptualizing better navigation and controls that help folks get key information into and out of meetings in a seamless experience. We hope to ship this to a first cohort of users a few months from now.

We continue to deliver updates to our Mattermost and Microsoft Azure DevOps integrations.

Our customers in the public sector are making great use of increased interconnectivity between Parabol and Mattermost. Teams can easily link their channel to their team in Parabol, set up meetings, and configure notifications.

For Azure DevOps, we’ve added better controls over notifications from Parabol helping folks stay better connected in Teams.

Our DevSecOps team has been hard at work ensuring that our platform is easier to maintain, easier to deploy, and more secure along the way. This allows us to better serve our customers who need an air-gapped or private instance. Thanks to recent progress our devs can rest easier with faster and more stable deployments. We’re also working on higher levels of security compliance. While these features aren’t as easy to show, they’re essential to providing an excellent software service.

Here’s a list of enhancements either shipped, shipping soon, or at the drawing board.

🕰️ Improved History View — Now our History view, which shows the past activity and meetings of a user’s teams, is divided into timeframes. This makes parsing the history more contextual. Looking ahead we’re considering how to generate insights and summaries across meetings from the History view. More to come!

🤖 AI-powered Summaries & Insights — Now users can opt in to meeting summaries for all meeting types, powered by OpenAI. We’re also testing a beta of Team Insights that generate trends from meetings in a specified timeframe. The demand from customers for these features is only increasing.

🧐 Researched New Workflows — We’re partnering with customers in the public sector to research and conceptualize workflows that are essential to their operations including:

We’re feeling great about our product roadmap and are looking forward to upcoming cycles. Here’s a big thanks to our Product team 🙌 (Matt, Terry, Georg, Rafa, Dale, Jordan, Bruce, & Nick) for the excellent work so far.

It’s great to see our core metrics up and to the right. My assumption is teams are back in the swing of things, many having had their first meetings of the year. It seems that folks are also evaluating new tools and considering Parabol to fill the need.

…fielded helpful user feedback. Each week we add key pieces of feedback to our board. Items on this board are up for consideration in our next Shape Up cycle. We are happy to have a customer base that keeps in touch and shares feedback.

…provided quality customer support. I want to mention the high level of support our team has provided to our customer base this week. Thanks to our customer success team and developers for the quick responses and solutions.

…met up with users to learn about their top needs. We’ve had a steady stream of meetings with key customers to research the workflows that are key to their everyday operations. We find it of first importance to know where their greatest challenges are. This research is informing our product roadmap and conceptualization of new meeting types and features.

…review our All Hands Retro to inform strategy. Each trimester we refresh our company strategy. In preparation for our planning, we open a company wide Retro board to gather input from all employees in regards to how we’re serving customers, supporting each other, and stewarding the business.

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Please write to us.