#443 Shaping & Shipping

This week we had a mid-cycle demo on the Product team.

As a team, we’re excited to share with each other what we’ve been shaping and what we’ll be shipping. Take a gander at what we’re working on…

Nick has developed a first version of a music player in the meeting UI. For a long time, our customers have requested background music that they can play during meeting phases while folks are adding ideas, voting, or waiting for everyone to finish. This iteration introduces the player itself. The next iteration will allow facilitators to sync music for all participants, with the option for individuals to turn it off or change the track. In the future, we plan to expand the background music library for broader listening options.

Jordan has been hard a work wrapping up our new Linear integration. This should be a hit with many customers who’ve been asking for an integration to improve their workflow. Like our integrations with GitLab, GitHub, and Jira, folks can both create and estimate tickets that sync directly with these tools. We’re looking forward to launching this soon in the Linear marketplace!

Bruce has made several improvements to our company usage dashboard. For one, he’s making our internal usage tools directly available to customers. They’ll now have the same granular insights into usage that we do. A few key areas they can monitor:

Georg has been a champion in building and shipping our rebuilt-from-scratch Mattermost plugin. This cycle, he’s focused on improvements that make it smoother to log in and set up Parabol through the plugin. Our goal is to make the connection between the two platforms as seamless as possible.

Matt recently shared his progress on how folks can share pages beyond the team scope. This is key, as pages will be where team knowledge and insights are surfaced from meeting activities. As folks continue to organize and reuse the knowledge coming out of meetings, they can now share it in the specific contexts they need.

Terry recently shared concepts for improved meeting summaries. These focus on a few key ideas:

These are just a few highlights from the progress being made across our Product, Growth, and DevSecOps teams. We’re excited to see the impact our efforts will have for customers while also boosting adoption and expansion of the product in these organizations.

While we’ve seen healthy meeting activity, our monthly active user count has declined slightly. Our strategy to increase adoption is to expand Parabol from being a tool for agile teams to one that also supports the broader workflows of collaboration and knowledge management across an organization. We’re up for the challenge, streamlining both, while many tools only focus on one or the other.

…held a webinar with GitLab. Fierce Software invited Rachel Fuerst and Jordan (our CEO) to walk through how GitLab and Parabol can work together to boost agile team collaboration. Watch the video from this LinkedIn post.

…continued reworking our sales motion. This deserves a post of its own, but our Sales team has been actively improving how we match customers with the right product tier and level of support.

…made progress toward our SOC2 certification. We’re refining and implementing the key policies needed to reach certification.

…synced with key public sector partners. We hold regular check-ins with many of these partners to ensure we’re delivering excellent service and approaching new opportunities with care.

…start the 2nd half of Product Cycle 8. We’ve got 3 weeks left to refine and complete many of the items shared above.

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