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#460 – Building valuable integrations

Friday Ship #460 | September 19th, 2025

Puzzle pieces representing software integrations

This week I spent some time digging into our integration adoption. For a long time our most popular use case has been backlog estimation using Sprint Poker. We’ve learned a few things along the way:

  • The use case makes all the difference. Is it essential?
  • Integrations drive adoption, attachment, and upgrades. Is it valuable?
  • Providing integrations takes considerable effort. Can we support it?

Where we go from here is important. Looking at our plans for the future, what new integrations might be essential to our product roadmap?

Usage by the numbers

The use case makes all the difference in how popular an integration is:

  1. Backlog estimation (Jira, GitLab, GitHub, Linear, Azure DevOps) — integrating with the backlog is essential to Sprint Poker.
  2. Calendar (GCal) — this is our second most popular integration. Many folks live by their calendars.
  3. Chat notifications (Slack, Mattermost, Teams) — chat is useful, but we don’t think it’ll be essential until we support workflows that span chat, meetings, and knowledge management.

Trends on teams that use integrations:

  • 34% of teams with 5+ members
  • 23% of teams on the Enterprise tier
  • 29% of teams on the Team tier

Supporting users

Supporting integrations is a continuous effort that keeps us in touch with our customers.

  • They let us know when there are bugs or frictions. A portion of our development efforts goes into fixes, enhancements, and upgrades.
  • Customers often ask us to add their new backlog management tool when they switch to one that we don’t currently support.
  • Helping folks discover and set up integrations is an important part of our customer success efforts.

What’s next

We are building custom workflows on top of knowledge management. What integrations might be essential to supporting the following use cases?

  • Theming customer support tickets or survey data
  • Prioritizing sales or talent pipelines
  • Moving insights from meetings to the team’s knowledge base

We’re also exploring MCP connections to enable AI-driven insights across tools and workflows.

The technology is here to connect all the things in powerful ways. The opportunity is in enabling teams to make sense of their data so they can do their best work and build strong relationships with each other and those they serve.

Metrics

Parabol metrics for the week

One trend that has puzzled us is that while MAU has decreased, meetings are up. We’ve seen that teams are running multiple meeting types. Teams are more active!

This week we…

explored architecture to support workflows. As we look to build custom workflows of all types, our Product team has spent time looking to normalize data patterns. Meanwhile we’re putting these ideas to the test with new use cases.

worked on our data warehouse. Making sense of our own data has been crucial in order to invest in the right parts of the product and the business. We’ve had to work through some changes to make our data more accessible, accurate, and useful.

Next week we’ll…

plan to release Pages. While Pages (our new knowledge management offering) is in beta for many teams, we’re working through some cases to improve overall stability before launching to all users.

Terry Acker

Terry Acker

Terry specializes in front-end architecture, UX strategy, UI design, and brand systems. He has previously worked for Quirky, BoomTown, and Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, and has served as an advisor to several early-stage start-ups. Terry lives and works near Tyler, TX.

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