#467 – Coming Soon: Pages Databases

This week we worked diligently to advance many of the features under development that were shared during our Product team’s mid-cycle demo last week.

Since Parabol’s founding, the way we’ve developed product has always been “Agile-ish”. Originally we started with 2-week sprint lengths. Somewhere along the way we thought to add “demos” to our sprints to show off what’s under development as a way of driving momentum and getting feedback from peers. There was one problem: two-weeks weren’t quite long enough to make appreciable progress.

This all changed when we changed our internal processes to Shape Up and elected to work in 6-week development cycles followed by a 2-week long “cool down” period. Now, there are some 10 days of cooldown + 13 working days before we demo, followed by another 16 working days before the cycle concludes and all our bets should be shipped: plenty of time to show off progress.

We showed off a ton of great work from the team:

There is evidence that user activity is once again starting to pick up, even while the number of meetings ran this week dropped slightly compared to the previous week.

…held our Q3 board meeting.

…began refactoring our deployment chart used at the DoD to support Pages, and many architectural enhancements. The U.S. Department of Defense Platform One maintains a standard Kubernetes foundation called Big Bang that forms the basis of how we orchestrate Parabol for use in defense. They are constantly updating the services available within Big Bang and we’re making some big changes to better orchestrate how our application is deployed.

…update investors on Q3 results. We communicate with all of our investors monthly, at minimum. Next week’s communiqué will be special in that it will roll up results for a full quarter.