#502 Shape Up Cycle 15 Kickoff

This week we kicked off our 15th six-week Shape Up cycle.

It’s been over two years since we adopted Shape Up. What began as an experiment within our product development team to change our way of working has now become the operating rhythm for all functions in the company. A primary tension we hoped to resolve by adopting Shape Up was to make more meaningful product-improvements by making slightly larger, more explicit “bets” on what to build.

It’s not that we didn’t allow our design process to dream big, it’s that we’d often spent the end of our design process watering down a big vision into a development effort that would fit inside of a two-week sprint and what we ended up shipping often wasn’t good at telling us if we were on the right track or not.

We’e taken some big swings of late. July’s edition of our What’s New newsletter is indicative of how well our process has been working:

Of course, AI has also had a meaningful impact on our product team’s velocity. If anything, the age of AI lends itself better to Shape Up by allowing us to think more deeply and be more ambitious about what to prioritize.

Lower overall platform activity this week even while we say a modest increase in the number of signups. August is commonly the quietest month on Parabol, so we expect lower figures still before a September “back to school” rebound.

…added a developers portal to our webpage. Our hope is this will make it easier to discover that Parabol has an API and what people can do with it.

…published a video showing off dark mode. As search engine referral volume is dropping off and content marketing is becoming harder, investing in other channels has become a priority for us. Here’s what we shared:

…sent our July What’s New email. In the first few days, this email was delivered to some 25,000 people with a 16.4% open rate. Not bad!

…ship some improvements to the way AI-assisted grouping works in our retrospective activity.