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Parabol Sprint Poker Template Selection Design

This week we made great strides in bringing our new agile Sprint Poker experience to life.

Pictured above are the near-final designs for the new template configuration dialog, here showing how someone can set up a new Sprint Poker activity and can configure how stories will be assessed. Eventually meeting participants will be able to judge a story by more than just story points, they’ll also be able to conduct activities that assess backlog items by other dimensions like “user value,” “tech debt,” “complexity,” “effort,” or whatever their team finds useful.

We also made quite a bit of progress in definition patterns for setting up meeting activities ahead of time. Below is a screenshot of a team leader using the Jira Query Language (JQL) to find stories to include in an upcoming backlog grooming session:

Parabol Sprint Poker Story Selection Design

Our designs are solid enough for the rest of the team to proceed and begin implementing the backend architecture needed to support them.

Metrics

2020-08-07 Parabol Friday Ship Metrics

User registration continues chugging along at a super-linear rate while product retention continues to soften. Our suspicion has been that the COVID cohort is special compared to previously more tightly targeted groups of users. As we look into the data we’re learning specifically how so.

We’ve also learned some valuable insights that apply more generally:

  • More than half of people who churned in July 2020 had met 0 or 1 times
  • Of users who did not meet, 11% eventually churned. Of users who met once, .13% churned. The difference here is stunning
  • In July, 72% of people who created an account then had a meeting. In June, that number was 78%

All of this points at getting people to run just one meeting is critical to them sticking around.

This week we…

published a fresh new layout for our Check-in Meetings 101 page.

kicked off a new cycle of research where we’ll be speaking with several users. User research is a job everybody does at Parabol. It’s a great way for us to stay close to the people we serve

create a fresh and final iteration of the consolidated tasks view. Keen eyes will note the new super quick way to filter between teams and the task view. We’re going to follow up with some additional enhancements for how tasks are handled in our system. Stay tuned!

2020-08-07 Parabol Task View with Archive Checkbox

…interviewed 3 candidates for the senior designer role.

ran some experiments enhancing the Parabol product experience with the GPT-2 language model. GPT-2 and GPT-3 have several applications in our product including: supporting automatic grouping, summarization, trend detection, and more. The early results seem very promising!

kicked off new partnerships with consultancies. Consultancies, including some of the big ones—are increasingly becoming more valuable partners in spreading Parabol to new users.

Next week we’ll…

kick off sprint #62. Focus: Sprint Poker implementation

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Leave a public response here, or write to us.