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Frozen Shrub Banner for Parabol Friday Ship 240 2021-Feb-19

This week, we stood by our colleagues affected by the weather in the southern U.S., while we launched a major new feature, Sprint Poker.

Freezing weather and winter storms caused havoc for our employees in Texas. Several had to go lengths to stay safe and keep themselves and their loved ones warm. One employee, “ran out of things to burn,” and trekked over a mile on foot with their partner and two animals in tow over ice and snow to stay at a friend’s house with power and heat to stay warm. Another employee had received a half-dozen baby chicks the week prior, and needed to stay huddled around the fire to keep their four children, pets, and poultry to keep from freezing.

Meanwhile our distributed team checked in on their welfare, took over tasks, and continued on. Tuesday, February 15th was a big day: the launch of Parabol’s newest meeting type, Sprint Poker, into production.

Our culture of writing everything down and sharing transparently helped us to adapt: marketing materials still went out on time, calendar appointments were rescheduled, code was reviewed, sprints were kicked off, and so on.

We’re happy to report everybody is safe and sound, and things appear to be returning to normal.

Metrics

Parabol Metrics for Friday Ship 240 2021-Feb-19

Good-ish metics this week. On the plus side, our very top-of-funnel metrics are going bonkers. 13% more new users this week than last! Also positive is seeing the total number of Sprint Poker meetings already exceed our Check-In meeting format, and a higher number of total meetings ran this week than last. On the not so great side: we’re seeing a slight slowdown of new user registrations and fewer MAU that last week, overall.

This week we…

wrote our second guest post for Agile Sherpas. This one on agility and content marketing (meta!)

shipped two versions, v5.36.0 and v6.0.0, into production. v5.36.0 released Sprint Poker into production while v6.0.0 made a couple of important hotfixes: we fixed a regression where users couldn’t delete retro prompts, and folks who missed meetings weren’t receiving summaries.

processed Sprint Poker feedback into new backlog issues.

deployed a new private instance for a customer. Private, single-tenant instances are something we anticipate doing more of this year.

Next week we’ll…

conduct a number of later-stage hiring interviews.

continue on with Sprint 74. We decided to schedule this sprint out a week longer than usual, to make scheduling around our team retreat easier.


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