#378 – Introducing Kudos

This week we looked at how an early version of a kudos feature is performing in Parabol. Launched in early December, we’re experimenting with ways to recognize team members within Parabol activities. At Parabol, we use TacoBot in Slack for showing recognition, and regularly make space for kudos in our retrospectives and standups. It’s become a big part of our culture and we asked ourselves: how can we make this more dynamic and fun within the Parabol app?

We had a lot of ideas for what we could do with kudos, but we needed to solve a few problems first:

To answer these questions we decided to start by building on top of existing features. Users can emoji react to discussion comments and standup responses, and it’s an often-used feature by our own teams. We decided to use a relevant and popular emoji (❤️) and make this represent kudos. Now, when you emoji react with a heart the person who wrote the comment gets a notification that you gave them kudos. You also receive a notification that kudos was given, so you know that this functionality has changed (and you can do it again for others!).

While we continue to monitor the response to kudos (it’s looking good so far!), we’re working on the ability to give kudos with an @-mention and what a Slack integration could look like. We’d love to get some insights around them into the product too!

Have you tried kudos yet? Let us know what you think!

Metrics are expectedly down this week as holidays wrap up and work gets back in motion.

…got back into the swing of things after the holiday break

…opened an all-company retro in preparation for updating strategy

…welcome the rest of the team back from holidays