#451 – Making Bets, What Now?

This week we’ve been focused on shipping an all-new version of an old feature, our meeting summaries. Although we’ve made some improvements over the years, this has been overdue for a fresh take. While meeting summaries sound super exciting 😏, what I’m keen on sharing is how our bets—the features we’re investing in—are stacking up. Let’s dig in.

The meeting summaries will be built on two new features: Pages and Insights.

The bet behind Pages is that we can reduce friction in how folks get information and knowledge in and out of meetings and collaborative activities. We think there’s a market for a tool that drives meetings and workflows with embedded knowledge management.

The bet behind Insights is that leaders and teams will make use of trends and insights from data across meetings and teams to make better decisions and plans. We want to help folks understand what they already know and help them answer the question: what now?

The new meeting summary pages will allow folks to customize their insights by asking questions of their meeting data. They’ll be able to shape the notes and outputs of the meeting directly, and organize them alongside other team knowledge. Soon, we plan to enrich this with video call transcriptions. In the future, we may offer summary templates that users can customize.

While we hope these summary pages are a big improvement, we’re eager to learn a few things:

Perhaps the biggest bet is on the platform as a whole. We think there’s a virtuous cycle between getting information and knowledge into a collaborative activity (via embedded knowledge management, integrations, and imports), enabling workflows that help teams make sense of that data and decide what to do next, and then building those learnings back into the organization’s knowledge and insights.

To support this, we’re building a tool that powers customizable workflows for many meeting formats (e.g. retros and estimation), collaborative activities (e.g. brainstorming and prioritization), and team processes (e.g. collecting feedback or team health surveys). The bet here is that by enabling more processes across an organization, the knowledge, trends, and insights gained will inform cross-functional decisions and planning. Teams can get started with Parabol by reaching for templated solutions to the problem they’re trying to solve, and the platform will adapt to them from there.

This is the product roadmap we’re focused on; we’re iterating toward this vision. So we make bets upon bets upon bets, learn, and ask ourselves: what now?

We’re seeing some of the slowdown typical for the summer months. Meanwhile behind the scenes we’re seeing better activation with new customers thanks to improvements made to onboarding by the sales team. We’re seeing better product/market fit in the meeting formats we have, so we want to expand by supporting more of the workflows that organizations use for smooth operation, decision making, and planning.

…proposed strategy to the company. Our process gives every employee a chance to question, understand, and give feedback before we commit to our strategy for the trimester.

…signed a contract to join Platform One’s MarketPlace. The MarketPlace helps DoD teams discover and deploy software solutions that are ready to go.

…shipped meeting transcriptions behind a feature flag. We find that a lot of folks don’t have a habit of writing things down in a meeting—or they rely on a single person, like a team lead, to do so. We’re betting that video call transcriptions will help teams keep better track of their insights and takeaways, so that they can focus on what to do next instead of better note taking.

…ship meeting summaries as pages. We expect to have this behind a feature flag soon so we can start working out any bugs or UX hiccups.

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Please write to us.