#454 – Airtime to Action
Friday Ship #454 | August 8th, 2025
Meeting insights lost to airtime?
This week, we reviewed user feedback from the last six weeks and focused on a recurring trend: a lot of meeting value lives in what’s spoken, not written down.
While our structured meeting formats help teams stay on track, we’ve seen that the surface areas for adding context, taking notes, and creating tasks often go underused.
Here are a few highlights from recent feedback:
- One team lead wants to keep stand-ups as low-effort as possible and suggested that a transcription feature could help.
- Another noted that their retro cards don’t contain much detail, so the AI summarization per topic isn’t that useful.
- And another shared that while they use transcription tools, they don’t know where to put the output or how to make use of it.
We’ve seen this pattern in our data too:
- Only 1 in 4 retro topics leads to a comment or task.
- The average retro card is about 10 words, and 90% of teams write fewer than 18.
- Stand-up responses are often just an issue number. At best the context is shared verbally.
We’ve known for a while that most of what’s said in a meeting stays in the air. It’s often the team lead juggling both understanding and documenting the discussion in real time.
A transcription feature?
How might Parabol help teams capture and summarize their airtime?
We’ve been exploring what a transcription feature could look like. The open question is whether it’s something worth building in 2025.
There are already a lot of ways to get transcripts:
- Zoom and other video call platforms offer this built-in.
- AI notetaker bots can be invited to meetings.
- Some tools record locally on one participant’s machine.
We’re not looking to compete with every transcription tool out there. But we are asking:
- If you’re already using Parabol for your meeting, how might we increase the value by making it easier to link the transcript to the Parabol activity?
- If you’re already generating transcripts, how might Parabol’s insights and summarization feature connect to and make sense of that information?
We’ve got some early napkin sketches. We want to help teams turn conversation into knowledge, next steps, and shared understanding. If transcription can support that, it’s worth a closer look.
Exchanging notes
Have you found a good meeting workflow that includes transcription?
How do you capture the insights and take-aways?
What’s working? What’s missing? We’re always keen to exchange field notes.
Metrics
This week saw a healthy number of Sprint Poker meetings. Active users are a bit down; we suspect a slump in usage with August vacationing. We’ve had fewer resources to devote to our content marketing. We suspect this might be a reason behind the downward trend in web sessions. However, we have found a good fit for product with the audience we have had.
This week we…
…chipped away at meeting summaries. We’ve been retrofitting summaries for all meeting types to use our new pages and insights features. We’re excited to launch these features soon.
…helped more PubSec customers move to Platform One. Long story short there has been a lot of change in how our customers in the Department of Defense are using budgets for the tools they need. We’ve been working with them closely to help this go as smoothly as possible.
…kicked off a 2-week cool-down period. During this time we look at user feedback, reflect on progress and learnings, and propose bets for our next work cycle.
Next week we’ll…
…release pages and insights to GA. We hope to complete the swing and finish testing.
Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Please write to us.
