#491 Shaping Features in 2026
Friday Ship #491 | May 15th, 2026
This week we iterated on prototypes for the oft-requested ‘Task Review’ feature in Parabol Retrospectives.
It’s remarkable how much the craft of software development has changed in the past year. Until this year, we’d spend the majority of our teams’ time iterating, debating, and validating on digital mock-ups of features before writing code. Now, we’re iterating directly on fully-coded prototypes. AI, of course, has enabled this shift.
There are some tremendous advantages to this way of working but also some pitfalls, too.
Beware The Sirens’ call to ship too quickly…
Have a look at this graph of production incidents for two competitive products, GitHub and GitLab:
Notice anything? More AI = more incidents.
Iterate with AI, verify with humans
We’ve found a few simple guidelines to increase our pace of iteration while avoiding the pitfall of shipping too quickly:
- Work in smaller increments
- Iterate until you fall in love
- Re-write for humans and maintainability
- Humans review production code
- Don’t ship until its clean
An example: task review in retrospectives
At the beginning of the week, Drew on our sales team the following customer feedback:
During my demo with ~10 users at [Company X], they were unanimous in wanting some way to have a quick overview of what was actually accomplished by their team between sprints, before the reflect phase of a retro. We’ve talked about this idea forever, so just adding one more stick to the bundle.
We’re far ahead of planned work this development cycle, so I decided to take this feature on. I began by writing a prompt containing a feature spec and asked our AI harness to break the work into smaller increments that I could independently review and verify. I shared the first iteration with the team. Here’s a screenshot:
Drew (sales) responded with:
I’m sure I’ll also get a lot of thoughts on it (e.g. the classic “i should be able to see what retros/discussion items these tasks originated from!” ) but those will be good problems to have.
I’m going to share a couple screenshots with my contacts there to show we are keeping their needs top of mind and to get any feedback they have
Terry (design) offered:
If the task originated from a discussion topic, there could be a link to the topic URL at the bottom of the card: [link to Figma designs]
Matt (developer) wrote:
Yeah curious to see what the customers say! I like it. I want a shorter title for it, maybe “Task Review”? Still not sure…
And now were were iterating!
Three major iterations later, a pull request was created for human review.
Metrics
The number of meetings ran this week rebounded to nominal levels. Platform usage continues to decline slightly. We’ve been looking into this and it seems an overly aggressive monetization tactic may partly be to blame. More on this in a few weeks as we analyze and experiment further.
This week we…
…build a new proof of concept for adding meeting transcriptions to Parabol using Google Meet. We’ve been experimenting with exactly how to add transcription to Parabol for years. This looks like the most promising approach yet! We’re producing another iteration now…
…iterated designs for an improved Team Health feature. Our users and customers have long desired some ability to customize and report data gathered during the team health phase. We’re adding iterations of this feature to our next development cycle.
Next week we’ll
…wrap up development Cycle 13. Our ShapeUp cooldown week is next week!
Jordan Husney
Jordan is Parabol’s CEO and Head of Product. He was previously a Director at Undercurrent, where he advised C-Suite teams of Fortune 100 organizations on the future of work. Jordan has an engineering background, holding several patents in distributed systems and wireless technology. Jordan lives in Minneapolis, MN.