#493 – Rethinking Recurrence

This week we redeveloped the way recurring meetings are scheduled in Parabol.

It’s the first of 2 cool down weeks between Shape Up Cycles here at Parabol. That means our development team is free to work on whatever it wishes: exploration, bug fixes, or rethinking old features.

In the past few weeks we received feedback from two separate enterprise customers that they weren’t happy with the way scheduling recurring meetings worked.

First was the bug. We had introduced a regression when we switched to a better library for helping manage our recurrence rules behinds the scenes. The bug only reared its ugly head whenever the owner of a recurring meeting tried to update its scheduled time, which thankfully turned out to be rather rare.

More pressing however was a friction users experienced when they tried to schedule a recurring meeting in the future: they’d be surprised to see that a meeting would be started for them immediately. This was particularly bothersome on teams that had notifications set up as it would notify users that the retro intended to start later was starting now!

When we built this feature, long ago, this was an intentional design tradeoff chosen in order to expedite feature delivery. Our architecture simply lacked the concept of creating a meeting series without starting a meeting first.

Now, when you set up a recurring meeting series to start its first meeting in the future, it won’t start a meeting right away (just like you’d expect!)

Your calendar invitations have snazzy new links with a more descriptive “slug” in the meeting link:

And you can edit the recurrence settings easily from the Parabol meetings dashboard:

We love hearing user feedback. Truly, it is one of the only ways our product gets better.

If you have feedback, let us know at: https://parabol.co/contact

We recorded further declines in usage this week, likely in part due to the U.S. holiday.

…started cooldown week 1 of 2 before Cycle 14 begins. In addition to fixing up the way scheduled meetings work, we’re also providing some useful deployment configuration changes that will allow Parabol to be administered in single-tenant environments more easily. We’ll likely write much more about this in the near future.

…continued shaping our Team Health feature.

…began some financial modeling work to best determine how to spend our resources in the near future.

…begin cooldown week 2 of 2.