#497 Redesigning Team Health

This week we worked together to increment our designs on an upcoming major revision of the way our Team Health measurement feature will work in Parabol.

Parabol’s Team Health feature was released exactly 3 years ago, in June 2023. At the time it was one of the most popularly-requested features, particularly by users at Enterprises who wanted to justify the purchase of Parabol and show that we could “tick all the boxes” when compared to competitors’ tools. Our feature was initially minimal: it’s just a subjective pulse check at the team level, no organizational reporting, no discussion, no analysis. Just a moment in a retrospective to assess how your teammates are feeling.

Tensions arose within our organization for how to start a large redesign of Parabol from fixed-format facilitation tool to a system that could express any collaborative workflow more easily. Designing a sort of “collaborative survey” that we called the “structured conversation” became the topic of intense design experimentation. We went looking for an initial target that would demonstrate what such a system could enable, and Team Health (that is, organizational measurement) emerged as a natural fit.

Meanwhile, some of our largest users also began asking for enhanced engagement reporting tools (see Friday Ship #414 and #449). We couldn’t quite hit on “the” solution. Recently we feel this has changed.

One central issue we’ve felt exists with the team health and engagement survey tools on the market is this: if a team member is feeling disengaged at work, pours their heart out in a survey, then what? Engagement metrics shouldn’t just be rolled up into a report that leadership may or may not take action upon. A great Team Health product should provide some agency to the team member themselves in improving their working conditions.

This week we had the insight that we should allow the results of team health measurements to be remembered in a new feature of our product we’re calling “Inspirations” which will be available in all of Parabol’s meeting types. These Inspirations can be recalled during retrospectives, for example, to be resurfaced so recurring tensions can be dealt with, rather than ignored.

Team Health is the current priority of our team, and as the feature is implemented, we look forward to sharing more with you here!

A slight rebound on weekly meetings ran while other indicators show a notable declining trend. Web traffic can be attributed to changes in user web behavior as large number of people adopt chatbots as their primary search interface. We’re keeping a keen watch on our monthly active users.

…we hunted down memory leaks and made Parabol’s realtime backbone steadier. After upgrading our Pages collaboration server, we spent the week tightening the bolts — closing subscription and document memory leaks, and making sure stale realtime connections finally disconnect instead of lingering.

…made the work drawer scrollable.

…revised a pull request to the open-source TipTap project. Parabol ****benefits a tremendous amount from being members of the open-source community. When we notice something within a dependency break, we try to fix it and share the fix with the rest of the world. A number of weeks back we spotted a small regression in the TipTap editor and worked to submit a fix.

…continue executing Shape Up cycle Week 4 of 6.