Bugs

Friday Ship #247 | April 9th, 2021

Parabol, Inc.
Parabol Focus

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Parabol makes a retrospective meeting app free to use with up to 2 teams. If you like what you read, please subscribe, follow, like, or hit 👏 .

This week we disabled our special easter egg feature for April Fools Day from the code that unleashed digital insects whenever a team discussed “bugs” during a retrospective meeting.

The idea for our April Fool’s easter egg came to us during our own product team’s retrospective. One of us thought, “what if bugs crawled across the screen when teams were talking about bugs?” One day later, the pull request was merged to master. We used this excellent piece of open source by Auz to make it happen.

Here was one reaction that came in via our support channel:

The feature went live on March 24th and we disabled it April 7th. More than 500 meetings were held where folks saw bugs crawl across their screen. We sincerely hope no displays were harmed.

Metrics

Sweet and sour metrics this week. Strong top of funnel growth continues, while user activity dropped a bit. With Easter Sunday as a part of this week it’s possible what we’re seeing is a disruption to many team’s regular rhythms. We’ll be on the lookout for a rebound next week…

This week we…

published a blog on How to Design Inclusive Meetings for Introverts with 23 techniques for facilitators to borrow for their next meeting. It’s a long, great read.

drafted the first in potentially a series of landing pages that give an explicit comparison of Parabol against tools that are commonly used as a substitute. Occasionally when somebody makes a request to buy Parabol for their company, one of their senior colleagues asks, “how is Parabol any different than tool X? Can’t we just use tool X?” This page will help to give our advocates clear information to share.

changed the primary CTA on our homepage from offering users to try a demo to creating an account directly. Running an A/B test clearly suggested this was the best course of action, so voila!

began some early work to revise our Slack integration notification designs. Here’s a sampling of a direction we may take:

shipped v6.6.0 and wrapped up Sprint 76.

Next week we’ll…

kick off Sprint 77. Goals of this sprint will be to get our new meetings view into production as well as enhancing our service monitoring capabilities.

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Leave a public response here, or write to us.

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