Collective Memory with Guru

Friday Ship #70 | 16-Jun-2017

Parabol makes real-time prioritization software for teams. We value transparency, so we share our progress here each week. If you like what you read, please subscribe, and don’t forget to hit 💚 .

People come together to achieve something larger than themselves. Collecting information and allowing others to easily find it, improve upon it, and eliminate what is no longer relevant is vital practice for people pursuing a collective mission. Parabol makes software that allows people to focus on what to work on together. However, from time-to-time, every team needs a solution to document how to work together. That’s why we’ve chosen Guru for housing our working processes and corporate structure.

Guru is a knowledge management system. It allows individuals to create brief bits of knowledge on Cards that are grouped into Collections. Guru has three killer features: 1) Cards are easily searchable 2) the knowledge kept on Cards has an expiration date 3) search and notifications are seamlessly integrated via Slack.

One of our uses for Guru is to store our team’s structure: who’s responsible for doing what job. For example, we have a role on our Product team called Metrics Collector stored in Guru that looks like this:

Now, suppose one of us who fills the role of Metrics Collector (above) goes on vacation, and needs another person to cover by collecting their metrics. We also store this process in Guru. For example:

Jordan can surface this process by simply searching for it in Slack, like so:

Being more effective per-head is the way we’ll outpace the competition, and we’re always looking for tools that give us extra leverage. By storing our structure and processes in an accessible way, we enable our organization to learn and evolve. As we hire, we’re also better prepared to scale, because our job expectations and working processes are already largely defined (and can easily change!)

Speaking of scaling, Parabol is hiring. If you’d like more information on joining our team, visit:

www.parabol.co/join

Metrics

Transparency means reporting bad news as readily as reporting good news. At first glance, this week’s news doesn’t look great: our core metrics were soft. So what might we learn?

• Our marketing metrics tend to flatline when we don’t push unique content beyond this Friday Ship series. The Fix: planned marketing activities scheduled for July, including a new strategy piece, and that Big News we keep sitting on.
• Our user metrics were significantly down*: we’re a startup team of four, doing All The Things and wearing All The Hats. We’ve recently earned the right to expand our team, which means intentionally allocating significant leadership focus away from new user acquisition, in favor of the recruiting activity we need to ensure we hit our target of adding two new FT teammates by late August. The Fix: we have plans for both new messaging and targeted acquisition testing to continue to develop our acquisition channels. That said, we know that startups always experience the see-saw/balancing act between internal growth and external growth. As soon as we earn the right to do the former, we’ve gained more bandwidth to do the latter.
• Our developer metrics were the bright spot as we hit a 5-week high in growth. This likely reflects our recent recruiting efforts, and we hope to see this line continue to rise over the summer.

*We also discovered that recent code changes broke the way we track our Weekly Active Teams and Weekly Active Organizations metrics. So, we’ll have to come up with a fix before we can begin tracking and reporting on these again.

This week we…

…worked on concepts for search, filtering, and inbox. We’re making it easier to find what users are looking for, and process batches of incoming work.

…expanded our menu component design to support multi-select. This will support new workflows including assigning projects to multiple team members, or applying multiple filters to the dashboard view.

…conceptualized pinned agenda items. Some teams have recurring agenda items week over week. We are looking at ways to support this functionality.

…worked on fine tuning Card Editor UI. You can see the rather hefty PR including enhancements such as implementing DraftJS, link editing, user mentions, emoji, etc. We are particularly excited about linking: one can paste a link, add a link to text, or write Markdown syntax. Our link editing menu is inspired by Google Docs: http://g.recordit.co/RQwStZxpVq.gif

…improved markdown support for the new card editor so technical folks don’t have to change how they are used to formatting text.

…discovered a nasty bug that was causing meetings to end prematurely for a handful of folks and shipped a hotfix. Here’s how we ship hotfixes to our production environment.

…formalized our Hiring Process with a goal of beating the current average of 52 days from application to offer. Please feel free to test how we’re doing :)

Next week we’ll…

…explore design concepts around reporting (deltas, burn-down, team performance, etc.)

…iterate on integration UX (focusing on GitHub use cases).

… finish testing and ship the integration epic.

What’s keeping us up at night…

…strategy is about choice. We clearly see our choices being reflected in our metrics. We hope our choices are good ones.