Uptake

Friday Ship #290 | February 10th, 2022

Parabol makes an open-source async agile 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 had a look at how one of our newest product features is performing by analyzing its usage data.

In mid-December, we released a new product feature to make it easier for teams to form groups of reflection cards during retrospective meetings to help them better surface important topics to discuss. Internally this feature was given the codename ‘Spotlight’. Making grouping as fast and as easy as possible is one of the most important things our product must get right.

We were curious — how has adoption of this new feature gone?

Parabol collects high-level usage information via Twilio Segment. Before we launch a new feature, we discuss what learning goals we have and add code to collect data for later analysis. Below are some analyses for our new grouping feature.

We’ve learned our new grouping feature is used:

…in roughly 16% of meetings, and 2% more often if that meeting has more than 14 participants

…by roughly 3% of total meeting participants

Establishing these baseline data help us to understand where we are now, and consider if we should take any actions to make this feature easier to discover and use. For now, for this grouping feature, we won’t be making any near-term changes. We’ll just keep watching to see how these data change.

Future Questions & Analyses

The answer to any good question should raise several more. In the future we plan to learn:

• Do teams who use our new grouping feature more efficiently form groups — that is to say, do they spend less time in the Group phase of our retrospective meeting compared to those who do not use this feature?
• Are the groups formed denser, do they contain more cards?

Metrics

We’re continuing to see steep gains on marketing traffic, new user registrations, and MAU. Only the number of meetings ran were down this week — even though we saw a new all-time high for the number of Sprint Poker meetings ran.

This week we…

…ran Sprint Planning for our Growth and Product teams in a new way. The Growth team grew frustrated with the mix of sizes of stories on their backlog, and have adopted agile epics as a way to keep track of smaller steps toward a larger goal. The Product team have changed the manner we’re using our own Sprint Poker tool by opening a Sprint Poker activity for the next sprint immediately after the current sprint begins. Team members are invited to add stories to the Sprint Poker meeting as the sprint proceeds and vote if they believe the story belongs in the next sprint. Our Product Manager then uses the team’s input to plan the next sprint, taking the votes and sizings into consideration. This has made planning the next sprint much easier, and harness much more of our team’s intelligence.

…completed a project to setup Infrastructure-as-Code pipelines for a number of Parabol Core Services on GCP. As Parabol grows, so too do our application hosting needs and sophistication. Parabol today relies on and is flexible across a number of cloud providers depending on our client’s preferences or needs. This week, we laid some foundation to make deploying to GCP easier.

…assisted our U.S. Department of Defense users in getting a new instance stood up. We recently made it easier for Parabol’s users within the U.S. Department of Defense get up and going with Parabol on their secure private networks by supplying them with infrastructure configurations which confirm to their specification codenamed, “Big Bang”.

…responded quickly to a user request to be able to query Jira stories by their ticket number in Sprint Poker. We are so happy this user shared feedback letting us know searching for stories in Jira didn’t work as they expected. We’re not Jira users ourselves and we didn’t realize that ticket numbers weren’t part of Jira’s full-text search API by default. We’ve now made that feature work the way we intended. We’ll ship these changes out in our next release.

…shipped v6.46.0 into production. Aside from fixing a bevy of bugs, we’ve added some cool stuff including Datadog RUM to help us track down some pesky front-end bugs; shipping a huge suite of new retrospective templates (soon we’ll feature these on our website, too); and improving our dashboard’s filter drop-downs, they now let you type to search and narrow down long lists:

Next week we’ll…

…wrap up the Product Team’s Sprint #96.

…welcome some new Parabol members in joining our team. Writing this makes us realize how long it’s been since we’ve made a round up of some of the new folks we’ve hired. We’ll fix this in an upcoming Friday Ship, soon!

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