Our March release recap and rundown
Blog

Our March release recap and rundown

Tiffany Go
Head of Product Marketing
April 2, 2021

Last Wednesday marked our first official (and virtual) Release Event.

We showed off new features like Teams and our upcoming Productboard Integration, shared great insights and best practices from Shortcut customers, heard our CEO's vision for the future of Product Collaboration, and showed off some of the exciting things that are coming to Shortcut in 2021!

Throughout the next week or so, we'll share each session from the event. Starting today, with a recap of the 2021 Product Update that closed out the event, presented by Nik Pai, our VP of Product, and Tiffany, our Senior Product Marketing Manager. Why start with the last session? In this case, it's because that session, as the two presenters might imply, was the most product oriented.

Here's the recording of our 2021 Product Update session from our event:

You can also access the full video of our March event, if you'd like to kick back and watch the whole thing.

Product Focus Areas for 2021

This year we're setting out to help your team do a number of different things:

Monitor and Communicate Progress

Our continued Roadmap enhancements will help you communicate up to leadership and out to stakeholders, sharing upcoming plans alongside full visibility into the progress being made towards the completion of those plans. Plus we'll be adding more monitoring functionality and additional Roadmap enhancements so that everyone has access to the views they need to understand what's going on.

Organize Your Work by Team

Last week we launched Teams to help our users make deeper connections between teammates, the work those teammates own, and the processes those teammates use to help them better organize and operation as a team. The new Teams feature is foundational to Shortcut's future, which means we'll absolutely continue investing in it to ensure its even more powerful and useful.

Measure Performance

We launched a series of new charts to help you and your teams the insights you need to make data-driven decisions. We're certainly not stopping with these: expect even more filtering and customization capabilities to come.

Integrate More of Your Tools

Our upcoming Productboard Integration will make it easier for product teams to connect their product planning to the development work found in Productboard. Also, the preceding sentence came up only one mention short of tying the Guinness World Record for most mentions of the word product in a single sentence.

Here's what we shipped as part of our March Release Event

Visualize and communicate planned work with the Roadmap

Available in Shortcut Labs

The Roadmap gives a clear view into how work larger initiatives is progressing, helping keep everyone aligned on the highest priorities. The Roadmap makes it easy to visualize and communicate planned work to leadership and everyone else in your org.

The latest update to Roadmap allow you to:

  • See Milestones alongside Epics: Connect your short-term efforts to long-term business goals
  • Additional Filters: We’ve added more filters to customize views by Quarter, Milestones, Epic States, Labels, Teams and more to zoom into the initiatives you care about the most.
  • Share unique URLs: Share progress after you've set up customized views.

Organize your Shortcut with Teams

We added Teams to be the default and most powerful way to organize work by team in Shortcut (very appropriate of us, we think) and better align the way you work in Shortcut with the way your team likes to work in general.

Our initial release of Teams provides the ability to:

  • Assign Stories, Epics and Iterations to a Team
  • Use the Teams Filter across Shortcut to zoom in to quickly find work most relevant to your Team
  • Structure of Teams allows for increase collaboration and visibility
  • Connect a Shortcut Team to a Slack Channel
  • Measure Team performance

See Teams in action:

New Charts & Reports for data-driven decisions

We’ve released new charts to help you measure performance and get the insights you need to make data-driven decisions.

Use the Iteration Velocity Chart for powerful sprint insights

The Iteration Velocity Chart can help you track and understand your team’s historical average output across Iterations and sprints. This is a great chart to use for measuring the impact of changes to process or planning as you can quickly see the impact of the change on your team's average Iteration velocity over time.

Improve process, identify bottlenecks and more with the Time Spent in Workflow and Created vs Completed Charts (Shortcut Labs)

We released two new charts in Shortcut Labs to help you improve process and efficiency:

  • The Time Spent in Workflow State chart shows how long completed Stories spend in each Workflow State.
  • Created vs Completed Chart: Shows work that created and work that was completed within a period of time.

What's coming next in 2021!

Monitor and communicate progress

We'll continue pushing to provide useful, actionable detail that doesn't overwhelm you with too much information on one screen. Here's what you'll see next:

  • More performative and informative Roadmap functionality: Presentation View, Custom Quarters, and Save an Exported Image
  • Progress reporting for better transparency and visibility: Status fields, Progress Dashboard, Fuzzy dates and Estimates vs Actual Dates
  • Custom Views for additional customization of your data to help you highlight what’s most important to you

Organize your team and their work

Teams are a core element of Shortcut’s future and now the most powerful way to represent you team. As such, it'll be continually updated and improved. Here ‘s what we’re building next in Teams:

  • Team-to-Workflow connections to better represent and standardize your Teams’ processes
  • Advanced filter and view options to quickly focus-in on your Team’s work
  • Saved views or Spaces per Team create common views for all Team members to enjoy
  • Advanced Team overview page to provide better overview aggregated and summarized work

Reporting on performance

Our goals are to help your teams stay productive and efficient by giving your organization the insights you need to make data-driven decisions

  • Cycle Time / Lead Time Chart improvements: Customize which Workflow is used for to generate an individual report
  • Enhance Filters by Story Owner, rolling time ranges, and removing weekends from reporting

Integrate with your favorite tools

Your project management tool (you know, us) should fit right in the middle of the rest of your process. That's why we're very excited about our partnership with Productboard. The Shortcut Productboard Integration will make it easier for product teams to seamlessly connect their product planning to their product development work. You'll be able to:

  • Push a Productboard feature into Shortcut
  • Sync development status back into Productboard

2021 Projects in research

Here are some of the 2021 Projects our product team is researching:

  • Permissioning: Detailed control over what members of your Org can see and do within Shortcut
  • Custom Fields: Custom Story and Epic fields that enable Shortcut to better reflect the way your organization works and collaborates
  • WIP Limits: Set a limit on works-in-progress (WIP) to control the maximum amount of work that can exist in each status of a workflow
  • Subtasks: Create subtasks of tasks within a Story that can be assigned and tracked individually
  • Search enhancements: Improve searching and filtering of data
  • Reporting enhancements: We'll be continually making additions to our reporting capabilities.

To share your opinions about any of the projects above, get in touch with our product team and tell them all about it! Schedule time with them here:

https://calendly.com/clubhouse-build-research

We look forward to having you be #tunedintoclubhouse with us at our next release event in late May / early June!

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