New features, faces and a fresh coat of paint: Shortcut’s 2018 in review

To kick this off, I want to first thank our customers for their continued support of our product and company. This year has been a real journey for Shortcut and it couldn’t have happened without the folks who continue to use, support, recommend, and feedback on our product.

It feels a little unoriginal to describe 2018 as a “big year” for Shortcut, but it’s honestly really hard to think of a more suitable adjective. If pressed to be more specific, I’d describe 2018 as “a year of significant change and growth” for us. We’ve seen many new features, improvements and faces added to the product and team.

We started the year with a focus to deliver on better visualizations, more integrations, and building out an enterprise feature set to support even larger customers. Before we dive into how we did that, though, here are some key stats about where we’re at:

• We’ve surpassed 20,000 active users.
• Over 1,500 organizations are using Shortcut.
• 160,000 Stories created last month (November), our most active month ever.

Here's how 2018 looked for us:

Always be shipping!

In 2018, we focused heavily on launching new features, integrations and infrastructure improvements. Here’s what we shipped this year:

New Shortcut features

The intent of Shortcut is to bring everyone on every team together to build better products. To help us achieve that (never ending!) mission, this year, we...

• Improved team visibility by giving users the ability to grant read-only access to key-stakeholders with Observers.
• Empowered teams to work on the bigger things in a way that suits them with custom Epic workflows.
• Helped our users to collaborate on-the-go with our new iOS app, then later adding push notifications and drag and drop Stories.
• Added Workspaces to enable efficient collaboration within different groups in the same organization.
• Increased the velocity at which users can create Stories for common Features, Bugs and Chores with Story Templates.

New Integrations

It’s really important to us that teams are able to use Shortcut with the tools they use every day. So this year, on the integrations front, we…

• Made bug tracking easier with new integrations from Rollbar, Sentry and Honeybadger
• Allowed teams to better collaborate and communicate their priorities with a StatusHero integration.
• Made it simple for teams to connect user feedback to Shortcut Stories with our ZenDesk integration.

Stack improvements

As well as launching new features and integrations, we also worked hard to make what we already have better. In 2018 we...

• Rebuilt our search infrastructure to make it easier for users to find work in Shortcut. Then, a little later on, we added new operators to make it possible to search across time).
• Implemented the Fastly CDN to improve how quickly our web app loads - more on this exciting change very soon!
• Used ES modules to speed up our front end development process, meaning we can build and ship even faster.

Building for scale

After experiencing the headaches of trying to make tools built for small teams work for large teams (and vice versa), both Andrew and I knew that Shortcut had to be a product built with scale in mind. We knew that what we built had to be a suitable option for any team of any size.

To make that happen we first introduced a “Small Plan” to provide more affordable pricing for smaller teams. With this plan, any team of up to 10 users were now only charged a flat rate of $10 a month (or $100 annually).

Later in the year, at the other end of the spectrum, we launched our Enterprise Edition. This enables larger teams to build and collaborate, at scale, by offering SSO, priority support, dedicated account management, volume discounts, and more.

Finally, we made it possible for companies and individuals already using Shortcut to earn rewards (such as billing discounts and fun prizes) with our triple-sided referral program.

Growing our company and brand

All of this progress doesn’t happen without having a robust, dynamic team behind it - as our product has grown, Shortcut as a company has grown too.

This year, Shortcut tripled in size. We made important hires right across the board in the areas of Engineering, Product, Customer Success and Marketing, as well as improving our back-office operations with hires in Finance and People.

In November, we got a new home for our larger team and moved into our new office. We’re really looking forward to using this space next year to host events for the engineering and product communities.

Finally after more than a few pieces of, um let’s say “constructive”, feedback about our old logo, we partnered with an outside agency (Ueno) in the back-half of the year to breathe new life into the Shortcut brand. This resulted in a new brand identity, website and mascot who we’ve affectionately dubbed “Dot”.

A look ahead to 2019:

So that was Shortcut’s 2018 - a pretty “big” year for us to say the least and I expect that 2019 will be no different. In fact, we already have an exciting roadmap of new features, improvements, and programs that I can’t wait to share with you all.

In the meantime, I’ll sign off by saying “Happy Holidays” wherever you may be celebrating them and see you next year!

Kurt.