Next up for Write: Story and Doc relationships, better discoverability, and more!
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Next up for Write: Story and Doc relationships, better discoverability, and more!

Heather Purdy
Product Lead at Shortcut
April 14, 2020

It's kinda hard to believe that we've now reached the first month of Q2. Time feels strangely removed from the entire concept of business quarters. Still, here at Shortcut we've continued moving forward on all our plans for the year and this includes our work on Write. So we want to share some updates on the current status of the private beta, eligibility, and new features, while also previewing the roadmap for the next quarter.

Read on to see what we have planned for Write in Q2.

What's coming in Q2

Write <> Build Functionality

With Write <> Build Relationships, we aim to bring your documentation front and center so that you can easily find the relevant Docs at the moment when you're actively doing the work.

In Q1 we launched Epic <> Doc Relationships. These Epic <> Doc Relationships allow you to create powerful connections between the documentation for a feature/project/etc. and the Epic that holds all that work. The new Relationship Panel on the right side of Docs shows a summary of which Epics (and Stories and Docs) are related to that Doc. Relationships can be added by + mentioning an Epic in a Doc or adding the relationship from the Relationship Panel.

See the different Story, Epic, and Doc relationships in the Relationship Panel.

There's a new Docs section within the Epic Detail Page, where you can now see all the Docs that are related to that Epic, as well as add a new Doc relationship.

Attach multiple Docs to an Epic

You can also create a new Doc from here and it will automatically become related to that Epic.

Create a Doc from an Epic

Coming soon...Story <> Doc Relationships

Building on this Epic <>Doc Relationship, we've now begun work on adding Story <> Doc Relationships. With this update, we'll bring all the same functionality to Stories that we brought to Epics and their relationships with Docs.

Additionally, we're adding in new functionality for Stories with the ability to create a Story directly from the text inside your Docs. This new feature will help you quickly turn your spec Docs into Stories without all the copying and pasting.

Create Stories from a Doc - Title only.

Create a single Story with the Title and Description pulled in from the Doc text.

Story created with Title and Description.

Save time by creating multiple Stories at once, Think of all the time you'll save by taking the list of Action Items from your standups and turning them into Stories!

Create multiple Stories from a list.

We'll also be bringing the power of Write <> Build Relationships to Iterations, Projects, Milestones, and Labels. These four relationship types will work much like Epic <> Doc Relationships, except in this first release they won't be available in the + mention lookup or the Relationship Panel lookup.

Discoverability

As our Beta teams have created more and more content, we've been hearing more and more feedback that teams are facing challenges organizing their content and then finding that content once it's been created.

This quarter we're going to focus on two of the issues we hear about most often:

  1. "It's hard to find a Doc if you don't know the Doc title."
  2. "It's hard to find Docs for a specific group, team, squad, project, etc.".  

If you'd like to participate in our ongoing user research around Discoverability, please schedule a time to chat with us here. You don't need to be in the Write Beta to participate! We'd love to hear the challenges you and your team come up against when organizing and finding your content.

Coming up you can expect to see the following updates to help with discoverability:

  • The ability to search on the content of a Doc (in addition to searching the Doc title)
  • New views, such as Docs you've recently viewed
  • New filtering and sorting options
  • Updates to the UI for Doc listing pages and Collections
  • The introduction of Shortcut Groups into Write

☝Note: If you haven't tried using Groups, we highly recommend you check it out. This powerful new feature allows you to create groups within Shortcut, assign people to them, and @mention and notify Groups. There's more great functionality to come soon, such as assigning Groups to Iterations and more!

Other things we're thinking about

In addition to everything above that we have planned for this quarter, we've been thinking about what to do further down the line thanks to great feedback from customers. Here are some (but definitely not all!) of the other items that we know are top of mind for a lot of teams.

  • More Functionality for Tables
  • Improvements to Doc Comments (including the ability to resolve comments and see a history of comments made)
  • Doc Version History (including the ability to revert a doc to a prior version)
  • Table of Contents (including the ability to link to specific sections of a doc)

Availability and Eligibility

Thank you to everyone who has expressed interest in joining our Beta. Our Beta continues to be closed at this time but you can sign up to receive updates about it here. We are working toward opening up the Write Beta to be self-service accessible to anyone on our Standard or Enterprise plans. We'll keep you posted as we get closer to that date.

If you have any feedback reach out to support@clubhouse.io, tweet us @clubhouse, or join our Slack community. If you are currently in the Write Beta and in the Slack Community, please reach out to join our #write-beta channel. Your feedback is incredibly important to us as we create a better way for software teams to ideate, document, and collaborate together.

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