A look into the future (and past) of Shortcut

Back in March we held our first virtual event. It was a success, which is why we’re excited to hold our next release event on May 26th at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern. This will be a shorter, 60 minute look at how to get the most from some of our newest features. We’ll cover:

• Monitoring and communicating progress with our new Roadmap features
• Working faster and more efficiently with the soon to be released Command Bar. Live the dream and never use your mouse again
• Making data driven decisions with our updated Cycle and Lead Time Charts and Cumulative Flow Diagram Chart
• Setting up a seamless workflow with our in-progress ProductBoard Integration
• Preview of future improvements to Teams and other features we have planned for the August release

Register to attend

Also, if you’d like to experience our last event, you can read and watch takeaways below:

Collaboration is key to success, whether you're in a small startup, gathered around your founder's kitchen table (well, virtual kitchen table) or in a large, successful org that has strict ship dates to hit. Collaboration can also be a struggle, especially in this era of remote work when all our colleagues are faces on a screen whose environments beyond the edges of those screens are not equal.

How do we tackle these issues and everything else? Your company is growing, your team has aggressive goals, and everyone needs to continue working better together.

On March 24th, we set out to help answer that question in our first official (and virtual) release event. Over the course of a few hours, we discussed:

• Our March releases alongside a look at upcoming features
• How to make sound decisions with deeper reporting insights
• How to bring technical and non-technical teams together
• Scaling your company from early stage to exit
• Best practices for big team collaboration

Our CEO and co-founder, Kurt Schrader, presented our keynote, showing off some of our newest features, like Teams and Roadmap, and diving into his (and our) vision for the future of Shortcut and Product Collaboration. Watch his keynote below:

Or watch the entire event here:

To sum up some of what we talked about: What do we see as the future of Product Collaboration?

We believe remote and distributed work is here to stay.

No matter how many people ultimately return to the office, lots and lots of folks will be working remotely. Maybe it’ll be a situation where employees are able to work from home two days a week. Maybe some of your colleagues will be in the office and some will be distributed. Or maybe your organization will be fully remote with no full-time home base. Regardless, there will be challenges around:

• Discoverability
• Communication
• Transparency

And those challenges are only going to grow as leaders, managers, product development teams, and cross-functional stakeholders continue to interact with each other as little thumbnails on a computer screen.

It’s important that planning and collaboration fully adapt to this era. A process that treats everything as if people were in the same room together, but now on video, cannot possibly be the best way to go about things.

Charles Burgess spoke to this in his talk on scaling your company from early stage to exit.

We believe that organizational design is at the center of how work is organized and how processes are built

The way a product development department (and your entire company) is organized as a 10 person startup is very different from a 200 person startup. Your tools need to grow and evolve with you to fit the needs of these different approaches to organization.

How do you collaborate with and incorporate feedback from people you don’t see every day? How do you separate actionable comments from background conversation?

Mani Kothari illustrated this in her talk on bringing technical and non-technical teams together.

Reporting should guide data-driven decision making

Reporting should not only be a way to prove value to leadership, it should be used by managers to optimize resourcing and identify areas to gain efficiency. Reporting can’t just be an area of last resort that you look at when forced to, but a useful tool that can help continually shape how you tackle the challenges that your business is absolutely going to encounter on a day-to-day basis. It’s not an end result, it’s a responsive feedback tool.

Matt Sheaffer dove into this in his talk on how to make sound decisions with deeper reporting insights. His team created a Customer Pain Score that tells them exactly when they should be focused on fixing bugs and problems, and exactly when they don’t need to worry much about it.

True collaboration requires tools to talk to each other

Products need to be able to talk to each other to create seamless workflows. This is more than just making integrations for every possible tool, but instead creating thoughtful connections that allow you and your team to do your best work without the tools getting in the way. If you want to update Stories from your Commits? You should be able to do that. Want to create a Story from a Slack conversation? You should be able to do that seamlessly too.

Shaun VanWeelden talked a bit about this in best practices for big team collaboration.

And don't forget, our next event is on May 26th at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern. Sign up here.