Anniversary Release Event Recap

Last week we hosted our Anniversary Release Event where we celebrated 10 years of Shortcut and took a look into what’s on our roadmap as we head into the new year. Our Product Team shared some exciting announcements about new upcoming features, all to help your team execute more effectively and make it easier to share status and progress. They covered:

• Shortcut’s origin story and our core mission to help teams get work done and share status across their orgs
• Best practices for keeping work on track using Swimlanes on the Status page, the new Stories page, and the improved Cumulative Flow Diagram
• How agile development teams can stay focused with Work in Progress Limits
• A preview of Subtasks - a highly requested feature - to break down Stories
• A sneak peek at our upcoming support for Triage, capturing user requests, managing conversations with threads, and tracking Story progress - all within Slack!

You can watch the full presentation on-demand now or read about our upcoming release plans below.

Keep Focus

Now you can personalize your workspace to best fit your team’s needs and help keep focus with the ability to toggle features on or off! Only owners and admin roles have permission to change feature toggles. 

Set Work in Progress Limits

Work in Progress (WIP) Limits are coming soon to Shortcut! WIP Limits help agile teams stay focused and efficient by setting recommended caps on ongoing work, reducing bottlenecks, and ensuring that teams finish Stories before starting new ones.

Using WIP Limits, you can set a desired limit on the number of Stories in development for your team within each workflow. If this limit is exceeded, it will be visibly indicated in your Kanban view. Sign up for early access.

Break down work with Subtasks

We're excited to announce that Subtasks are coming soon to Shortcut!🙌 Subtasks are a new layer in the hierarchy that brings nuanced flexibility to breaking down work. With Subtasks, teams can divide Stories into detailed, manageable pieces, whether it’s for a feature, bug fix, or chore.

Subtasks can be used in two main ways: first, to break down a Story into essential tasks, like when engineering has multiple components to complete before a Story is ready to ship. Second, they allow for cross-functional collaboration by dividing a Story into tasks for engineering, product, design, marketing, and support to deliver a solution collectively.

Similar to Stories, with Subtasks you can add tables, attachments, diagrams, and more. Subtasks can be linked to Stories across the workspace as blockers, dependencies, or related tasks, and you can attach pull requests or merge requests. 

Choose how to view Subtasks: display them as standalone cards in Kanban view or nest them within Stories for a clearer visual of progress. This flexibility helps teams visualize the true status of their work and identify any dependencies or blockers that need attention.

Supporting the Triage Process with Slack Integration enhancements

We’re enhancing our support for triage - a crucial way teams manage the steady flow of incoming feature requests, bug reports, and new ideas. These requests come from many sources, like users and internal teams, and are often communicated through Slack. Reporting Stories directly from Slack is already possible, but once a request is logged, it can be challenging to track its progress - whether it’s been picked up, delivered, or is awaiting updates.

To close this loop, we’re working on making the entire triage process accessible within Slack. Soon, you’ll be able to report and monitor the status of Stories without leaving Slack, making it especially helpful for teams like Support and Sales who don’t regularly use Shortcut. They’ll receive notifications when Stories are shipped or delivered, ensuring everyone stays informed and can follow up with customers at the right time.

We’re also planning to make Slack notifications even more granular, giving you updates on more specific actions and events.

Experience and performance optimization for the Stories Page

The new Stories page has improved how you navigate and manage work, making everything flow more smoothly. We’re rolling out some slick updates to make loading, scrolling, and drag-and-drop even smoother - especially noticeable for larger teams! We’re also updating table layouts for better UI density, so you can scan lists faster. Both features are planned to be in beta by the end of the quarter. If you’re still using the old page, now’s the time to switch over. 🙌

Support for Team Methodologies

We’re excited to bring more tools to support the way your team works. Look out for new features like team-level labels and custom fields, plus a steady stream of small updates and bug fixes to keep things running smoothly. Check out our weekly release notes to stay in the loop, and don’t hesitate to reach out with ideas on how we can make Shortcut work even better for you!

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This is only the beginning of what we have planned. We'd love your feedback as we launch these new features; just drop us a line in our Community Slack to tell us what you think.

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