Next up for Build: New Reports, Timeline View, Importers, and more!
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Next up for Build: New Reports, Timeline View, Importers, and more!

Joey Shampain
Senior Product Manager
April 15, 2020

It’s impossible to write about our plans for Q2 without acknowledging COVID-19. At Shortcut, we feel very lucky that all of our own employees are currently safe, healthy, and able to work from home. We are also grateful that our service remains useful regardless of whether or not our customers are all in an office together or working remotely. This means one of the best things we can do right now is continue improving Shortcut to ensure we’re able to better serve all of our customers. We have big plans for the future.

Here's what we're working on in Q2:

  • Cycle and Lead Time Reports
  • Timeline Views
  • Group enhancements
  • Slack and VCS Integration improvements
  • Trello and Jira Importers
  • a CLI tool
  • and more!

Read on to learn more about what we have planned:

Reporting

We're continually evolving Shortcut's reporting suite to ensure it provides transparency into your company's progress across all possible dimensions. Well, at least all possible business dimensions; don't expect these reports to provide sudden insight into the fourth dimension or time travel.

First up, we're adding Cycle and Lead Time Reports (coming this week😉) to provide helpful data for planning and allocating resources more effectively. These reports will be available on the Reporting, Milestone, Epic, Iteration, and Project pages.

Cycle and Lead Time Chart - coming (very) soon!

Longer-term, our vision is to expand our reporting capabilities to enable you to customize, save, and share filtered Charts and Dashboards within Shortcut.

Early designs for custom charts on a dashboard

We also know that many teams want to perform custom analysis on Shortcut data, so we're building a Google Sheets integration to make it easier to access your raw data.

Timeline View

In Q1, we launched a Timeline Beta with a “static” Timeline that displays Epics with both start and end dates. This is an exciting start, but we know the the Timeline needs additional features to enable your team to effectively plan a roadmap and report on progress.

v1 of the Timeline

We will continue to roll-out new Timeline features throughout Q2, including the following:

  • Interactivity (dragging+dropping, resizing, etc.)
  • Swimlanes grouped by Milestone
  • Displaying Epics without Start or End Dates
  • Epic Dependencies

If you're interested in beta testing the Timelines feature, please reach out to support@clubhouse.io with Timeline View beta in the subject line.

Group enhancements

As mentioned in this previous post, Groups will become the backbone of first-class team management within Shortcut. In Q1, we released Groups v1 to enable @-mentions.

@-mentioning a Group of Users

In Q2 and beyond, we'll enhance Groups functionality, so you can:

  1. Associate Groups to all of the key work entities in our system (e.g. Iterations, Epics, Stories)
  2. Filter work to hone-in on what’s most important to your Group

Our immediate plans are to release Groups-to-Iteration functionality. This will allow you to associate an Iteration to a Group, and therefore, quickly filter your Iterations. We hope to follow this up with Group-to-Epic functionality in the next few months.

Filtering Iterations by Groups

Improving Slack and VCS Integrations

Development teams use a variety of tools to collaborate and execute throughout the software development lifecycle. Our goal is to improve the Shortcut integrations with these critical tools to ensure your team's workflow and communication is as efficient as possible. Over the next few months, we will be expanding functionality for our two most popular integrations.

  • Slack: Your conversations shouldn't become siloed within tools. We're building Personal Slack notifications to ensure whenever you're notified in Shortcut, you can be notified in Slack. More importantly, you can reply directly to the Shortcut comment from Slack.
  • VCS Integrations: Your Shortcut Story should be in lock-step with your code. We hope to expand our VCS integrations (Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket) to support further automation and more granular control. We'd love to hear any of your own VCS feature requests, so please share them with our team!

Trello and Jira Importers

It's hard to transition project management tools. We get it, and we're here to help. We're building import tools to support a variety of use cases - whether your a new user looking to explore Shortcut, and existing user looking to pull-in your previous backlog, or a super-fan trying to convince other teams to give Shortcut a run. Our current focus is on Trello and Jira importers, but we may expand to other platforms in the future.

Coming soon!

The Trello and Jira Importers do exactly what you might expect them to do: pull in Comments, Users, Story Relationships, attachments, and everything critical to your workflow from those two tools. We will be launching Trello first, then Jira. If you're interested in beta testing either of these importers, reach out to support@clubhouse.io with Trello Importer or Jira Importer in the subject line.

Updated Design and Navigation

We're exploring a refresh to our Navigation and Story cards to provide a cleaner and quicker way to access all your most important information in Shortcut. Be on the lookout for an option to try this new design soon!

Updated Shortcut UI

Shortcut CLI

To give developers a more powerful and simpler way to work, we are building a Shortcut command-line Interface (CLI). Less context switching and less friction means more completed work.

Mobile

Coming soon - 🌑 Dark Mode for iOS and Android, updated navigation for enhanced usability, better Search capabilities, and more! We're getting smaller and more mobile all the time.

Things we're thinking about...

Looking beyond the next few months, we're also exploring:

  • WIP Limits: We know WIP Limits are a critical piece to an effective Kanban workflow, and we plan on building proper support.
  • Further Automation: How can we make your team's workflow even more efficient? How can we automate the manual (and sometimes tedious) tasks associated with planning and project management? Some options include "scheduled actions" (e.g. recurring Stories) and more advanced notifications. We'd love to hear your ideas!

Write

If you're interested in seeing what we have planned for Write in Q2, take a peek at our What's Next on the Write roadmap post. We plan to build more Write <> Build functionality like Story<>Doc Relationships, better discoverability, and, as with everyone else planned for Q2, even more!

Write remains in closed Beta at the moment, but you can sign up to receive updates here. We're working to open it up so it's self-service accessible to anyone on our Standard or Enterprise plans.

Create a Story in Build from a Write Doc

If you have any feedback or questions reach out to support@clubhouse.io, tweet us @clubhouse, or join our Slack community. We hope everyone stays safe and healthy as we all continue adapting to this new normal.

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