Shortcut’s 2019 in review

As we celebrate the end of another year (and decade!), I want to start by thanking our customers for their continued support of Shortcut.

Last year I described 2018 as a “big year” for Shortcut and it's safe to say that 2019 was even bigger. As I reflect on what we have accomplished together, I'm in awe of the awesome features we shipped, the tight-knit user community we've built, and the wonderful people we've added to our team.

This year we focused on delivering more features and integrations to make work faster, easier, and more enjoyable. We launched our second product, Write in private beta, and introduced a Free Plan to give smaller teams access to the best software project management tool. Before we dive into how we did this, here's 2019 in numbers:

In 2019:

• We've nearly tripled our active users to 78,000+
• Grew to 28,000+ active organizations using Shortcut.
• Shortcut users are busier than ever with 323,662 Stories created in November (twice as many as our highest month in 2018!)
• The team doubled in size! We now have 48 Housemates working remotely in 6 countries across the world!

The intent of Shortcut is to enable cross-functional collaboration, workflow transparency, and joy so that software teams can build better products. To help us achieve that (never-ending!) mission, this year, we shipped the following features:

New Features

• Introduced Iterations to streamline sprint planning in time-boxed periods, making it easier to plan and visualize work.
• Helped users to stay in-sync and collaborate on-the-go with Shortcut for Android.
• Upgraded the Shortcut API to v3 for more stability and support.
• Empowered users to find work with less effort and stress with Auto-suggest Search Operators.
• Allowed users to express themselves in Shortcut with Emoji Reactions.
• Launched Dark Mode in Shortcut to make working at night easier on your eyes.
• Made it possible for users to customize the side Navigation Bar and personalize their Shortcut experience.

Integrations

• Made conversations more actionable with Slack Actions in the updated Slack Integration.
• Empowered designers to remain in-sync with their team with a Figma Integration that enables live previews in Shortcut.
• Created integrations with GitLab and Bitbucket to reduce context switching between tools when associating merge requests, branches, and commits.
• Updated the Zapier Integration, so users can create Stories from over 1000+ connected apps and automate many of your repetitive and tedious tasks.
• Improved the Sentry Integration to make it possible to fix and manage errors more quickly with added automation and less context switching.

Improved onboarding experience

• Launched a new Shortcut Training Platform to educate new and existing users.
• Built out a Resource Center with, tutorials, videos, and webinars to help your team do their best work in Shortcut.
• Created a new Sample Workspace in-app to illustrate how to best leverage Shortcut.

Shortcut helps teams manage projects through the different development phases, but there is a lot of work that happens in the ideation, documentation, and post-release stages phases. That's where our second product, Shortcut Write, comes in. Write was born from the desire to evolve from a project management tool into an integrated platform that supports all phases of software development.

Shortcut Write aims to be everything you want in a documentation tool from real-time collaboration, comments, and @mentions, plus so much more. With Write relevant information is easily accessible and right at your fingertips as you work on Epics and Stories in Shortcut. No more wasting time searching for documentation or asking for permission to access a document.

Since launching in private beta in September, we've rolled out @mentions, code blocks, to-do lists, and much more. To date, we have received over 2,000 requests participate (🙏 thanks!), enabled over 100 organizations, and we continue to provide access on a rolling basis. If you'd like to join the private beta, please request access here.

In September, we introduced a new Free Plan to make Shortcut even more accessible for teams up to 10 people. The Free Plan is a no-cost option for smaller software teams so they can benefit from the full functionality and power of Shortcut without worrying about their budgets. Learn more about the Free Plan here.

In 2019, over 52,000 folks were invited into Shortcut through our advocates, Referral Program, and in-app invites. Since its launch, the Shortcut Slack community has grown to over 1,100 members! Thanks to everyone who has joined our tight-knit community and spread the Shortcut 💗.

As we look forward to 2020, we have many exciting new features and enhancements planned. Here are a few highlights:

• Groups: Enable cross-functional teams to collaborate faster, at scale.
• Timeline views: Make it possible for teams to visualize their roadmaps across different workstreams.
• Reporting: Empower teams to work more efficiently and set better benchmarks for performance.
• Integrations: Connect to more of your favorite tools so you can work the way you and your team want.
• More Joy: Find ways to bring more joy into Shortcut so you can focus on doing your best work

Thank you for being a part of our community and contributing to our success. Happy Holidays and I look forward to sharing more exciting news in the new year!

Cheers to 2020!

Kurt