This winter has been amazing in Estonia from where I’m writing this blog post and where shipit is based in. There has been a lot of snow, and at times the temperature fell below -20C (-5F). In fact, there is still a lot of snow in the forests, enough to build a fortress. Turns out long winter nights are very productive, and we’ve made a lot of improvements this quarter. Here what’s new in shipit…
Card view replacing list view
We have massively improved the UI of ur simple list view. It’s now in card style, which still allows for an effeicient quarterly view, but is visually more appealing. The card view comes with drag-and-srop support, as you’d expect.
More updates to ideas
Ideas in shipit are the place where you collect all… well… ideas in a single place. You can groom them and decide which ones get promoted to the product roadmap. And managing and grooming ideas just become much better with these new features:
- Comments: you can now discuss ideas with the team
- Filtering and full-text search: with just a handful of ideas nothing will get lost, but it gets harder as the number grows. You can filter by status, author, date, number of likes, tags, and source. Filter defaults also help you clean the clutter by hiding shipped and rejected ideas. And with full-text-search finding that needle in the hay stack just got a lot easier
- Email notifications: whenever there is any activity on the idea you follow (you authored it, liked, or commented), you will receive an email notification
Weekly digest email
Shipit was built with the idea to simplify product planning and help you synchronize the plans with the rest of the team. To make sure your team stays up-to-date on product plans, everyone now can receive a weekly digest of project changes. This email is sent every Friday and contains information about your progress on OKR goals, as well as any changes to the roadmap and ideas.
Multi-quarter roadmap items arrived
You talked and we listened. Having roadmap items limited to a quarter was an intentional design decision, however, it turned out that for many of our users this too constraining. So, without further ado: it is now possible to stretch your roadmap initiatives over multiple quarters.
Startup plan
With just 2-3 people who need to stay updated on your product plans, a personal plan might be too small (and password sharing is not the best security practice), while team plan with unlimited users can be an overkill. This is why we decided to introduce a startup plan! At €29/month it has all the features with up to 3 user accounts.
Overhauled help pages
Good software must always come with good documentation, no matter who your target audience is. And our previous documentation page wasn’t as easy to use as one would like. We have completely updated the design to have a sidebar menu for easy navigation, and updated all of the articles and screenshots with the latest information. Documentation updates are now more closely tied to feature releases which means that with every major application deploy our help pages will be in sync. Have a look here.
Upcoming Intercom integration
You know this: a user mentions a product idea or a feature request in an intercom conversation. A few weeks later you recall that there was this conversation with a customer who requested a feature… but who was it, and when? With our new Intercom integration you can send product feedback from intercom conversations straight to shipit. Any conversation you label with certain tags (e.g. shipit-idea or feature-request) is converted into an idea in shipit automatically. These ideas in shipit are linked back to their source conversation on Intercom. This way, you easily collect all ideas and feature requests in a single place.
We are currently waiting for Intercom to review and approve the app, and when that’s done you will be able to set it up in the integrations.