This is a monthly product update where I share what I’ve been working on recently. For the previous installment, check out the July 2022 Update.

I’m feeling really good about August! I got a lot done, and did a couple user testing sessions where I watched as folks went through the signup and onboarding flow. It was simultaneously very illuminating and embarrassing to see where they got lost.

After users signed up, I was dropping them directly into the app, but there weren’t a lot of hints about what they should do first. I ended up adding a new onboarding view and a banner to send you there, and am working on some other improvements that I’ll be able to talk about next month.

Two other features that came out of those user testing sessions are toasts to indicate that something has been saved and at-mention functionality in status updates and comments so you can say “@username” and have it notify that user.

Some other changes this month are:

• I finally added user roles! There are now admins and users, and role-based access controls for various parts of the app
• Poker and refine descriptions now support markdown, and Jira issues will be automatically converted from Atlassian Document Format to markdown
• I updated the Slack bot to show the user an error message if they don’t have a Teaminal account and try to interact with the bot
• I now warn users if they don’t have a GitHub username associated with their account but the GitHub integration is enabled
• Sprint length is now configurable
• I did a big redesign of the team settings page and added tooltips
• Added a word cloud to the dashboard so you can see what folks have been talking about
• Built out an admin dashboard for myself

I also fixed a few bugs:

• There was a SAML SSO bug where, if you happened to share a computer with another user and they were already logged into your IDP, you’d be authenticated as them - now that won’t happen
• I now block users from being invited via email if SSO is required
• As part of the Atlassian Document Format work, there was an issue where Jira descriptions without any special formatting were throwing an error

In September, I’m going to ship a big overhaul to the navigation that’s currently in flight

Update: The September 2022 Update is the next post in this series.