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

Homepage Redesign

I kept getting feedback that it wasn’t super clear what you were supposed to do when you were dropped into the app. Which makes sense, since when I sat down and looked at it, every red square below is a place where you might have found something actionable:

Effectively, there were six inboxes. So with the help of a designer friend, I iterated towards a new “To Do” card, tucked the filtering below the “New Status” card, and simplified the top nav quite a bit.

I also minimized the buttons to create new pokers, refines, and retros in the “New Status” card, and added a dropdown to the top nav where you can more obviously add those things from:

Overall I’m really happy with it, and user feedback has been great.

Avatar Upload

Added the ability to upload custom avatars, rather than relying on Gravatar or relegating you to your initials.

Notification Overhaul

This one’s less visual, but I overhauled the notification system so that status updates no longer notify your team (since they’re not really actionable), comments and replies now notify the person who created the thing you’re commenting on, and all notifications now trigger an email (which can be disabled from your account settings).

Fixes & Improvements

In addition to the items above, I also shipped quite a few small fixes and improvements:

• Split the SAML SSO config from the organization settings page into its own page, adding tooltips and links to the docs.
• Pointing pokers and refines that are linked to a Jira isue now stay in sync if you edit or delete the issue in Jira.
• Made the organization domain (which is used for SAML SSO) into an optional field and defaulted it to null. Having it be a required field was causing issues for users with Gmail addresses.
• Upgraded the poker and refine create and edit pages to use a typeahead for selecting Jira issues vs. a dropdown, allowing you to search by title.
• Fixed a bug where status updates which contained email addresses were getting mangled due to the @mention functionality introduced last month.
• Fixed a bug in the onboarding page where it wasn’t turning green if you enabled an integration.
• Fixed a bug in SAML SSO that was causing 500 errors for some users during setup.
• Fixed a bug in team settings where only the first 100 Slack channels were being shown.

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