Recently, things in the Workflowyverse have been quiet, a little too quiet. So we decided to poke our heads out and share a bit about what we’ve been up to. And hopefully to make this a regular thing going forward.
What’s New
Despite the rumors, we have not been relaxing on a beach in the Bahamas. Rather, we started this year discussing and planning for the future of Workflowy. For years, Workflowy has been a focused on providing a great single-user experience. Users have naturally shared Workflowy with friends and colleagues and invited them to collaborate. However, this isn’t always a great experience. While we do currently have some collaboration functionality, it’s not nearly as robust or useful as we would like.
We’ve drawn up a plan that we feel will take what is currently a great single-user experience and enable great multi-user experiences. To be clear, this doesn’t mean focusing exclusively on collaboration. Rather, we plan to work on three distinct tracks in parallel – core Workflowy features, collaborative features, and growth.
For collaborative features, imagine taking the fast, minimalist experience of Workflowy and then being able to use that with your entire team or company. In the near future, that’s what we hope to achieve. By laying the groundwork for what we affectionately call “charming collaboration”, we hope to make Workflowy a powerful alternative to today’s bloated and clunky team organization software.
Next we have core Workflowy features. By that we mean taking the great single-user experience and extending it with more useful and powerful features (think dates, templates, calendar integration, etc.).
Our third track, growth, will be focused on making it easier for users of all types to discover and share the Workflowy experience with others. That means making it easier to share documents, and refer and invite others to enjoy Workflowy.
In addition, we would like to take this opportunity to present our shiny new product updates page. This page will make it easy to check what we’re up to at any given moment. You’ll be able to see links to our latest big releases, a roadmap of sorts that shows what we’re currently working on and what we plan to focus on next. And finally, you’ll be able to see the latest release notes.
We hope this page will make it easy to answer the age-old question of what are the folks at Workflowy doing instead of adding [insert your wish feature here]? Jokes aside, we do listen and take into consideration every feature request we receive. Over time we’ll refine the product updates page to reflect that reality and make it easier to see what other users have already requested.
For upcoming features, we’ll be using the blog and the Workflowy user group to ask the community for feedback. We want to start involving users earlier in the development process to make sure we’re working on the problems that users really need solved. That’s where you come in!
What’s Happening Now
As you’ll see on the product updates page, we’re currently busy working on two key features. Essentially change tracking and mentions.
Change tracking will allow anyone on the team to keep up with all the changes made across the entire shared item. That means you’ll be able to see what has changed, how it was changed, when and by who. No more asking if someone has updated “the thing”, you’ll be able to see that yourself. This makes asynchronous collaborative work in Workflowy much easier.
Mentions will allow you to get the attention of anyone on your team to either tell them something or assign an item to them. You’ll also be able to quickly view your own mentions and reply if desired. In addition, we’re hoping to provide notifications of your mentions so you don’t have to check Workflowy to see if you have a mention. Of course, this is something you’ll be able to turn off if you don’t want notifications of any kind.
It’s easy to say we’re doing these things. Designing them to work in a “Workflowy” way that makes sense and fits with the rest of the experience is what’s tricky. However, we’re confident that when we release the features, they’ll provide users that have been wanting to use Workflowy in a more formal team setting with the tools they need to be successful.
Here’s a top-secret sneak peek at what the features look like right now.
We don’t have a fixed release date for these and will instead release when we feel confident they’re ready and useful. But we’ll let you know in these updates how we’re feeling as time passes and the features take shape.
So there you have it, those are the two big things we’ve been working on and are continuing to develop. There are more things happening in the background and we’ll mention these over the coming weeks as they become relevant. For now, we hope this feature update has piqued your interest and shown you that new and exciting things are coming to Workflowy soon.
But that’s not all.
Internally we’ve taken a long hard look at how we do things at Workflowy, especially since growing the team. Going from 2 people to 14 means we need a new way to manage everything and make sure we’re using all our resources to give everyone the best Workflowy experience possible.
That means we’re also busy implementing a new way of working together that we believe will help turn us into a lean, mean, Workflowy-building machine. We’ve already started implementing this new method of working together and as time passes we will get better at it. We hope that the results will be evident to users as we get better at releasing features and overall making Workflowy a more useful and enjoyable experience.
What’s Next
Starting with these features, we plan to regularly publish updates on the blog, via social media and on our new product updates page as opposed to our standard way of sharing updates – cryptic crayon doodles delivered by carrier pigeon.
We’ll let you know when we’re close to releasing to beta, then to all users and so on. We’ll also mention any important updates or tweaks as they develop. We really want the community to feel like they’re along for the ride and can see and feel the progress and improvements as they happen.
On a much more serious note, we would also like to mention that several members of our team are based in Ukraine and have been facing the extremely difficult situation that’s currently ongoing in the country. Needless to say, current releases will slow down a bit until the situation is resolved and our team members and their families are out of harm’s way.
Sound off in the comments section if you have any thoughts, concerns or anything else you’d like to share.
Until the next update,
– The Workflowy team
Song referenced in the title 🎶