#4. Winter Is Coming in November 2018

Flashback: #3: Smelling a Private Beta in October 2018

As usual, main numbers (→ sign shows changes between October and November):

Product:           Fibery — SaaS B2B (SMB) work management platform
Stage:             Private Alpha (no production version)
Launch:            November → December (silent, invite-only)
Development:       21 months
Cold leads:        750 → 800 (subscribed from fibery.io web site)
Hot Leads:         25 → 25 (gave feedback)
Customers:         3 → 6 more play with Fibery regularly
Team size:         9 people
Burn rate:         ~$50K/month
MRR:               $0

November was a good month. Development speed increased and we are pretty certain that private beta will be released in January 201X (year is skipped for the sake of brevity and potential future excuses).

Let’s check how Fibery was improved last month.

Apps creation

This area got some love. We’ve implemented new Apps creation flow. You can name your App, select icon and main color:

App delete action is added. Type creation menu was redesigned. Everything is much more polished now.

Last things we should add is renaming. So far it is not possible to rename App, Type or Field.

Finally, you can edit Single Select values:

Customize Entity View

Entity View customization was not in private beta scope, but we decided to implement it. Otherwise Entity View may look weird. It was implemented surprisingly fast — in a week!

Some usability improvements

It was hard to change states, for example, in board columns. We’ve added a menu that makes it clear:

You can group lanes by many-to-many relations on Timeline now. It means you can create views like this, it shows vacations for people grouped by Teams:

Wiki

Wiki is almost ready for the beta release. This month it was somewhat polished and filled with fancy features.

Create entity from text is cool, since you can quickly create work from text. For example, you can quickly define a list of features for your next iteration in a meeting and then create real entities later:

Insert entity into text and mention people is also helpful. You can form lists from existing work items and quickly access them.

November plans vs. reality

We hoped to implement at least 2/3 of the features below. Haha! Plans were changed!

• ✘✔︎︎ Formula Field / Implementation started and even rough prototype is ready, but Andrey burnt out and went to a vacation. In December he will finalize this important feature.
• ✔︎ Finalize Wiki (insert entities, floating menu and bug fixing) / It is almost done, some bugs are still there, but planned scope was implemented. Volodya did his best!
• ✔︎ New App creation flow / App creation is fully implemented.
• ✘ New App Catalogue / This feature is postponed, since it does not add new functionality and so far we can live with old catalogue.
• ✘ Slack integration / This feature was removed from private beta scope
• ✘ 10 Apps / We’ve reviewed apps scope. In general most apps are created, but they are not complete yet.

December plans

Extremely modest this time.

• Filters on Boards. This was out of scope, but we think without filters boards will be unusable.
• All Done entities should be gray everywhere.
• Formula Field.
• Finalize some Apps (OKR, GIST Planning, Software development, Retrospectives, etc)
• New field types: % and Decimal Number.

Future: Board Filters

Filters will look like this:

Apps List

We’ve changed list of Apps for private beta once again. It was reduced. We think it is better to get few Apps right and then expand. These apps were dropped from private beta scope:

• Slack integration
• Kanban process
• Zapier integration
• Employee directory

Fibery for education?

Last week Guido van Dijk visited our office to discuss how Fibery can be used in education. They run a very cool program that mixes agile approaches (Scrum) with personalized education.

It seems Fibery might be a very good fit and functionally only permissions should be improved to implement this solution. We hope to cooperate in education domain and get the solution ready somewhere in spring.

˚ Random

Random image from our Slack channel:

Random link from our Slack channel:

To turn docs into apps, Coda had to rethink productivity from scratch

Random quote from our Slack channel:

A well-designed system is not simply a bag of features. A good system is designed to encourage particular *ways of thinking*, with all features carefully and cohesively designed around that purpose. — Bret Victor

To be continued → #5. Engine Warm Up in December 2018.

🎈Fibery — work management platform that replaces many tools inside a company and grows with the company from startup till the… success.

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