Spring Innovation Week: Empowering change and celebrating creativity

We’re thrilled to present the highlights from the first Innovation Week of 2023! While we may be a tad biased, we couldn't be prouder of everything the team accomplished in a week’s time. More importantly, the amount of value heading to you–our dear users–is unprecedented in the history of The LaunchNotes Innovation Week!

To refresh your memory, during Innovation Weeks we temporarily pause our regularly scheduled programming to provide the entire team with the freedom and time to develop new features, functionality, or ideas they’re particularly passionate about. Then, at the end of the week, each project is judged using the following criteria:

1. Does the idea solve an existing customer need?

2. Does the idea deliver delight to the customer experience?

3. Is the presentation both informative and creative?

This Innovation Week there were a total of seven workstreams that delivered a myriad of exciting product ideas. Here are the top four we think you’re going to be most excited about:

RSS feed for announcements

Say hello to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for LaunchNotes pages! RSS is fantastic (and in fact was designed!) for delivering web content that changes regularly. In the case of LaunchNotes, the regularly changing web content comes in the form of announcements.

The idea for this improvement has been in the works for a while, and we’ve received great feedback from customers along the way. This includes, but isn’t limited to, customers asking for the ability to publish announcements directly to specific Slack channels, into Microsoft Teams, to LinkedIn, and on Discord. The use cases for an RSS feed can go way beyond publishing announcements to these channels, but we’ll start with these since they were the most requested:

Slack and messaging applications

With RSS feeds, you’ll be able to automatically post announcements from LaunchNotes in popular communication platforms such as Slack, Teams, Discord, and RSS readers. From what you’ve told us, what we think you’ll be most excited about is that our new RSS integration unlocks the ability to send and receive updates in any specific Slack or Teams channel. And as a bonus for Slack users, RSS is a native capability within Slack, meaning you can use the /feed command + the page url to enjoy what we’ve built!

Extending RSS capabilities with Zapier

The team also built our new RSS functionality so that it works as a trigger with integration platforms like Zapier, IFTTT, Microsoft Power Automate, and Workato. We plan to build the new RSS feature so that product teams can leverage these platforms to post to social media (LinkedIn, Twitter), automate personal emails, and more for every time an announcement is published.

Timeline to ship: We anticipate launching RSS feeds this week, the week of May 29.

AI writing assistant v2

Since launching our AI assistant, Bernie, it’s been one of the most popular features within the product. But there’s always room for improvement! Which brings us to AI writing assistant v2…

This team was focused on improving product teams’ productivity by further streamlining the process of creating announcements and roadmap items with a few clicks. And as a result of their work here are some of the exciting improvements you can expect in the coming weeks:

• First off, the discoverability and the ease of use of the LaunchNotes AI writing assistant were the first targets to improve. We’ve moved the writing assistant, placing the icon in a more prominent position in the editor toolbar. 

• Next, the AI writing assistant was given a fresh visual identity aligned with the “magical stars” commonly used to indicate AI assistance.

• And last, but certainly not least, we updated the writing experience with inline AI-assisted content creation within the editor so that you can write your own prompts or start from one of our recommendations.
  
  
  

But our rocketeers didn’t stop there. With these improvements in place, the team then overhauled both the front-end and back-end of the prompt structure. This includes, but isn’t limited to adding:

• Multiple output tries: AI writing assistant v2 will have the ability to cycle through various AI output "tries" to explore different writing options. The writing assistant will also generate alternate suggestions, giving you the freedom to choose the best fit for your needs. V2 unlocks every author’s ability to experiment, iterate, and find the perfect wording… effortlessly.

• Open-ended prompts: The v2 release will introduce the ability to present open-ended questions and prompts to help you brainstorm, problem-solve, and generate compelling content in a snap.

• Workflow-centric prompt templates: To streamline content creation, writing assistant v2 introduces new and improved AI prompt suggestions tailored to the specific actions of drafting announcements and roadmap items.

We're constantly working to improve existing features core to the LaunchNotes platform, and we know these updates to the AI-writing assistant will supercharge the drafting of both your feature announcements and roadmap items.

Timeline to ship: The team is putting the finishing touches on AI writing assistant v2 and we plan to ship it in July.

Promote ideas to the roadmap

Another Innovation Week project we know you’re going to love is the team that tackled the promotion of ideas to roadmap! With this improvement, LaunchNotes users will now have the ability to seamlessly promote items from their ideas board directly to their product roadmap, unlocking product teams’ ability to bridge the gap between ideas that are under consideration and work that has been committed to their product roadmap.

Promoting an idea to the roadmap is simple and straightforward thanks to a short, streamlined workflow. Simply select the idea (or ideas) that you’d like to promote, click “Promote to Roadmap”, and the items will transition to and become visible on your LaunchNotes roadmap. The content of the idea will automatically port to the new roadmap item and then can be further edited and fine-tuned from there.

To enhance communications with customers and to help close the feedback loop, the “promote to roadmap” feature will include email notifications to keep users informed about the progress of their feedback as it travels through the product development lifecycle. These emails will be automated to trigger when an idea is promoted to the roadmap, linking subscribers directly to the roadmap item. 

Timeline to ship: The schedule for shipping “promote ideas to roadmap” is being finalized this week.

Streamlined audit logs and admin operations 

Last but not least, one Innovation Week team made a handful of significant enhancements to the LaunchNotes admin controls. Specifically, they shipped a number of exciting improvements, including:

• Enhanced audit logs: A revamped UI ensures every record now contains a user name, the associated object, and consistent formatting.

• Detailed change history: The audit log now captures before-and-after states for changes, making issue resolution a faster and more accurate process.

• Improved admin tooling: Additional safeguards were added to serve as an additional layer of protection for our Sales and Support teams.

• Streamlined SAML setup: Automated instructions simplify configuration, eliminate the need for manual input of sensitive information, and speed up our Success team’s ability to assist in configuring SAML authentication.

Timeline to ship: It’s live!

A big thank you 

As always, a sincere thank you to our wonderful customers for ultimately inspiring each of these Innovation Week projects, and an equally big thank you to each of the teams that dove in and tackled such an impressive list of work. One of LaunchNotes’ core values is “Don’t just deliver; Delight!” and we believe that you’ll be delighted by what all our Innovation Week teams were able to accomplish last week.

We’re always game for feedback

Speaking of being delighted, we’d love to hear from you! What do you think about this quarter’s Innovation Week projects? Which is your favorite? What were you hoping to see but didn’t? Let us know by leaving feedback in the upper left-hand corner of this announcement.