Background

When we set out to build our first product, we looked for the intersection of what we’d build for ourselves and what others could naturally pick up and run with. We believed all teams could benefit from running retrospectives, not just engineering teams. We shipped the core set of agile rituals while building an Enterprise business. Along the way we iterated on our business model, sales & customer success, and marketing & brand to build a feature-complete SaaS from left to right and our first revenue stream.

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Retro

Our Retro meeting is what put us on the map. Upon release we iterated early and often based on feedback from users. Launched in 2018, our retrospective tool is still a leading product in the marketplace.

Sprint Poker

Lauching Sprint Poker we learned how to integrate deeply with a team’s backlog. This integration proved to be a key driver of Enterprise adoption. Integrations include GitHub, Linear, GitLab, Jira, and Azure DevOps. Under the hood, we experimented with adding video conferencing to the discussion thread, but decided we didn’t want to compete with existing solutions.

Standup

We had a strong belief in an async-first standup interface. In reality, most customers still want to have a quick call and take turns sharing. However, more and more cultures are adopting async, remote-first practices with standups and check-ins. The opportunity remains to tightly integrate our async standup feature with a chat integration.

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In Retrospect

Having successfully delivered a best-in-class agile meeting suite for product and engineering teams, how have we moved forward in our long-term vision to make work better through software?

• We built Parabol Pages as an embedded team knowledge management tool that can be air-gapped in highly regulated environments.
• We are building modular workflows to empower team collaboration, process, and operations beyond agile.
• We are building internal AI-native tools integrated with our operations and workflow.