If you logged into your Status Hero account lately, you probably noticed some changes! We recently shipped a bunch of enhancements and design and usability updates. There’s a new side navigation, dashboard layout, and our favorite new addition - the Insights page.
We also added some other less prominent changes, including our brand new table view, a team dashboard view for folks with multiple teams, and sorting for check-ins.
All of these updates are an important step to enable us to continue our evolution from a simple check-in app to a team management tool.
Status Hero is already more than just a standup bot. Our integrations with tools like Jira, GitLab, and Google Calendar allow you to automatically pull in activity so your updates are fast, easy, and complete. But you know that - it’s one of the things customers love most about us.
Building upon what we’ve done with check-ins, we want to do even more to help your team communicate more effectively, work more efficiently, and build trust and empathy - whether you’re remote or not.
That’s why we’re really excited about the introduction of the Insights page with this redesign. Now, prepping and running retros and 1:1s is a breeze. Let’s start with retros.
Instead of wasting time at the beginning of retros asking your team to tell you what they’ve been doing, you can start the conversation with data and trends about how your team is performing and, more importantly, how they’re doing in comparison to the last sprint or cycle.
The Insights page allows you to see trends related to participation, goal completion, blockers, integration activity, vacations, and more. You can even see how your team’s mood has trended. Surfacing these insights will help you figure out the most important question - how are we doing and are we getting better?
While viewing the Insights page, use the filter options to view check-ins from the dates of your most recent sprint/cycle. You can also filter by tags or search terms to review check-ins about a specific topic or project. We recommend filtering to see the blocked check-ins so you can have a team discussion about what is slowing you down.
Some things we recommend you look out for:
- Participation - if your team’s participation rate is dropping, it may be an indicator that they’re burning out or lacking motivation. We recommend taking a closer look at workloads and satisfaction within your team.
- Mood - a mood score that is trending down can be an early warning sign that there’s a problem within your team. Introverted team members may be unlikely to speak up but will often display other, more subtle signs. Mood is one of them.
- Blockers - A high number or significant increase in blockers can be an indicator that there is a systemic, process, or prioritization problem within your team. Perhaps you aren’t refining work enough before starting it, leading to unknowns and surprises.
- Integration activity - Integration activity can give you a sense of how active your team has been vs. previous periods. Are you seeing MRs and issues being completed at the same rate?
For 1:1s it’s the same steps but you filter down to the specific team member.
And the table view makes scanning the check-ins even easier.
We hope you enjoy the redesign, not just because it’s easier on the eyes, but also because it helps you and your team’s performance.
Stay tuned for more great updates as we continue our evolution into the tool teams use to improve communication, efficiency, and trust.
Let us know what you think of the updates. We’re always just a click away.
