We've changed the way skill ownership works to make things clearer and simpler.

Previously, you could "borrow" skills from the Progression Library to use in your framework. If you wanted to make a change to a skill, we would copy it to your library.

This was annoying for users because it was a few extra clicks (and a bunch more cognitive load) to edit a skill, plus there was a weird disconnect between the skills in your frameworks and those in your actual skills page.

It was also annoying for us because we couldn't change, delete or improve skills without affecting teams' frameworks.

A simpler way

Now, whenever you use a skill from the Progression Library we make a copy for you right away. That means you know you have a version you can edit, while we can keep on iterating on our library without affecting you.

We still keep a record of which skill you used, just in case in the future we want to suggest improvements, but we won't ever change a skill of yours.

Please note: You'll now see more skills in your skills section because as part of this change we made copies of any skills you were using from the library.

Already got your skills or framework in a spreadsheet somewhere? Dont worry, no longer will you have to manually copy-paste from your spreadsheet into Progression skills. You can now prepare a CSV ready to upload and get them all in at once.

What's more, if you want to grab skills from Progression or make mass updates to a set of skills you can do that using this method too. Just head to your import page to get started.

Check this video guide for more:

Some of the most satisfying releases aren't the 'one big shiny feature' but squashing dozens of tiny bugs and annoyances.

Today we rolled out a release which just improves your quality of life in a ton of small ways when creating and editing your content.

Team and framework page improvements

• The 'disciplines' row in your framework page no longer scrolls out of view, meaning you have all the context even when you're working right at the bottom of your framework
• When you want to add a requirement to a position at a level higher than the number of levels in a skill, we no longer default you to creating a new requirement. That was pretty confusing, so now you can still pick from existing levels or click once more to create a new one.
• Weird bug - when you updated the capitalisation on a discipline name, it might disappear! Now fixed.
• After creating a position on the framework page, you now stay there.
• After editing position details in a modal, you are brought back to the page you were previously on.
• New skill levels have a consistent look and feel with existing ones
• When choosing a level for a requirement, the whole card is now clickable, not just the little text link. You can also click through to edit a skill from that modal.
• Clicking the + button to add a skill at the top of a framework gives you the same options you get in other places

Other improvements

• We now pull in your image from Office 365 if you've signed up using that method
• When editing a skill in a modal, you can't accidentally close it, losing progress. We now warn you!
• We've improved the behaviour around auto-saving on check-ins to make it a bit less eager.

Lots more to come!

Get a t-shirt for 45 minutes of your time…

If you're in an engineering or design team, want to test some new stuff and bag yourself a t-shirt (modelled above by Jonny, our co-founder), sign up to be a user research participant here.

Hi everyone, last major release of this year for us. 2021 is going to be jam packed for Progression, so we've taken a few days to 'clean the decks'. One issue that we've been aware of is that the top navigation and structure of the app is not super intuitive. We also know there's more coming to add to Progression in the next few months, so we've tweaked how to the nav works to make today easier and to be able to fit in what we'll need to in the future.

A video paints thousand words, so find out more about the changes in the loom above!

One thing we've seen as companies roll out frameworks is that you tend to end up with various teams that are either false starts or templates to build other teams from. Also with a staged rollout, having 'half finished' teams visible to existing team members is not ideal.

We wanted to make it easier for admins to manage what people could see, especially if their content creation wasn't quite finished yet. We've now done that.

Introducing draft teams

This week we rolled out draft teams. What this means is that org admins can happily build out new teams in your organisation without revealing them to people already using Progression.

This is great for not only preparing your content upfront and signalling when a framework is truly 'done' (no more adding [WIP] to your team names!) but also adding new versions of your teams as you go along.

It's now easy to duplicate an existing team into a new draft, make any changes you need to and then simply move people across when you're ready.

Positions in draft teams won't be available for people to check in against, or compare against, keeping all your work in progress safely under wraps. However if you make a team a draft and people are already on it, they will still have visibility.

You can read more about this feature in our help article.

Another big set of updates went out over the last couple of days, including:

1. View your skill level from your homepage

No more need to dig into your check-ins to check what level you are at any skill you've checked in against. Just browse your home view or if you have visibility over others' checkins, view their profiles to check their levels.

We grab the latest check-in result across multiple check-ins, so if you didn't check in against all your skills this time round, we grab the last time you did.

2. Add notes on a joint review

Sometimes you want to comment on a check-in without it being tied to a particular skill. Now you can add general comments on a check-in during a joint review, to summarise the process.

3. Skills are now fully rich-text enabled

You can now add bold, italic, links, lists and headings to any field within skills. Great for linking out to other resources or writing your skill levels in slightly more structured ways.

4. Know what license our library content is using

Some of the content in our library is under open licenses. That's great as it gives you complete permission to use and adapt as you wish (we wouldn't add any content that was restricted). However, it's always good to know what license the content is under just in case. So we added that in for your peace of mind.

5. use Rich Text in your position descriptions

When you're making your framework public, the position description hasn't yet been useful for adding extras like job descriptions. That changes now. Add titles, lists, links and more into the descriptions of your positions.

(We're gradually adding rich text to lots of things. If you want to see rich text somewhere else, let us know!)

Alongside the bigger things we're building at Progression at the moment, we're constantly making small every-day improvements to the parts of the app that people use the most.

Today it's the turn of the framework view (or the grid). We've added a bunch of new functionality to it to make creating your framework a true one-page experience.

Changes in this release

1. You can now add positions to a discipline using the (+) button in the discipline
2. You can now add new disciplines to your team (scroll to the end of your framework to add)
3. Edit and re-order disciplines from the framework page directly
4. Clearer buttons and labels for common editing tasks like re-ordering categories and disciplines, adding skills from your library vs creating new skills, moving skills between categories and creating new categories
5. A slight UI cleanup with nicer sticky header and sidebar (no more grey!)
6. Many other small but useful improvements

We'd love your feedback on this change - we know how core it is to your experience using Progression, so we really want to get it very much right. Just let us know what you think using our chat bubble or email support@progressionapp.com.

Whoo, it's been a little while since one of these. We've been shipping on the regular, but with lots of other things going on (to be revealed soon!) our updates have taken a back seat.

Check-ins

Share a work in progress check-in

Our customers have regularly asked for easier ways to run peer feedback as part of a check-in. While a full '360 review suite' is a little way off for us, we agree that it should be easy to grab quick thoughts using your Progression check-in.

So you can now download your check-in at any point in its lifetime as a CSV file, to share in your tool of choice with your people of choice.

• Employees: download at the very start to share alongside or flesh out your answers
• Managers: download alongside your review to gather more data
• Either employees or managers: download during a joint review to add other notes into your final answers

This is also useful if you want to merge two check-ins together - just download one and copy-paste the answers into the other.

This is the first of many check-in improvements to come. Please keep giving us feedback on what you need, it really helps!

It's now way easier to delete check-ins you don't need

Accidentally started an extra check-in, or want to clear out an old incomplete check-in? You now can delete from your homepage or any list of check-ins. Just click on the three dot (•••) overflow menu to find the option.

Skills

Remove unused skill levels

It's easy to create too many skill levels then realise you didn't need some of them. You can now remove levels of a skill after the fact, keeping your skills nice and streamlined. Just beware, removing a skill level will also remove it from any positions or teams you've used it in.

Rich text!

We're starting to roll out rich text across the app. This will gradually get to every part of your framework (with Bold, Underline, Italic and Links being the first port of call), but for now you can add rich text elements to any example within a skill. Any feedback on where to add rich text next is very welcome.

Massive simplification of skill examples

Most of this work is behind the scenes, but we've made examples much simpler. They're now a single field with no 'behaviour tag', which we now recognise was surplus to requirements for 90% of people. As a result we've been able to make the editing experience smoother, and reduced the complexity of a skill. Hooray for simple!

Other fun things

• When you start your trial, we now ask upfront what team you want to set up, and create it for you
• You can now choose a framework on our website and one-click use it when you get going! Head to progressionapp.com/library to browse our frameworks and collections.
• Less weird scroll behaviour on the team view
• Fixed some over-enthusiastic autosave page locking in check-ins
• Fixed ordering of skills in a check-in
• Lots of other small but annoying bugs

Every user on Progression can have a manager which creates reporting lines up and down the org. With this release you're able to view the people, check-in progress and aggregated check-in insights right down the reporting line.

We're always looking for ways to speed up the process of creating a framework, we now let you edit a skill without leaving the framework page.