Progression updates progressionapp.com

New

If you're anything like us, you'll know the feeling of not quite being able to remember what you've achieved in the last 6 months. Conversations about development suffer and recency bias creeps in.

You end up with a blank sheet of paper, scrabbling around only talking about your most recent examples of demonstrating skills you know you have.

We built Wins to solve this.

A Win in Progression is an achievement at work. It doesn't have to be big - in fact the small ones are more important because you're more likely to forget them. It can come from you or be added by others and gets added to your private wins page ready for the next time you need it.

A quick overview:

• You can add a win from your homepage or from the button in the top navigation.
• You can make your personal wins private so only you can access them. Your manager will be able to see the meta data (that you've added wins against skills) but the content is just for you.
• Anyone else in your organisation with a Progression account can also add wins for you — you'll get an email letting you know. (New ways to add wins coming soon…)
• Tagging skills from your role in your win means that win will then appear during your next check-in and on your homepage under the relevant skill.
• You can also download your wins whenever you feel like it. After all, they're yours!
• For managers Wins offers a great way to recognise your teams achievements in a place they can access easily whenever you see good things happen.

After trying the feature ourselves we've become somewhat addicted. Reflecting on our wins has helped us learn a lot about ourselves and knowing that whenever you add a win for someone they get a nice surprise email. Great for everyday happiness, as well as recording achievements for a check-in or 1:1.

This is our first iteration so if you've got any feedback to share on the feature let us know!

New

We've added some new functionality to our existing check-ins allowing you to optionally "skip" skills as part of the check-in process. We know that some of you want to check-in more often and with focus in mind.

Previously, you had to check-in against every skill, scoring yourself and providing examples of each skill every time. There was no real way to complete a focused check-in and spark conversations about specific skills.

Now you're able to skip as many skills as you like as the author of a check-in, scoring yourself and commenting on those you want to focus on. You can only skip skills once you've completed a full check-in as we'll use your previous score for skipped skills.

We'll make it clear to the assessor in their part of the process which skills you've skipped and they can choose to either skip or add notes against skills you've skipped. You'll then have the opportunity in the joint review to move past skipped skills or dive in to notes if your discussion goes in that direction.

With skipped skills you'll still be able to see your shape and progress within a check-in summary, we'll simply assume that things have stayed the same since you last checked-in and make it as clear as possible for you to keep record of.

New

Our latest release included a small but mighty improvement to allow you to update your own billing details in app.

No more emailing support to change your card or update your details. Org admins can head straight to settings and update billing details from there.

You'll be directed to our third party tool - so don't be alarmed by the slightly different UI - here you can:

• Update your card details
• Change your billing address
• Add a back up card

Any changes will be recorded so we can always pass on the details if you need to access them.

New

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.

New

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:

Improvement

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.

New

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!

New

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.

New

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!)

Improvement

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.