Progression updates progressionapp.com

Improvement

A public framework is a great way to show how you support personal growth as an organisation and as a team. We've seen the start of a thriving community around public frameworks (check out Progression.FYI if you've not seen it!) so we're now supporting that in app 🤝

If you're thinking of using your Progression framework to help you hire fantastic talent and communicate your companies commitment to personal growth then why not make your framework public too?!

We've had this functionality within Progression for a little while but due to popular demand we've moved this out of Beta.

Public frameworks allow you to:

• Share your framework publicly via a simple URL
• Provide context and useful links to additional information about your framework
• Provide public access to specific teams, allowing others to see the skills required to be successful in each different position within a team
• Allow you to connect "hiring links" to direct candidates to specific job ads

Take a look at the Progression team's framework for inspiration

There are 4 simple steps to a public framework within Progression:

1. An org admin will need to enable public views for your entire org
2. Write a blurb and introduce your framework
3. Include links to socials or your hiring page
4. Make each individual team Public on a team by team basis

New

We've launched commenting and collaborating on Positions in app 🥳.

We've been thinking a lot about how we can help teams build and iterate on their career frameworks. We know it's important for you to get feedback and work together to create accurate, useful frameworks. We also know that was a little bit lacking within our app. So we're changing that and we're laying the foundations for you to comment on and discuss "Positions" within Progression to kick off that collaborative effort.

Team Editors and Org Admins can comment and view comments on Positions and will receive an email notification when a comment is made so you know when to join in the conversation.

Right now commenting only exists for "Positions" and the functionality is limited but we'd love to hear more about how you're collaborating on your framework so let us know your feedback.

New

If you're a team lead running check-ins with your team, our latest release should help you kick off the process seamlessly, allowing you to start check-ins with your team against their current position.

Simply head to your direct reports profile and hit "Start a new check-in"

We'll initiate a check-in against your team members current position and email the team member asking them to get the ball rolling on their part of the check-in.

These check-ins will continue to follow the usual 3 step format:

1. Team member self review
2. Assessor review
3. Joint review

Improvement

New

Some of the best things come in small packages - we're excited to tell you about a bunch of improvements we've shipped in the last couple of weeks to make life in Progression a little easier.

Framework page

• Removing a skill or a requirement from your framework the page used to refresh the whole page which was lets face it incredibly annoying - that's now fixed. From now on remove skills without losing your place on the framework page 🥳.
• Edit a skill and all it's levels directly from the framework page now.
• We promised your "Disciplines" wouldn't scroll out of a view - but a caching bug got in the way. That's fixed - so the context of role titles will remain as you scroll to the bottom of your framework.

Account settings

• Time Zones - We want to make sure we're dropping in your inbox at the right time of day. We've automatically set your Time Zone but you can update it in account settings.
• Notification preferences - As we look to make our content more personalised we want to make sure you're in full control, you can now opt in and out of our content in your notification settings.

Other improvements

• A link to tell us what's missing from our skill and framework libraries.
• Fixed a long standing bug making the rich text editor difficult to use in a check-in summary section.
• We've brought consistency to the order of skills within a role. Choose the order on the framework page and that'll change within a position.
• You can now use hyperlinks, bold and italics within your Wins.

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.