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.

Many of our customers run check-ins as part of a quarterly process where the whole organisation completes a check-in. With this release we make it easier for org admins to get an org wide view of checkin progress:

This new view shows you each person's progress on their latest check-in and follow up with people who haven't started a new check-in recently.

Last week we focused in on a very specific action that we knew was a confusing and lengthy process: categorising skills.

In a Progression framework skills can be categorised in anyway you like but the process of moving a skill from one category to another and adding a new category to a framework was slow and clunky.

We've added a drag and drop interface that makes it simple to re-categorise skills and create new categories. You can find it when you click "edit categories" on the top left of your framework.

We've been working hard on getting all our ducks in a row for the last few weeks in preparation for a public launch, and have now turned on public signups!

You can now start your trial from our website and if you like it, get going without ever having to talk to us, which we're sure you're thrilled about. Who needs another zoom call.

That said, we do still want to chat! If you have questions or ideas please do reach out to us on our chat bubble or support@progressionapp.com.

Other things of note:

• Much more accessible pricing, whatever team size
• A much bigger library of skills for you to adapt and work from
• A few case studies from our existing customers.
• I also re-recorded my video demo (gradually improving, but still a not-so-concise 13 mins!) in case you want to see some of our new features.

Today we've released a small change to how we display URLs, we've made them a bit more descriptive.

So for example:

https://app.progressionapp.com/teams/1234

is now

https://app.progressionapp.com/teams/acme-user-research

and

https://app.progressionapp.com/orgs/1234

is now

https://app.progressionapp.com/orgs/acme

Check-ins get a random string as an identifier e.g. https://app.progressionapp.com/checkins/hRJFUKhuWQyB

All the old URLs will continue working for now, at some point down the line we'll switch over to only using word-based URLs.

We'll be rolling out similar updates for users and skills in the near future.

The difference between your skills and library skills has always been a bit vague. Today that's fixed. We've rolled out an improvement to how you manage the skills in your collection, and bring them in from elsewhere.

From now on if you add a skill from the library it stays the same and you can't edit it automatically. But by making a copy you get an identical replica of that skill that you now own and can edit.

More than that, if you're using one of those skills in a team (or multiple teams) we'll offer to swap the new one in in its place, including any levels that have been added to positions in that team. Think of it as uncoupling the skill from the original while keeping everything else the same.

This should mean you can start with one of our standard frameworks, or a collection of our skills, then whenever you want to make changes do so in one click. Much better.