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.

Jonny here!

Wow, so many things have shipped in the last week that I just had to go through our releases in Github to work it all out.

First of all a confession. I've been working on a covid project for the last couple of weeks which has blown up and taken a lot of my time. The amount we've managed to ship even with me a distracted mess is deeply awesome and thanks to Neil. So this list is me taking credit for his work.

I'm going to just list stuff as I find it and we'll see how we get on eh.

A new more sensible navigation pattern across all org pages

You'll spot when you head to your organisation that it now has nice tabs to separate your teams, skills and people. When you have 50+ skills, 20+ teams and 100+ people the old way was not working, and we've fixed it.

We also improved that pattern wherever else it lives, to give you consistency.

Skills improvements

A whole load of improvements to skills here.

1. A way better way of finding and adding skills to your frameworks

We added search and filtering to all lists of skills. So thats in your org's skills list, in the framework when you're adding skills and in our skills library too. No more endless scrolling!

2. You can now add levels to your skills from your framework page

This is a biggy for us. Previsouly in order to add a new level to a skill you'd have to go and edit the skill in its own page. Now you can do it all from your framework, meaning creating, improving and updating skills can happen as you're building your framework. So much better.

3. Add skills directly to categories

No longer do you have to add skills to a framework then separately put them in categories. Click the (+) in any category header and you can add skills directly, saving you vital clicks.

It even scrolls you to the skills you just added to make life even easier.

Misc improvements

We've also continued to make Progression more secure, squashed bugs and added things that our customers have been asking for. The road to an infinitely easier framework creation and measuring experience continues!

We're now into our pre-launch roadmap, so expect to see dramatic updates to our website, new clearer pricing and much much more.

As always, you can check out our roadmap (here) for more!

As our skill library has grown from around 40 skills to over 100 and from 1 publisher to 5, the original interfaces we created for browsing and finding skills have needed an upgrade. Today we're updating our "skill picker".

Now, when you're adding skills to a framework, you can filter by publisher and search the skill library.

Over the next couple of weeks we'll be rolling out updates to how organisations can browse their own skill libraries as well as updated Progression skill library.

A key feature for supporting larger teams is enabling imports of users and then syncing that data with Progression. We've taken the first step in rolling that out with our new CSV export import & sync feature.

You are now able to download all your users in a CSV, including fields like name, manager, team, position and active status. You can then modify and reimport. We'll create new users for the ones that don't exist and update existing users where the emails match. All this happens as a background process which means it can easily scale to support the import & sync of thousands of users.

Eventually we'll use this same technology to allow you to connect your HR system so all your users are automatically kept up to date.

As our product and business mature we find ourselves thinking about how we can support larger and larger teams. A key piece of this is enabling admins to more effectively manage their team members.

Our first stab at this, the org people page, got us some of the way there but we were aware of issues around page load times and ability to filter.

That's all changed with the new version of our people page.

We've combined a much cleaner look with massive performance improvements and added some powerful filters. You can now search by name and email, filter by status, find reporting lines for managers and filter by team membership. We've kept the same "one-click" management actions so you can quickly edit and update your users.

This is a pattern that we'll be reusing in the future to better enable org admins to manage check-ins, skills and other moving parts of their organisation.

When building a framework a common occurrence is that you create a set of positions in a discipline, let's call it "Design", and then you realise you named it wrong and you want to rename it.

Up until now that's not been easily possible, you had to create a new discipline and then move each position over.

We've now made this much easier. You can easily transfer all positions from one discipline to a new or existing discipline. Just look for the vertical arrows when you edit a discipline.

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Plenty of small fixes and features out today. New features includes:

• Check-ins are now "soft deleted" this means that they are persisted in the database but hidden from view in the application. We're currently not surfacing those soft-deleted check-ins anywhere but if you need a check-in restoring you can contact us and we can sort it out.
• View subscription activity logs on the billing info page. You can now see which users were added when to make more sense of your pro-rated charges.
• Transfer reporting lines on archive. When you archive a user with reports, you now have the option to transfer these reports to another user.

Today we have a bit of an "inside-baseball" update. It's been weeks in development but will have a very minimal impact on the user experience.

TL;DR

The headline is that nothing much has changed except that the page that you can view a user at has changed from something like /teams/11/memberships/396 to something like users/321.

The Long version

The back story is that when we first came up with the architecture behind Progression we assumed that user management would be centered around the idea of a Team. Each Team would have an owner and would manage the other people in the team as well the framework content.

From this we created the concept of a Membership which represented a person's relationship with a Team. The Membership specified the position the user had in the team and the user's manger.

This lead to some unintended consequences, where in order to have a manger, a user had to be a member of team and a user's manager had to be in the same team. As we've taken on more customers we've realised this doesn't represent how their teams are structured.

We also discovered that the notion of reporting lines were nearly always more relevant to permissions than teams. For new features we've almost always created permissions based on a reporting lines rather than by team membership.

In this update we moved the manager relationship off the Membership and on to what we call the org_user a record which represents a user's connection to an Organisation.

The rollout of this change helps us better define the Team owner role as the person that looks after the framework and position content but not a person that can manage others, unless they happen to be another user's manager. (We appreciate the roles and permissions can get confusing so we'll shortly be rolling out a matrix view of these as part of our help docs.)

As well as the re-architecture, we've also taken this opportunity to increase the number and surface area of automated tests. All of which will be a solid foundation for future product development and help provide a more stable service.