1H 2022 Product Roadmap Update

Hi Guru Community!

It's been a few months since our last Product Roadmap announcement and we wanted to check in and let you know the latest.

This roadmap looks out about 6 months. It outlines the big projects that our product teams are focusing on, but doesn't include everything we'll work on — there will be lots of little updates you can follow right here in the product updates section of the Guru Community.

1H 2022: Simplicity is innovative

The theme of our Roadmap for the first half of 2022 is Simplicity is Innovative. This is one of our guiding product principles here at Guru, so we wanted to center our roadmap narrative around how we’re working to make Guru as simple and easy to use as possible.

We know that there are many places that company information can and does live, so we want to make sure that when you choose to keep it in Guru, that’s an easy decision for you and your users. You'll see the theme of simplicity represented throughout our three persistent Roadmap focus areas.

PRODUCT FOCUS AREAS

We segment our Roadmap features using the following three focus areas: Ecosystem, Experience, and Administration. The features in our 1H Roadmap will nest under these themes.

1. Ecosystem: One of our guiding product principles at Guru is "plays well with others" — we live in a world of ever-expanding apps, tabs, notifications, and devices, all vying for your attention. Our ecosystem roadmap is all about meeting you and your team, wherever you're working, and helping you be more productive.

2. Experience: Sometimes we focus on new and shiny objects, but as a knowledge product, the core of what we do is pretty simple. It should be easy for authors to write and store great content, it should be easy for searchers to find the content they’re looking for, and it should be easy for team members to collaborate. Our emphasis on experience is all about these core experiences.

3. Administration: Managing your Guru instance should be easy, too. You shouldn't have to spend all your time managing your content, users, and permissions. Instead, you should be able to spend your time creating, sharing, and enjoying information. Our administration roadmap is all about making the lives of our admins easier.

ECOSYSTEM

Slack integration enhancements

Guru’s Slack integration is a key element of our promise to live where our users work. That promise is so important to us that we’ve made it one of our core product principles. And Guru users have been doing a lot of work in Slack! In 2021, our users had over 1.2 million interactions with Guru’s Slackbot. That adds up to tens of thousands of questions answered, cards verified and knowledge shared–and tens of thousands of people whose days were made just a little bit easier because they found knowledge where they were working.

We love it when information flows along with your workflows, so we’re making enhancements to our Slack integration to make it even easier to use.

We recently upgraded our Slack app to support org-wide deployment, a feature that allows admins to install Guru’s Slack app across an entire organization instead of having to install separately for each of the workspaces associated with their org. This feature is available today and puts Guru’s app in Slack’s elite enterprise-ready category–we’re built to scale along with your company!

We also know that while some people are slash-command wizards who know their Slack shortcuts inside and out, there are lots of people who could use help getting up to speed with Guru’s Slack app. That’s why we’re updating our Slack app to make it easier for everyone to get the most out of their Guru + Slack experience. Updates to Guru’s Slack integration will be released later this spring.

EXPERIENCE

Search

If you’ve attended a previous roadmap session, you’ll know that search is a permanent fixture on our roadmap. That’s because search is a core tenet of the Guru experience.And we also know how important powerful search is to you: search is one of our highest feedback areas. We hear you and are committed to improving Guru’s search experience.

Here are some of the ways we’ve improved search since the last update:

1. Machine Learning-Powered Search Updates (coming very soon!): We know both from feedback and from our data that users often miss relevant cards because they aren't high enough in the results list. With this update, Guru will use the meaning of cards and search terms as a way to ensure that the most relevant cards are as high as possible in the result list even if the language in the search terms and cards differs. This means that when someone wants to know your policy on taking time off, they won’t need to guess whether you call it PTO or vacation!

2. More Context in Search Results: You asked for it and we heard you: Guru search results pages now include highlighted keywords and snippets of card contents. Now it’s a lot easier to know what cards to open because the relevant keywords are highlighted on search results pages.

3. New Search Algorithm: Updating search is a continuous effort, and we’re always investing to stay on top of industry best practices that make finding knowledge simpler. The new algorithm has already improved how synonyms are treated as well as how punctuation and spacing are handled, plus we’ll be able to deliver future enhancements even faster!

Editor

The editor is also a familiar topic on our roadmap, but this time with a bit of a twist. Because creating and editing knowledge is so important to the foundation of Guru, we’re moving forward with a complete rewrite of our editor. Since we announced our decision to invest in this project back in September 2021, we’re beginning to move forward with important milestones! Here’s a refresher on what you can expect as we continue work.

By rewriting the editor, we will deliver:

1. More frequent feature updates

2. Improved editor performance

3. Fewer bugs

This project requires a significant time investment on our part, so we appreciate you bearing with us while we pause all other authoring-related work in order to focus on the editor. We are excited about how effectively we will be able to iterate on this new and stronger foundation later this year!

Templates

Let’s face it—sometimes the hardest part of documenting your own knowledge is just figuring out where to start. For experts on product details to HR processes, sometimes we all need a little inspiration to get the writing juices flowing. That’s why we’ve worked with our customers to curate hundreds of Card Templates designed to give you a kickstart on all types of documentation in Guru. We’re investing in making templates more actionable and simpler to use for your whole team to use. We’re also continuing to invest in new, expert-created Templates to keep the inspiration coming.

Check out the template gallery to see what’s new for you!      

ADMINISTRATION

Knowledge Alerts Enhancements

Knowledge Alerts is an area of Guru that we have been pleasantly surprised and intrigued to observe how our customers use – even in ways we hadn't anticipated. With the rise of hybrid work, we're seeing more and more customers rely on Knowledge Alerts not just to share knowledge, but to help their teams find the signal through the noise. To that end, we’re continuing to make it simpler to send and receive Knowledge Alerts in ways that fit into your workflows.

We’ve released a series of updates to Knowledge Alerts that make it easier for admins to send them, while also improving visibility for both readers and authors. Here’s what’s new:

1. You can now send Knowledge Alerts to individual users, increasing the flexibility of the feature.

2. Knowledge Alerts can be sent for restricted cards, as long as users have access to read those cards.

3. We've made it easier to send a Knowledge Alert to any group if the All Members group is permissioned on the Collection.

4. Users can revisit past Knowledge Alerts that they’ve already read, so they can get a refresher when they need it.

5. Subject Matter Experts can see all Knowledge Alerts sent from Collections they have Author access to, making it easier to understand what comms are going out to the company.

New Import Options

We understand: there are a lot of tools your company is using–or used to use–to store information and content. It’s our job to make it easy to get that information into Guru so it can be seen, shared, and used by people across your company. With that in mind, we’ve updated our import feature to add a bunch of new source options and improve visibility into the progress of your import. In addition to our existing Confluence, Zendesk Help site, and spreadsheet importer options, you’ll now see options for:

1. Notion

2. Slab

3. Google Docs

4. Google Sites

5. Word Docs

6. PDFs

1H 2022 RECAP

To recap, here are some of the items that we've released since the last Roadmap session, and some that are still in progress. As a reminder, this list is only inclusive of major roadmap items, not exhaustive of all releases.

Since our last roadmap session, we’ve released:

1. Announcements (fka Knowledge Alerts) enhancements

2. New search algorithm

3. New content import options, including Notion, Slab, and Google Docs

4. Snippets and highlighting for search results

In progress items include:

1. An editor rewrite that will provide a strong foundation for future authoring and editing functionality, like in-line comments and collaborative workflows

2. Continued Slack integration enhancements

3. Continued work on making Guru more accessible and intuitive

4. Continued search improvements

Fin

That's all for our 1H Roadmap update! Thanks for tagging along. We'll revisit the roadmap in the fall and provide a new vision for the following six months. See you then!

We've also created a public Guru card with our H1 2022 roadmap that you can bookmark and share.