Roadmap

2H 2021 Product Roadmap recap

Related products: User Management Apps and Integrations Card Creation Navigation and Search Guru Administration User Experience

As we close in on the final stretch of 2021, our product team at Guru has updated our product roadmap to reflect our product vision for the rest of the year. We revisit the roadmap quarterly, and outline the “big rocks” that we’re most focused on in an interactive webinar with our customers. This roadmap isn’t a guarantee, and doesn’t include every project we’ll tackle in that time frame, but provides a high-level overview of the biggest things on our list. If you missed this quarter’s webinar, never fear! We’ll recap the session below, and you can join us next quarter.

Roadmap theme

The theme of our Roadmap for the second half of 2021 is Simplicity. Simplicity is one of our guiding product principles here at Guru, and so we wanted to center our roadmap narrative around how we’re working to make Guru as simple and easy to use as possible.
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We know that there are many places that knowledge can and does live, so we want to make sure that when you choose to keep it in Guru, that’s an easy choice for you and your users. You'll see the theme of simplicity represented throughout our three persistent Roadmap focus areas.
 


Product focus areas

We like to map out our Roadmap features in the following three areas: Ecosystem, Experience, and Administration. The features in our 2H Roadmap will nest under these themes.

  • Ecosystem: One of our guiding product principles at Guru is "not another destination" — 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.
  • 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 to write great content, find the content you're looking for, and collaborate with your team. Our emphasis on experience is all about these core experiences.
  • Administration: Another guiding product principle at Guru is to deliver “knowledge management without all the management" — you shouldn't have to spend all your time managing your content, users, and permissions... you should be able to spend your time creating, sharing, and enjoying it. Our administration roadmap is all about making your life easier as an admin or knowledge manager.

Ecosystem

 

iPaaS: Zapier & Workato integrations

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Guru is great at helping teams manage their knowledge, but oftentimes that knowledge needs to be shared or acted on in different applications. Because our goal with Guru is to make it easy for all teams do their best work, we understand that Guru needs to connect to these other applications that you rely on daily.

Through partnerships with Zapier and Workato, you can now build no-code/low-code workflows yourself to ensure that Guru works everywhere you work. The process is simple: identify an event that occurs in one application that you would like to trigger an action in another application. Guru can be the first application or the second. The example shown in this graphic is a Guru-to-Slack workflow: A user is added to a group in Guru, and through a “Zap” or “recipe” set up through Zapier or Workato, some magic happens, and that user is automatically added to a corresponding channel in Slack. Okay, it’s not really magic, but it feels like it!


Experience

 

Search

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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. 40% of the time, the first action a user takes in a Guru session is executing a search. We also know how much powerful search means to you: search is one of our highest feedback areas. We hear you and are committed to improving Guru’s search experience.

In recent months, we’ve released updates to make the search results page more useful. You can learn more about these updates in our recent Product update.

We have a few more updates to the search results page up our sleeves: We’ll be adding even more details, including content snippets and highlights, to the search results page so that users can more easily understand why specific Cards have been returned. Future search enhancements include more work on semantic search, which gets at the meaning of a user’s query rather than focusing specifically on the exact words, and delivering a new search algorithm that will provide improved handling for punctuation and word spacing issues, a new synonym architecture, and support for new machine learning components.

 

Editor

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The editor is also a repeat customer 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 are always working on improving this process. In recent months we’ve delivered updates to comments, table formatting, and image uploads. We have more work we’d like to do in these areas, but have reached a place where our current editor framework is holding us back from doing the meaningful work that we know you’re most excited about. That’s why we’ve made the decision to undertake a rewrite of Guru’s editor framework. In order to fully deliver on our desired functionality, it has become necessary to revamp Guru’s editor completely. You can learn more about this work in this Product update.

 

Web app usability

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A new area on this half’s roadmap relates to accessibility and usability. “Ease of use” is a big feedback item, and we hope we’ve mentioned it enough times by now that we want to make Guru as simple and intuitive to use as possible. Accessibility is the practice of making technology usable by as many people as possible, regardless of physical or cognitive disabilities. It’s important to us that Guru be accessible to everyone. We have an engineering pod dedicated to updating our web application to meet accessibility standards, so you may have noticed subtle stylistic changes across the product in recent months.

We’re diving even deeper into this work over the rest of the year in order to execute on a number of quick wins throughout the product to meaningfully impact the user experience. Some are such no-brainers that you may not even notice them!


Administration

 

Announcements (fka Knowledge Alerts) enhancements

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Announcements 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 announcements not just to share knowledge, but to help their teams find the signal through the noise. To that end, we want to make it simpler to send and receive announcements in ways that fit into your workflows.

First, we’re increasing the flexibility of who you can send announcements to:

  • Adding the ability to send announcements to individual users
  • Allowing you to send a announcement from a private card to a user who has access to that private card
  • Supporting sending a announcement to any group in Guru if the All Members group is permissioned on a given Collection

Next, we’ll be providing increased visibility into announcements:

  • Adding the ability to view “Read” and “Unread” announcements
  • Letting Admins, Collection Owners, and authors on a given Collection see all of the sent announcements from that Collection. 

Hopefully these updates will make it simpler for you and your team to send and receive announcements.


Want to know how you can stay involved with our product team between Roadmap sessions?

You’re already doing it by being here! One of the main reasons we do the quarterly Roadmap sessions is to have an open dialogue with our customers about what we’re working on and what excites them most. But that conversation doesn’t need to happen only once a quarter! This Community is how we can best stay in touch with all of you on an ongoing basis.

We had a question during our live session about how customers can volunteer to participate in Guru’s Early Access programs, and being active in the Community is the best way to demonstrate your interest to our product team. This is the first place we look for engaged customers to bounce ideas off of, so keep an eye out for future calls-to-action.


That's all for our 2H Roadmap update! Thanks for tagging along. We'll revisit the roadmap at the end of the year and provide a new vision for the following six months. See you then!