Release Notes - Notion

Release Notes

Last updated on March 7, 2016 by Kevin Steigerwald

March 7th, 2016

2016-0910

Released

  • Dashboard management has improved even more. As an admin, when you visit the All Dashboards view, you will be able to set which dashboard is the Team Dashboard—the board which all members of your Notion account have access to and can not be made private. This dashboard is now also the first dashboard users will see when they log in. It's a great way to keep team metrics front and center to your team.

Fixed

  • Cycle Time by Story Type, a Pivotal Tracker recipe, was rendering different line colors on the dashboard chart when compared to the detail page. This has been corrected.

February 22, 2016

2016-0708

Released

  • Dashboard deletion is now possible for all admin users. Just head to the dashboard settings of the board you wish to delete and you should see the option at the bottom. This will only delete the dashboard, not any recipes that appear on it. Any orphaned recipes will be placed onto the default team dashboard.

    The default team dashboard can not be deleted at this time. We have a few more updates and features to ship around dashboard and recipe management that will make this a bit more manageable. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us.

Fixed

  • Sprint summary emails should now be sending at the beginning of a new sprint. This feature currently only works for Pivotal Tracker integrations.
  • Performance and speed enhancements should be noticeable to users with a large number of ingredients.

Febraury 9, 2016

2016-0506

Released

  • Team Poll templates can now be found in the Recipe Library. Use these as a started point to track qualitative metrics from your team.
  • Advanced statistics are now listed on every recipe detail page. Easily see what the mean, standard deviation, and volatility are for your data sets.
  • Faster support is now just a click away. In the bottom right corner of the app you may have noticed a red chat bubble. Feel free to reach out with any questions, concerns, or just to say hi! We are friendly folks and love to hear from our customers.

Fixed

  • Recipes added from the Recipe Library can now be edited and deleted.
  • Import stability.

January 26, 2016

2016-0304 v1 Release

tl;dr
Notion is now out of private beta and open to all!

Released

  • Customize your dashboard
    When toggling the chart style of a dashboard recipe, not only does that change stay the same if you click through to the recipe show page, but it will stay set each time you visit the dashboard. These settings are controlled on an individual basis, so feel free to make changes without effecting your teammates.

    When you publish a report, you also have the ability to customize what chart style to show.
  • Subscriptions
    With this release, we are officially out of private beta and Notion is open to the general publis. All new signups enter into a free 30-day trial and have access to all features. Learn more on our pricing page.

Fixed

  • Charts now have an x-axis for additional clarity.
  • Empty dashboards have a slight redesign making it easier to get started.
  • Descriptions are now included in recipe templates, so when you build a recipe from the Recipe Library or add one from a connected source, the description field will be pre-populated.
  • The min/max labels are now displayed on the show page for a team survey, making it easier to read your team's reported values.
  • Message indicator now only counts user submitted content. Daily integrations no longer add to the tally.
  • When building a report with recipes from Pivotal Tracker based on your iteration lengths, the summary sentences now mention the corret frequency.
  • A survey is no longer listed as "reported" on your ingredient list if any member of your team reports on it, but you haven't.
  • Various UI and under-the-hood improvements to tune things up for general availability.

December 28, 2015

2015-5152 Release

tl;dr
Our Pivotal Tracker integration has some new improvements, including two new recipes and summary email reports.

Released

  • Sprint summary emails will now be sent to you and your team at the beginning of each sprint if you have integrated with Pivotal Tracker. It's a great way to keep your team up to date on your iteration story flow, throughput, velocity, and your backlog burn rate.
  • Cycle Times by Story Status and by Story Type are two new recipes you can add to your dashboard when you integrate with Pivotal Tracker. These recipes will help your team have a better understanding of how accurately you are delivering stories throughout a sprint.

Fixed

  • Moving a recipe off of a dashboard would cause any prevously published report for that dashboard to crash. This is now fixed.
  • Team polls were incorrectly showing your reported value as the ingredient on a published report. Now, they properly show the number of responses for the most recent poll.

December 15, 2015

2015-4950 Release

tl;dr
This is one of our most exciting releases. Our goal was to deliver as many of the most requested features from you, our customers, as possible. Edit and reassign ingredients, easily navigate to your reporting page, create multiple admins, and more. You don't want to not read this one.

Released

  • Edit existing ingredient names
    Sound familiar: In creating your last recipe, you spelled Productivty wrong. Do you live with it or start over from scratch? "Why isn’t there a way to change the name of my ingredients!?” Thankfully, now you can. Head to a recipe’s settings and edit ingredient names as much as you want so you can focus on real productivity.
  • Reassign ingredients
    Yup, fixing typos isn’t the only thing you can change about ingredients. If you created a recipe in the past and now want to reassign who the ingredient belongs to, you can do that too. Head to a recipe’s settings to make this change as well.
  • Add (and remove) team members from team polling
    If your team is growing with new members, it's important for their voices to be heard. From the settings page of a team poll, you can now easily add or remove any existing team member. None of your previous polling reports will be altered.
  • Easy access to report on ingredients
    We’ve made it easier than ever to submit data. From anywhere in the app, you can now access your ingredient report page (assuming you have ingredients assigned to you) via the dropdown menu on your username in the top right navbar.
  • Quick reporting
    We’ve also introduced a few changes that will speed up your data submission time. On a reporting page, the input field is now pre-selected. Meaning you can enter in your number and hit enter without using your mouse at all. What’s more, if you instead hit “cmd-enter” you will be taken to the next ingredient on your list, allowing you to report dozens of ingredients in seconds.
  • Admins (yes plural!) can now report on all ingredients
    Two exciting updates to admin users. First, you can actually create additional admins. If you are the current admin, head over to the members page to upgrade confirmed users. Second (and most importantly), all admins can now report on all ingredients. We understand how painful an incomplete chart can be when you are trying to share a report with the rest of your team. As such, we’ve granted access to admins to be able to report on any ingredient in the system. So choose your admins wisely.
  • Clicking on a recipe card now actually works!
    From a dashboard, you no longer have to click the name of the recipe to see its details. Simply click anywhere on a recipe card and you’ll be taken to the detail page.
  • Reporting on a Team Poll is now anonymous
    This change actually worked its way into product a few weeks ago, so you may have already noticed it. To improve the experience of team polling, all submissions are captured anonymously.

Additional updates and fixes

  • For our Pivotal Tracker users, an Iteration Flow recipe has been added. This chart visualizes the state of stories each morning so you can track how your sprint progresses over time.
  • The recipe formula is now listed on the settings page as well.
  • Fixed the formatting of the formula in the sidebar on a recipe detail page.
  • Ingredients on a reporting page are now ordered by due date, making it easier to find which is due next.
  • Additional meta data has been added to the ingredient list on a reporting page as well, so it's easier to know which recipe each ingredient belongs to.
  • Reporting while the tooltip is active no longer causes the tooltip to remain on the screen.

November 16, 2015

2015-4546 Release

Released

  • Updated Tooltips. We are always looking for ways to improve our visualization, and this sprint we focused on the tooltips. Now you can hover almost anywhere on the chart and you'll see the tooltip appear for that report interval. ANd with more complex charts, like Pivotal Tracker's Throughput for example, you will see a break down of each stack in the column.
  • Pre-built dashboards after connecting to a data source. We've decided to make things one step simpler for you to start seeing the data that matters most to your team. When you connect with Pivotal Tracker or Zendesk, we'll automatically create a new dashboard for you with the recommended recipes on it. Of course, you can still always visit the integration page and add more metrics.
  • Email alerts when a data import is complete. Set up your initial imports and then go grab a cup of coffee. We'll ping you to let you know when your first data import is complete.
  • Pivotal Tracker recipes are now tied to iteration length. Certain metrics — Velocity, Throughput, and Backlog Burn Rate — are now reported on the first day of a new sprint, rather than updated daily. This makes it much easier to see your trends over time. Look for more little updates like this in the future related to the Pivotal Tracker integration.

Fixed

  • Published reports where incorrectly being updated with new data added after their publish date. This only would have affected older reports you have made...so you probably didn't even notice it. And now that it's fixed, you never will.

November 2, 2015

2015-4344 Release

tl;dr
You can now easily create team polls as a metric type, making it easy for you to survey your team and get qualitative data to compare alongside your quantitative data.

Released

  • Team Polling! Do you have an effective way to track your team's happiness? Do you know how your team's mood correlates with the success and failures of your sprint goals? Your velocity might be great, but how does the team feel about the value they are delivering?

    For most product teams, these are difficult metrics to measure and explore. But we're making it easier than ever.

    When creating a new recipe in Notion, you can now select to add a metric or a new Team Poll. When setting up your poll, you can add a question to ask your team, set your labels on the answer scale (a range from 1 to 10), and select which members of the team you'd like to report.

    We believe having a fuller understanding of your team health results in a better understanding of your product health. Get started today!

Fixed

  • When building a recipe, the preview of report dates was incorrectly showing the same date for all of them. Nothing was wrong on the backend, but it certainly was confusing to use. The good news is, it's fixed.
  • Adding comments from a recipe show page caused the input field to become disabled, making it impossible to add another comment without refreshing the page. Also fixed!

October 21, 2015

2015-4142 Release

Released

  • It's now easier to see the targets you set on your recipes. When you click through on a recipe card from the dashboard, you should see the your target indicated by a bullseye and a dashed red line. If you don't see one, simply go to the recipe settings to add your target. Target lines also appear in your published reports, old and new.
  • We've also introduced a chart density picker, allowing you to view more of your historical data than before. When viewing an individual recipe, look for the menu in the upper right corner of the chart to change your density.
  • This release also tackled some more visualization styles. In addition to stacked and line charts, we now offer single number displays. You can toggle between certain styles from the menu in the upper right corner of each recipe card on your dashboard. (In a future release, these changes will save.)

Fixed

  • A data discrepency on the backend was causing some published reports to incorrectly calculate percentage changes by reference the wrong date. The delivered fix applies to all past reports as well. All should be right as rain.

October 5, 2015

2015-3940 Release

tl;dr
We've tightened up our onboarding process, so if you are already reading this, you probably won't see much of the work. But we did make it even easier for you to add new team members, so just invite them and they'll tell you all about it.

Released

  • Notion is better with teammates and we've made it even easier than before to add them. From your team members page, you'll now see a unique URL that you can share with your team. All they have to do is follow the link, complete a form, and they'll have access to your dashboards. (Don't forget, you can make dashboards private, too.)
  • A new onboarding workflow for account owners has been designed to help integrate their first data connecter. If you haven't set up a data connector yet, head here to try it out!
  • A few new visualization styles are making their debut this week. Stacked column charts and line charts are now the default view for some of our Pivotal Tracker and Zendesk recipes. Look for more styles and customization features soon!

Fixed

  • We were experiencing some scaling issues with Zendesk performance. This is now improved.

September 22, 2015

2015-3738 Beta Release

tl;dr
This release marks the last release of alpha. Yup, we’re now in beta! Lots of little fixes, some bigs ones. Too many to list in a tl;dr summary. So kindly read them all below.

Released

  • Quick Insights have been added to the recipe detail page to let you quickly compare your current value against past values. Visit your dashboard and click on one of your recipes to see them in action.
  • You can also get quick insights right on the dashboard itself. Next to the reported value, you’ll see a positive or negative percentage change based on the previous report.
  • We’ve added some meta data from your recipes to the sidebar on a recipe show page. Now you can see who created the recipe and when, what the formula is, what the trend is, and more.
  • Charts automatically switch to 26 columns when you have more than 13 intervals of data, letting you see more of your data at a glance.
  • Ever make a report but then have trouble getting back to your dashboard? It's probably because we didn’t have any navigation. (d'oh!) Well, we’ve now provided said navigation. Look for the dropdown menu in the top right corner and you’ll easily be able to jump to any dashboard you have access to.
  • Speaking on navigation, we also originally and unintentionally made it difficult to navigate back to your dashboards when viewing a published status report. We fixed that issue as well and introduced a link in the header bar.
  • The recipe Throughput has been added to the Pivotal Tracker library.

Fixed

  • Historicals for Zendesk loaders
  • Tightened up status reports from private dashboards
  • Total Points Not Started was calculated incorrectly
  • Maintain reporting schedule on error

September 9, 2015

2015-3536 Release

tl;dr
We now have Zendesk integration!

Released

  • Notion + Zendesk – Zendesk makes it easy to support your customer. Notion makes it easy to support your support team.

    As a manager, do you have any idea how much time you are spending responding to tickets with a Bad Satisfaction Rating? And do you have any idea how that time affects the morale of your team?

    Our Zendesk integration and existing features allow for that and more. Track recipes like Satisfaction Response Rate, Median First Reply Time, Current Number of Assigned Tickets, and Total Number of Reopened Tickets to get quick insights into how your customer support team is doing and how their volume influences the rest of your product roadmap.

    Sign in to get started.

Fixed

  • In Safari, numbers were incorrectly rounding to two decimal places in the chart's tooltip. Marking the first time that something worked correctly in IE and not in Safari. Thankfully, order has been restored.
  • When you first connect with a data source, the initial value will be for that moment in time, rather than what it was at 4:30am PST.
  • We now do a better job of visualization tiny numbers. If your data set ranges from 1 to -1, the Y-axis now starts at one, rather than four.
  • If you happened to publish a report two weeks ago, you may have noticed that the generated summary sentence was incorrectly comparing the total change against an individual ingredient, rather than the total. We hotfixed that issue two weeks ago and any past reports that were incorrect have been corrected as well.

August 24, 2015

2015-3334 Release

tl;dr
Send reports and comments with ease to Slack;
Pivotal Tracker now loads data from six months back;
Swap out a data connector you no longer wish to track.

Released

  • Notion + Slack webhooks – If your team uses Slack (and let's be honest, who doesn't?), we've introduced the ability to post notifications to a channel of your choosing whenever a comment is posted on a recipe or when a report is published. Check out our easy-to-follow instructions or head over to the new Account Settings page to get started

    This is the tip of the iceberg on what's possible with Slack, so if you have any requests, please let us know.

Updated

  • We now do a better job of loading historical data when you connect with Pivotal Tracker. For all of the time based recipes, rather than just showing you the current days value, we can load up to six months worth of data. Of course, we don't have the tools in place yet to scroll abck and view all of that data, but it will be coming shortly.
  • Related to Pivotal Tracker, it is now possible to swap out your API key with a new one. So in the event you were testing things out, or have multiple projects in Tracker and want to switch it, you can now do just that! Please note that when you swap projects or API keys, all of the recipes associated with the first connection will be wiped.
  • You can now link to specific dates in the activity feed for a recipe. So if you have a conversation from a previous interval you wish to share, when you navigate to that date, the URL will update accordingly which allows you to share direct links with your team.
  • When you connect with a data connector, you'll now see a few recommended recipes specifically called out in the list. If you're not sure what you should be tracking as a team, this is a good place to start. See the recommended recipes for Pivotal Tracker here.

Fixed

  • If you have connected with Pivotal Tracker, you may have been receiving an email at the end of every day notifying you that the reports have been completed. Since this happens daily anyway, there's no need to send the email. So this has been fixed.
  • A lot of under the hood performance issues have been released, so hopefully you are seeing a smoother experience as you navigate the site.

August 12, 2015

2015-3132 Release

Released

  • Notion + Pivotal Tracker — Build better software. Make smarter decisions.

    We’re thrilled to announce our first integration is now live! If your team uses Pivotal Tracker, you can easily integrate with Notion and pull over more than a dozen recipes that will automatically update each day — no need to assign out ingredients, no need to remember to report.

    This integration is the first of many that will be coming in future releases, so if there is a SaaS tool that you would like us to integrate with, please let us know!

    The recipes that come over from Pivotal Tracker behave just like normal recipes in our interface. You can add comments, set trends and goals, add them to multiple dashboards, and include them on your summary reports.

    Click here to get started or look for the Data Connector link in the side bar.

Fixed

  • Ingredient report landing pages were only working if you were signed in. This might have prevented you from making a report when clicking a link from a reminder email. All fixed now, so you should be good to go.
  • Ingredients set to be reported at the end of the month caused a few bugs in various places of the interface. These should all be fixed. If you see any funky time related bugs, please let us know.
  • Reporting an ingredient or building a report after midnight GMT also caused a few timestamp issues, depending on what time of day it was. Sadly, we did not invent time travel. Rather, we simply fixed the glitched.

July 27, 2015

2015-2930 Release

Released

  • Edit Recipe Meta Data – Three releases ago, we introduced the ability to add meta data to your recipes, like setting the trend, format, and goal. And as many of you found out, you were unable to set these for your previously existing recipes. Thankfully, you can now edit these for all recipes, new and old. Be sure to update yours to get the full benefit of your status reports.
  • Bi-weekly Reporting – If you are a product team like us, you are probably use to measuring everything in two week intervals. So if you work in sprints, you can now set up your recipes to be reported every two weeks, instead of every week or month. Let us know if you have other intervals in mind as well.

Fixed

  • All features and no bugs makes Jack a happy boy.

July 13, 2015

2015-2728 Release

Released

  • Private Dashboards – Sometimes you have data that you don't want everyone on your team to see. We get that. And now, we allow that. As the owner of a dashboard, you can access your dashboard settings and make your dashboard private. Only the team members that you grant access to will be able to view your dashboard.
  • Edit Dashboard Name – tired of having your dashboard be called "Testing out Notion"? Fear not, you can change that now in your dashboard settings, too.
  • New and Improved Activity Feed — Our previous commenting system was rather straight forward: click into a recipe and add a comment to a long thread. We've since added some enhancements and reworked it a bit to provide more value.

    Underneath each interval along the x-axis of your chart, you can pull up a comment thread specific to that date. How come your numbers were so high or so low last month? Add your insights directly to June 30th and you'll always be able to go back and remember why.

    It's also easier than ever to add comments. On an ingredient report page, you can now optionally include a message along with your reported value.

Fixed

  • Charts rendered in published reports were continuing to show future intervals rather than being frozen at time of publish. This is now fixed.
  • Timestamps on published reports were fixed to GMT. They are now the timezone of your account.

June 29th, 2015

2015-2526 Release

Released:

  • Status Reports – We've all been there. It's Sunday night, and rather than watching some great reality television, you're stuck putting together numbers pulled from emails and Excel docs and the various tools your team is using. And worse yet, you are compiling your numbers into a Word document, fully knowing that you'll be lucky if people even open it again after your meeting. That all ends now.

    Your reports can now live directly in Notion, making the process of creating and sharing your weekly or monthly status reports as simple as clicking a button.

    In the top right corner of your dashboards, you will see an option to "Build Report". Using natural language generation, we provide you with a brief progress report on each recipe — what is your current value, how did you improve over the previous period, and how are you tracking against your targets. Ingredient snapshots are also listed and you have the ability to include your own commentary to complete the picture.

    When published, reports can automatically be emailed to your team members or you can share the URL yourself. Past reports can be found under the Account section of the side navigation.

    Take a look at an example report: https://app.usenotion.com/publications/2?direct=1&token=e6149be0650045bf9e7796bb

    We look forward to hearing how you use Reports with your team.

Fixed:

  • Percentage format now properly multiplies your value by 100.

June 15th, 2015

2015-2324 Release

Released:

  • Recipe Meta Data – You can now set the trend and format type. Trends help you identify if your goal is to maximize or minimize your KPI. Format types include the default number format, as well as currency and percentage. Depending on the selected format, the UI will properly represent the calculated value by prepending a $ or appending a %. The percentage format also automatically multiple your equation by 100.
  • Recipe Targets – Set a target to identify what your team is working towards. Incremental targets follow the same frequency as your reporting schedule. Or you can set your target as a total value. And depending on your format, you can also set percentage growth (period over period) or steady growth (a fixed increase each period).
  • Mulitple Dashboards – Segment metrics by function, team, or however your heart desires and create as many dashboards as you want. Recipes can be listed on multiple dashboards without the need to duplicate any data or report twice. Edit any existing recipe to set which dashboard it belongs to or define it when you create new recipes.

Fixed:

  • There were zero production bugs to fix this release...Holy cow! The app is perfect. (In reality, there are probably bugs hiding in the dark corners of the app. You know the drill: If you see something, say something.)

June 1, 2015

2015-2122 Alpha Release

This release marks the official beginning of alpha! Our thanks to our super exclusive pre-alpha users for all their testing and bug finding. We couldn't have done it with out you.

Released:

  • Password reset – We know how it is. You try to be extra clever when creating your password and throw in a bunch of extra characters and letters...and then two weeks later, you forget if it was an @ or an a, 0s start to look like Os, and an l is an I. Well worry no more because now you can just request your password to be reset and you can start the forget-me-not process all over again.
  • Overdue reminder emails – Speaking of forgeting things, in the event you forget to report on your assigned ingredients by the due date, you will receive a single email the following day. Hopefully that is enough to remind you.
  • Reporting digest emails – As a recipe owner, you will receive an email at the end of the day if and only if you have created recipes that were due that day. The email will include all the recipes that are complete, and all the ones that are still missing so you can send a gentle reminder to your team members.
  • Troubleshooting – If you get lost at any time along the way or want a refresher on how to use the app, we now have a troubleshooting page live at usenotion.com/troubleshoot.html

Fixed:

  • If you've been tracking data for a while now, you may have noticed that you could only update the past four entries. This is no longer the case. You can now edit as far back as four periods before the first due date.
  • The x-axis now properly labels the year or month, which were missing before.
  • Bars now have a minimum height, so in the event your chart approaches zero, you still have something to hover over for more information.
  • Some of our fonts weren't loading in Chrome. We appreciate you putting up with Times New Roman in your charts, but that certainly wasn't by design. Hopefully they look better to you now.
  • All pages should now have a title and we added an .ico file, so if you are like us and have 500 Chrome tabs open, hopefully it's a little easier to navigate.
  • A bunch of dead links were scattered throughout the UI, leading to confusion. These have been removed. We promise to only but them back when they are fully functional.
  • The activity feed now correctly shows the updated value as the far right bar, making it easier to understand what was updated/submitted.
  • Ingredient bars now have a slightly different shade of yellow than a completed recipe bar, further helping to distinguish when a report is incomplete.
  • We now show a helpful error message if you enter in the wrong email or password on sign in. Before, we said nothing... which helps no one.
  • Despite what you were taught in middle school, there are some scenarios where you need to divide by zero. And representing data as ratios is one of them. Thankfully, we've bent the rules and made this work.
  • The recipe equation builder has been updated to prevent an odd number of parenthesis from crashing the dashboard.
  • Invited users no longer appear twice on the Team Members page.

May 18, 2015

2015-1920 Release

Released:

  • Email Reminder Digest — If you have 10 ingredients assigned to you on the same day but dread receiving 10 individual emails, this will excite you. Reminder emails are now simplified to a single email digest that reminds you of all the ingredients due that day. Adding space in your inbox and sanity to your workflow.
  • Recipe Library — Helping teams find the right metrics to track now has a home. Predefined recipes grouped by function and vertical can now be found via the sidebar navigation. Select the recipe you want to add to your dashboard and the formula will already be defined for you. Tweak the formula as needed, or simply assign reporters to your ingredients and you'll be on your way. We'll be continually adding to the library each release. If you have a recipe you'd like to see just let us know.

Fixed:

  • There's no place like home. Clicking the Notion logo in the menubar will now take you there, rather than destroying everything.
  • Anonymous report avatars crashed the activity feed.
  • Zeroes are numbers, too. As such, reporting all zeros no longer prevent charts from rendering.
  • Recommended recipes on a brand new dashboard are now fully functional.
  • Values with decimal points are now rounded down to just two in the UI making it a little more manageable to read.

May 4, 2015

2015-1718 Release

Released:

  • Activity Feeds – The story behind your data now has a place to live. Click on a recipe card from your dashboard and you’ll find an activity feed specific to that recipe. See reports as they come in, add notes, ask questions, and keep track of your decisions.

Fixed:

  • Table overflow has been wrangled on expanded recipe pages. Data no longer escapes the container.
  • :fire: Firefox — charts weren’t working correctly (read: at all) in Firefox. They do now.

April 20th, 2015

2015-1516 Release

Released:

  • Charts! (Probably one of the reasons you are using Notion in the first place.) Positive values, negative values, incomplete reports, or completely missing…we’ve got you covered.
  • Recipe creation notification. Helps explain what exactly happened when you hit that Create button.

Fixed:

  • :fire: Dave Shanley. While we are proud of our CEO, we no longer hard code his name on every report landing page. It now probably shows your boss’s name.
  • When logged in on your reporting page, you should only see active ingredients. Deleted ingredients are now just that, deleted.
  • It’s now more clear that assigning ingredients requires you to enter in an email address.
  • What’s a team name? We now include a better description when you first sign up to help answer that very question.

April 6th, 2015

2015-1314 Release

Released:

  • Pre-alpha release