#435 – 4 Ways We’ve Used Parabol’s Insights Feature

This week, we started using Parabol’s Insights product in earnest, and we’re growing even more excited about its potential impact on organizations.

Three weeks ago we shipped the earliest version of our Insights product into production (and wrote about it here). The Insights product is capable of taking Parabol’s meeting data, feeding it to an AI model, performing analyses and summarizing it into a report. While developing the feature we believed in the feature’s usefulness but having used it ourselves in production, it now feels indispensable.

Last week, we enhanced our Insights feature so that users can store and recall prompt templates. We have routine reports we need to send to stakeholders in the Parabol business, and now it’s a snap to select the meetings we need, and generate a report with the desired content.

Here are a few additional ways we’re using our Insights product today, and a few more ways we envision we’ll use it in the future.

1. Stakeholder Reporting

It’s common that we need to package up a report for stakeholders in Parabol’s business on how things are going. With our Insights feature, we’re able to create a concise report on what’s going on, using the data from our team’s weekly asynchronous standup (learn more about Parabol’s Stand-Up tool here), in the format stakeholders have requested. This is a major time saver!

2. Feature Prioritization

As user feedback for Parabol comes in, we add the verbatim feedback to a retrospective board. Every month, we group and discuss the feedback we’ve got. With Insights, we get a prioritized list of the most commonly requested features:

The prompt for the above was input as:

User feedback report. Given the following meetings where we've collected feedback from Parabol's users, create a list of the top 5 most requested features in descending order of frequency. Return your analysis as a bullet list. Start each bullet with a bold-formatted title, followed by a colon, a description of the feature, and a parenthesis of how many mentions each feature had. Each bullet should be clear and concise. For example "Drag-and-drop images (10 mentions): the ability to drag and drop images to retrospective reflections and comments." Limit your total output to approximately 100 words.

3. Performance & Promotion Insights

We conduct 360 employee feedback and reviews in Parabol. The longer an employee’s tenure at Parabol, the more data we’ve accumulated on patterns from their work. By combining the outputs from 360 reviews with other meetings they’ve attended we’re able to provide them potential areas for development to improve that’s grounded in real work.

4. Project Planning

Being able to query several years of Retrospectives in Parabol helps us understand what went well and what could go better. We’re now able to ask Parabol what to look out for when planning a specific feature and recommend different ways to approaching our work. In other words, we can predict potential incidents by analyzing past incident post-mortems and planning meetings.

7 other ways Insights could be used…

We’ve brainstormed a few other ways that our Insights tool might be used by organizations:

1. Trend & Theme Extractor: Summarize recurring themes or concerns across multiple teams over selected time periods.
2. Team Sentiment & Health Checks: Analyze retrospectives and stand-ups to identify emotional trends and burnout risk.
3. Innovation Index: Highlight teams frequently generating creative or novel solutions in meetings.
4. Cross-Team Synergy Detector: Identify potential collaboration opportunities by analyzing overlapping topics or concerns raised across different team meetings.
5. Conflict & Resolution Analysis: Detect and evaluate recurring conflicts and effective resolutions emerging from retrospective and incident post-mortem discussions.
6. Onboarding & Culture Fit Analysis: Assess onboarding effectiveness and cultural alignment of new hires through early participation patterns in team meetings.
7. Meeting Efficiency Analyzer: Identify meetings that consistently run over time or yield low engagement, suggesting areas for improvement.

We’d love to hear your ideas…

Do any of these use cases spark your ideas? We’d love to hear them! Please don’t hesitate to drop us a line…

(we might grant you early access to Insights!)

Metrics

Our weekly metrics were within our expectations this week. No major trends to report on, other than we hope to see more folks trying Parabol and its Insights feature!

This week we...

…reprioritized our marketing for the year. It is likely not the last time we reprioritize, but it’s important to take in all the available information and match it up against the resources at our disposal.

…set new sales targets.

…performed a deep-dive analysis into users and their usage of our Check-In meeting format. We’re always curious who these special folks are who discover and use our oldest (and one of our favorite!) meeting formats.

Next week we'll...

…iterate on designs improving standup activity layouts and flexible meeting scheduling to address recurring user feedback.

…ship improvements for user management and bulk task deletion features.

…have our product team demo in-progress features to each other during our mid-development cycle ritual.

This week's Friday Ship was written by Parabol's CEO, Jordan Husney

For past editions of the Friday Ship, check out our blog.