Happy Friday, and happy birthday to Glossa, the product!
Discovery is about more than just requirements
Especially in complex implementations, discovery conversations include a lot more than just simple business needs. Sometimes you make decisions in discovery. Sometimes you uncover risks. Sometimes you learn about things that constrain your future solution architecture. And sometimes you just learn really interesting things about the business that you didn't know before, which you need to be able to reference as you build.
Today, a lot of that critical project information lives in risk ledgers (aka spreadsheets), decision ledgers (aka spreadsheets), emails, notes... and, more than anything, in people's heads. In other words, nowhere helpful.
So this week, Glossa is expanding its capabilities to capture and track decisions, risks, constraints, and findings alongside requirements. These categories populate automatically from the same meetings, emails, and messages you're using to generate requirements; you don't have to do anything extra (you'll see that the Requirements panel in your projects now includes a few new tabs).
I'm curious about whether you'll want to use Decisions, Risks, Constraints, and Findings after discovery, too, as a running summary of what's been happening in the project. If you regularly update status reports, decision logs, risk registers, exec summaries, etc and want to try this, please let me know - I'd love to chat.
What We Shipped This Week & What's Coming Next
This week:
Decisions, risks, constraints, and findings - You don't need to dig through spreadsheets and meeting notes to find out why a decision was made or surface a risk; decisions, risks, constraints, and findings are all traceable back to their sources, just like requirements.
Better requirements - they're simpler, shorter, and include a separate Rationale that explains why the requirement is important to the project. We’ve been trying to make this better with Requirements Granularity Dial, then Requirements Styles - now I think we’ve got it right. (Note: this overwrites Requirements Styles; if this doesn't match what you're looking for, talk to me and we'll figure out a better path forward for you.)
This weekend:
Workflow diagrams - visual process maps generated from your discovery context, and editable live on a client call. Available for eager beavers over the weekend - more details for everyone else on how it works next week.
Coming next:
Workflow diagram polish - do you need to export diagrams into Lucid? do you need to change the visual style/colors/shapes? do you need to edit the diagram directly, rather than describing the change in plain language? All open questions based on your feedback.
UI/UX improvements - our wonderful UX team at Minimal audited Glossa and shared some wowza recommendations for how to make the product easier to navigate, understand, and use. (And if you've stumbled using an area of the product, I want to know! We will make it better.)
Weekend Celebrating 🥂🥂
Today marks one year that Glossa has been in production, used by customers. It's a big milestone and I am really grateful to everyone who helped us get here (if you're reading this, yes, that means you!!) Here's my LinkedIn post celebrating a year of immense learning, growth, and collaboration.
Thank you for being on the journey. It really wouldn’t be possible without you!
- Ali