All articles by Jay GoldmanBlog Index

Here’s what’s new in Rypple from today’s release.

It’s Aliiiiive! Real time updates in the feed

Customers are using Rypple more and more and it really shows in the feed — almost. Up until today, you had to keep refreshing your page to see the latest feed items appear. Refresh no more! The feed now includes a real time notice about new items at the top:

You’ll also see a little red badge on tabs that you aren’t on when there’s new items there.

Personal reports are the new black

People are digging all the reports we’ve been adding and using them to report on all kinds of things. Today’s release sees a new ‘thing’ you can report on: specific team members! The activity report just got a whole bunch more useful, making it simple to kick out a report on one person’s kudos, actions, insights, and coaching notes.

You’ll find the new report in the same place as the previous activity report — just look for the “Select people” option under the Team Activity report, click over to “Choose”, and then specify one (or more!) people:

Hot dates for everyone

You might also notice the swanky new date picker while you’re in there. Most reports turn out to be of the “this week”, “last week”, “last month”, and “last 3 months” varieties, so we’ve saved you the date-clicker-clicking and made them a fixed set of hot date options. The date ranges are still there for when you need even more fine grained control.

Everyone loves CSV

Last, but certainly not least (and by very popular demand!), reports now include an “Export to CSV file”, which does exactly what the name promises to do.

Give us feedback!

As always, we’d love to hear what you think of the new features. Stop by the comments for this post and share your thoughts! (RSS/Newsletter readers: you’ll need to click through to the full post to do so).

Tags: activty, csv, dates, feed, july 21st, personal, real-time, Release Notes, reports, Rypple, team

Here’s what’s new in Rypple from last week’s release.

I think we’re being followed

So much great stuff flows through Rypple that it can be tough to pay attention to the things that are most important to you. This week saw the introduction of our “following” feature to help you keep tabs on what you need to see. You can easily follow people and tags by clicking on the new follow buttons you’ll find on profiles and tag pages:

You’ll get an email whenever the followed person receives kudos, commits to action, or shares a question. Following a tag will get you an email whenever items are tagged with it. Here’s an example of what a notification would look like if you were following Tihomir, one of our awesome developers, and David, our Co-CEO (note the unfollow links at the bottom).

You’ve got mail

The more you use Rypple, the more email you get. Fact of life or awesome news in your inbox? We think it’s the latter, and we want to make sure you do too.

We’re redesigning and streamlining all of the emails you get from Rypple to ensure that they’re packed full of useful info and armed with easy ways to comment and become part of the conversation. Now you’ll be able to consistently reply to the email when you want to add your $0.02, or a click a link to visit Rypple on the web and see the full thread. As you can see in the follower notification above, we’ve also made them much simpler and more text-focused so they’re easier to quickly scan and read.

Here’s another example:

Battling multiple email address disorder

Turns out there are lots of you folks who have more than one email address at work. I feel your pain — I’m jgoldman, jay.goldman, and jay so there are a bunch of ways to find me too. Good news for all of you: this week brings email aliases to Rypple! Now you can add new addresses to your account settings and consolidate your various addressed into a single Rypple account (as long as they’re all at the same domain, like rypple.com).

Custom kudos for everyone!

Seems everyone loves their custom kudos. So much, in fact, that we had no end of requests for the ability to make them available to everyone on your domain. Requests granted! Domain admins can now create custom kudos that everyone in their domain can give from their admin dashboard:

Tags: address, custom kudos, domain, email, follow, follower, july 16, notification, person, Release Notes, Rypple, tag

Sometimes you get emails from your boss that make you wish it was Friday or that you were invisible and could hide under your desk. This was not one of those emails:

Would you be interested in VIP seats for the ROOTS June 29th?  The Roots are amazing, if you don’t know!

I couldn’t have replied “HELL YES” any faster without fracturing my fingers on the keyboard. I mean, it’s one thing to have a night at the pub to make you feel proud of your job — it’s entirely another to get to see one of the greatest hip hop acts of all time from the third row.

And so we went and it was awesome. Here’s a clip of You Got Me from 1999’s Things Fall Apart going into a guitar solo from “Captain” Kirk Douglas and then into an awesome rendition of Sweet Child of Mine (for real):

Bet you want to work somewhere that loves its team this much. On a related note, did I mention we’re hiring?

Tags: captain kirk douglas, career, guns 'n roses, hiring, jobs, Rypple, sweet child of mine, td jazz festival, the roots, things fall apart, toronto, you got me

They say you’re supposed to learn one new thing every day. I’m lucky enough to work in a place where I learn a ton of new things every day, which is a big part of what keeps me motivated and engaged. One of the things I didn’t expect to learn today: what do a hotelier from California, two Nobel prize winning economists, and the King of Bhutan have in common?

Happiness.

I watched Chip Conley’s excellent TED Talk this morning on the way in to work. Much like Tony Hsieh, who recently shared a stage with our Co-CEO Daniel, Chip has zeroed in on how a culture of happiness drives his company’s bottom line. He was inspired by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which helped him to re-imagine his company and helped them triple in size even during the dotcom bust (Bay Area hotels experienced the largest drop in US hotel history during the bust).

I love the Einstein quote that he uses in his talk:

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. — Albert Einstein

Chip even stakes out the intellectually dangerous position of arguing with Einstein — and then wins the argument conclusively. His point is that we are merely measuring the mundane when we focus on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) instead of on what makes life (and work!) meaningful. He’s backed up by none other than Robert Kennedy, in a famous speech from March 1968:

The gross national product (of a country) does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. — Robert Kennedy

Gross National Happiness (GNH)

Chip spends a chunk of the talk on Gross National Happiness, a global movement to balance the mundane measurements of GDP with the critical evaluation of the extraordinary that makes life worth living. The concept was first articulated by Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, and served as a unifying vision for their five year strategic plan. The movement’s legacy can be seen in French President Sarkozy turning to two Nobel prize winning economists to measure his country’s happiness (see coverage from The Economist and The Independent).

Performance Management: Measuring the Mundane

This resonated really strongly for me. We spend a lot of time here at Rypple thinking about measuring performance in the workplace, a somewhat nebulous concept with connections into coaching, culture, feedback, leadership, productivity, etc. Most of the existing approaches to this problem are the essence of measuring the mundane: extremely expensive, batch processes that kill productivity for months at a time in order to produce volumes of data that server little real purpose. You could almost substitute “Performance management” for “gross national product” in Kennedy’s quote and not change another word.

So how to go from the mundane to the extraordinary? We don’t have the answer yet, but we’re making big strides toward it. We think it has a lot to do with continuous feedback and conversations. We’re pretty sure it involves establishing metrics and ways to measure the concepts of mastery, autonomy, and purpose from Dan Pink’s work. We’re hoping that you’ll help us figure this out by participating in the Agile People Manifesto project, which aims to do for management what the original Agile Manifesto did for software development.

I’ll end with the same thought-provoking (and soul searching) question that Chip ends on: What one thing can you start counting today that would actually be meaningful in your life? Answer in the comments below!

Jumping for joy photo by Éole. Licensed under CC.

Tags: chip conley, GNH, gross national happiness, king of bhutan, maslow's hiearchy of needs, TED, Tony Hsieh

Here’s what’s new in this week’s release:

Release Notes by Email

By very popular demand, we’ve created a simple way for you to get these release notes delivered straight to your inbox. Look for a form in the right sidebar of this post — if you’re viewing this from an email or RSS client, you’ll probably need to view this post.

Group Control

You’ve been getting some great usage out of the groups functionality, so we decided to make it a little easier to administer shared groups. The owner of a shared group is now listed in the group to make it easier to track them down when you need people added/removed.

The administrator of each Rypple account can now also edit shared groups, so track him or her down if you can’t find the owner. If you are him or her, then congratulations! You’re now a group editing master. Use your new-found powers for good.

Peer Reviews

We’ve updated the ever popular Peer Review feature to include ratings!

The key lies entirely in the innocent looking “Ask for ratings” checkbox at the bottom left of the form. Check that baby and your review will gain near-instant star-rating power:

One important Peer Review note: unlike regular Insights answers, feedback given in a peer review is never anonymous.

Post by Email

We’re seeing more and more usage of our cool Rypple-by-email features, and this week brings a considerable cleaning up and polishing. You’ll want to add post@rypple.com to your address book because that’s where the magic happens.

Send an email to post@rypple.com and you can easily post an update to your company’s activity feed (remember updates from last week?).

You can assign someone an action by including them on the To: line of the email. Note that you’ll need to be in a coaching relationship with them before you can give them things to do. You can also include more than one person on the To: line and they’ll all get their own copy of the action to complete.

Lastly, you can mix and match the various tags to create a full worksheet for someone:

Assorted Goodies

We end this week’s notes with a grab bag of goodness:

• You can now uncheck a completed action when you’re a little too early with marking it complete
• The number of characters for most responses has been raised to 1,000
• Speed improvements on the coaching page

Tune in next week for another seven days worth of updates!

Tags: june 24, Release Notes, Rypple

Get your Rypple release notes delivered straight to your inbox! You can now subscribe to our Release Notes email newsletter and you’ll get an automated breakdown of what’s new sent straight to you on Tuesday mornings. Just fill in this handy form:

You can still check back here every week or subscribe to the Release Notes RSS feed.

Tags: email, newsletter, Release Notes, Rypple

Dan Pink is one of our favorite authors, which makes it no big surprise that his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is a perennial must-read around Rypple. That made us all the more thrilled to see this awesome whiteboard interpretation done by the RSA and Cognitive Media:

The core concepts of drive — that we’re motivated more by mastery, autonomy, and purpose more than by money — is central to Rypple. You can see it in our Kudos functionality, which enables people within teams to reward each others accomplishments in a social recognition feed, and in our coaching tools, which help build mastery and define purpose. The written form was great but the video really brings it alive.

Tags: cognitive media, dan pink, drive, rsa, video

Tags: Rypple, sixty seconds, video

Here’s what’s new in Rypple for the week of June 15th, 2010.

Updates

Sometimes you just want to let people know what you’re working on, how a project’s going, or what kind of sandwich you had for lunch. Good news! The previously-kudos-only box on your company home page has been transformed into a Kudos and Updates box. Now you can post updates right into the company feed for everyone to see (stay tuned for them to appear on worksheets in an upcoming release).

Easier Activity Reports

Our newly launched activity report, which first saw the light of day in last week’s thrilling June 6th Release Notes, has had a very minor face lift. Gone are the zeros that were cluttering up the columns, making it much easier to scan at a glance. On a related note: anyone want to buy a truckload of zeros? Looks like we don’t need them anymore.

Upgrades Galore

A smattering of lovely Upgrade buttons have appeared throughout the app, all wearing the same delightful shade of this season’s hottest color: look-at-me-red. Check them out and click away for a very quick and simple way to upgrade your Rypple account.

Tags: activity reports, plans, pricing, red, Release Notes, Rypple, updates, upgrade buttons

Roger Martin is one of our favorite business thinkers, and not just because he’s ranked in the world’s Top 50 or because he’s a Rypple investor. It’s because he writes really insightful content like The Secret to Meaningful Customer Relationships on HBR Blogs. You should really go read the whole thing because it’s got some strong and very useful things to say about the value of qualitative performance assessment feedback over quantitative, something we all wrestle with. Here’s the cheat sheet if you haven’t got time.

His post was inspired by economist and agency theorist Michael Jensen, who made some observations about qual vs. quant:

…subordinates generally object to receiving qualitative performance feedback from their superior, especially if it is at all negative. They typically are dismissive of the qualitative feedback and ask for the feedback to be on a quantitative basis only.

This strikes right to the heart of why we built Rypple. Jensen’s advice to managers is to tell the subordinate that if he could actually be evaluated using purely quantitative measures, his job should be outsourced. That’s brilliant really — and very true. If I could measure your job entirely based on widget throughput or whatsits analyzed per hour, I could hire a robot or an outsourcing company far more cheaply.

There’s also much less value in quantative feedback from a future-looking perspective. Knowing that you managed to write 183 bug-free lines of code an hour for the last three months is interesting, but it’s not a predictor of future performance or a particularly useful piece of feedback for your manager to give you (unless it earns you a gold star — everyone loves gold stars). Marshall Goldsmith talks about this in his seminal Try Feedforward Instead of Feedback article. The real value in sharing feedforward is to improve the future, not focus on things that happened in the past and can’t be changed.

This isn’t limited to performance assessment data. Roger very insightfully relates it to customer relationships (I told you he was insightful!), making the point that:

If our understanding of customers is based entirely on quantitative analysis, we will have a shallow rather than deep relationship with them.

We see this all the time in our business. We try to be a very lean startup and base as much of our decision making on data as we possibly can. That’s a good practice — maybe even a great one — but can have serious ‘data blindness’ consequences. If you limit yourself to making decisions based on what you’re tracking, how do you ever discover the hidden value that doesn’t turn up in your analytics?

Case in point: we spend a lot of time optimizing our registration funnel to remove friction and make sure all of the people who want to sign up for Rypple can easily do so. We’ve got data up the wazoo about where they go on our site, what they click on, how long they spend there, etc. This is pretty standard stuff, and we mostly get it out of Google Analytics and a few custom tweaks we’ve built. It’s great for finding friction and knowing where to apply some grease, but it doesn’t answer the very fundamental question of motivation. We know that x% of people who hit our registration page don’t complete the form, but for everyone who doesn’t encounter an error (which we track), we have no idea why they didn’t. Maybe they decided not to provide their work email address. Could be that a colleague stopped by their desk to chat and they got distracted. Maybe they remembered they had a roast in the oven. It’s even possible that they were spontaneously abducted by aliens as their finger hovered over the mouse button, ready to submit. Looking at quantitative data will never tell us the answer.

Alien abduction photo by Thorsten Thees. Licensed under CC.

Tags: customer, data driven, Feedback, feedforward, funnel, lean, marshall goldsmith, qualitative, quantitative, relationship, roger martin, startup