Zenhub Horizon See what’s new in Zenhub in Dec 2021!

We’re excited to bring you some incredible updates and improvements in this edition of Zenhub Horizon. Read on to learn more about everything we’ve built, optimized, and fixed.

First, a quick recap of 2021 ✨

Before we jump into our updates for this quarter, we’d love to take a moment to reflect on our most significant achievements and launches here at Zenhub. Here’s a recap of what the Zenhub team has accomplished this past year:

• In February, we launched Zenhub sprints, automated sprint planning in GitHub! This has now become one of our core and most loved features
• Then, we announced $4.7 million in seed funding from BDC Capital and Ripple Ventures, allowing our team to grow and continue focusing on exciting new features like automation
• We launched planning poker in Zenhub, reducing the need for lengthy backlog meetings by estimating directly in GitHub using Zenhub
• In July, we added a bunch of features to our on-premise product, Zenhub Enterprise 3.2.0, bringing features loved by  Zenhub cloud users to our on-prem teams
• Although our team has been working remote for quite some time, in August we officially announced our stance on being a remote-first workplace on our blog
• In September, we launched one of our most-requested features, dark mode! Our talented designer, Mayra Pulido, shared our team’s journey improving our design system for dark mode theming on the blog
• Later in September, we began our beta program for Zenhub board 2.0, a newer, faster board that delivers an overall next-level experience. We continued to roll out new features over the new weeks and months
• In October, we launched the brand new Zenhub Community on Discourse, hosting an exciting contest to give away a Mac Mini and Apple AirPods Max. Make sure to join us over on the community for some great discussion!
• We’re closing out the year with the launch of productivity insights, a quick-access panel available on your Zenhub board that gives you up-to-date metrics on your team’s performance

It’s been quite a year over here at Zenhub, and we can assure you we have even bigger and better things coming in 2022.

Now, back to our regular scheduled Horizon programming. Here’s a more detailed recap of the past quarter at Zenhub.

What’s new ✨

Our new, faster Zenhub board 2.0 with feature updates & enhancements

Since launching our beta for the Zenhub board 2.0 (our new, faster board) earlier this year, we’ve been hard at work this quarter reviewing all your feedback (keep it coming!) and building out features that have been the most requested. We’ve been so happy to see the overwhelming opt-in rates for the beta, as well as the plethora of feedback you’ve provided. We’ve used this feedback as our north star over the last few months as we continue to improve the board.

Zenhub Board 2.0 has received the following feature updates in the last few months:

• Multi-select and bulk editing
• Support for multi-select in the closed pipeline
• Filter by Epic Issues on Epic card
• Dependency and blocker icons on Issue cards
• Board settings updates
• Hide/show closed pipeline
• Hide/show labels on issue cards
• Issue card options
• Set assignee
• Set Epic
• Set sprint
• Bug fixes, reliability improvements, and stability enhancements

Focus in on your team’s work with the Condensed View for Zenhub Board 2.0

Continuing with board 2.0, this quarter we launched the first net new feature for board 2.0, condensed view. Condensed view is an alternate board view that abstracts the majority of ticket information in favour of a cleaner, more compact board view that allows you to see more tickets across the board.

This new view enables you to quickly scan the board for the information and tickets you need without having to sift through all of the details. It’s also ideal for team members who may not need all the context of the issues displayed on the board.

With condensed V=view, each pipeline on the board will now fit a few additional tickets that are loaded by default allowing you to easily view and manage more tickets at once. You can enable condensed view by navigating to board Settings and toggling the switch for it once you’ve opted into board 2.0.

See how your team is tracking at a glance with productivity insights

We know how valuable it is to quickly see team performance at any point during a sprint, which is why we created the productivity insights quick-access panel. Available right from your Zenhub board, this view of insights provides vital information at a glance and helps draw out patterns that previously required additional work to discern.

Productivity Insights features:

• Average days in cycle for an Issue
• Average days in development
• Average days in review
• Average cycle time over the last 14 days
• Anomalies for issues that took abnormally long to complete
• Spring progress and scope changes
• Percent of issues and story points completed
• Average velocity

Customize your sprint length

Zenhub is used by many types of teams across different industries and verticals. We tend to see teams in Zenhub using a diverse set of project methodologies, and rarely are they following any ‘by the book.’ When we released automated sprints earlier this year, the feature was well received by our user base, but over time we had requests to remove the 30-day limit on sprint lengths to better accommodate the different lengths of planning cycles our customers are using.

To allow for additional flexibility and to address the feedback we’ve received, we’ve removed the sprint length limit; all users can now create sprints that are longer than 30 days.

Epics just got epic-er?

Epics in Zenhub are, for lack of a better word…epic! We’ve introduced several new features to help our users better leverage epics across the product in the last few months, especially when planning and organizing work. We’ve added the following features to support Eeics in Zenhub:

To start, we’ve made creating Epics easier by introducing a ‘quick create’ option. Similar to the ‘quick create’ for issues, users can create an epic right on the board and within a specific pipeline without navigating to the ‘Create epic’ page.

Also, when working within roadmaps, we’ve added the epic flyover page to the roadmap so you can easily update or review your epics without leaving the roadmap page.

Adding epics to a roadmap has become easier with the introduction of an option to automatically add a new epic to the roadmap when you’re creating a new epic. When creating a new epic, you can choose whether to have the epic automatically added to the roadmap or left off for now.

As we complete one more journey around the sun and close out the year, we’re already looking forward to what we’ve got in store for 2022. Keep your eyes peeled on our blog, changelog, and community for updates from the Zenhub team! Happy holidays!