Pypelyne Blog

If you’ve ever wondered or responded to questions like “How much product is coming out of the pipeline every quarter?” or “It feels like were hardly launching stuff nowadays!” or “How much of last quarter’s product output was for marketing initiatives?” or “Am I devoting enough resources next month against SEO?”, Pypelyne  now has a powerful new insight you might find very useful.

This insight analyzes your roadmap and show you how much product is launching across time slices (you can select years, quarters, months, week, or even days as your slices.) And for each period you selected, you can see how the products are distributed across your strategic goals.

It’s slick and incredibly powerful. Look for the “Throughput with DrillDown” tab in the Insights section.

Product Throughput Insight

There is also a version of this insight without the portfolio drilldown. An experimental version of a similar insight in a pivot-table like format is also available. That one is very much a work in progress.

We now have an incredibly nifty voting feature.

You might be considering changing the priority of a feature but want to know who will get impacted … or upset.
Perhaps you’ve just captured a bunch of ideas after a brainstorm and want to know how popular they are and want your team to vote on them.
Or you might just be curious about who else is interested in your favorite feature.

Any user with an account can vote for an item in their roadmap.

Just select the “Owners” tab in a item detail and click the button to vote. You can also see who else has voted on that item.

Voting for an Item

Items with votes will show a red star icon on the roadmap view, along with the number of votes for that item. You just need to click on the star to see more.

Votes in Roadmap View

On a suggestion from a friend and a user, we’ve now implemented item dependencies in the product.

You can now make one item dependent on another. In addition to just being aware of relationships between items, if you rearrange priorities in a way that potentially breaks a dependency, the product will alert you.

Dependency Alert

Dependencies, if they exist, are shown beside each item in the Roadmap View. Iconic representations will immediately let you see if an item in dependent on another item, or if an item has dependents, or if an item is both a dependent and an antecedent.

Roadmap View of Dependencies

Clicking on one these icons reveals all the dependency details for the item:

Dependency Details

Managing dependencies is easy. You can add dependencies by just typing an item name in an auto-suggest box. You won’t see items that are already marked as dependencies and you can’t add an item to itself as a dependency. We’re smart that way!

Dependency Item Entry

An even slicker way to add dependencies is to just drag and drop an item from the Roadmap view into an item’s dependency list:

Dependency Drag and Drop

We hope you enjoy this feature.

We recently re-branded the product from the forbidding-sounding “Hexhelion” to the more accessible “Pypelyne.”

For the new identity, I used this amazing service called 99designs to get over 65 logo ideas  (see them here.)  Through 99designs, you can hold a contest where scores of designs are crowd-sourced and submitted.     The contest lasts for several days and you can provide feedback to the designers.   When the contest ends, you pick a winner who gets the prize and you get the logo.

And the winner is:

Pypelyne Logo