We have been building a lot and telling you almost nothing

The last time we posted anything on this page was 74 days ago. Not because nothing has changed.

Some of you have found things in Participant Kit that we haven’t announced. A setting that was not there last month. A column that appeared in your panel. Something that used to be irritating and is not any more.

Some of you have not found things, because we haven’t announced them.

This came up on a call in July, with a customer who checks Participant Kit against their own GDPR processes:

When I go in and I’m reviewing GDPR and our processes, I’m completely missing the new functionality, and I need to look at the new functionality against our processes and make sure that they align.

56 new things in two years. 12 posts about them. 😬

The gap has been getting steadily worse. In the last six months we have been building about three times faster, and over half of those 56 arrived since March. We got a lot better at building things, and no better at talking about them.

Since December, we’ve been using AI to help how we build. That’s why the pace changed. The talking is just us, and marketing hasn’t kept up with development, which is a fixable problem rather than an interesting one.

A note from the author. When I am talking about AI, I mean how we build the product. It is not AI inside the product. There is no AI touching your customer data. If you have any worries, I am happy to talk you through it. ~ Ben

Three things follow.

From next week, there’s a Friday Drop. Every Friday, sometimes more often. What changed that week, however small. Some weeks that will be a proper feature with screenshots and a help article, most weeks it will be a handful of smaller things, and it won’t go quiet again.

We’re going back through the backlog. There’s a lot in the product we never announced: broadcasts, do-not-contact, self-serve DPAs, the public API. Over the next couple of months we will work through them properly, one story a week, with the help documentation each one should have had at the time.

And if something is wrong, tell us. Building faster means we have more room to fix things. If something in Participant Kit is broken, awkward or just irritating, say so. The gap between you mentioning it and us fixing it is a lot shorter than it used to be.

And now an ask: bookings early access

We’ve got native bookings in Participant Kit. There’s no separate booking tool to set up. You plug in your calendar, Google or Outlook, and it already knows your study and the consent you have collected. You can ditch Calendly. 😉

It’s not switched on for everyone yet, which is why we’re looking for volunteers to come and test it out. Please get in touch! 🧪