🔮 Fibery roadmap for July-Dec 2023 + previous roadmap reflection

[mdubakov]

We’ve nailed what we are going to focus on till the end of the year. I shared our roadmap till May previously and we implemented many of the listed things. First, let me reflect on our progress.

Feb-May roadmap reflections

Overall we are pretty happy with the progress. We kept the focus in most areas. Unfortunately, we have nothing to show for permissions and tables yet.

Permissions (some progress)

We’ve finalized all technical details and started real implementation of entity-level permissions. It was slower than we expected, but we made progress.

Tables improvements (some progress)

We’ve spent 2 months on AG Grid prototype and decided to go for it. We have nothing major to show, since we need to catch up with existing tables first and only then we will release something and iterate.

Filters improvements (done)

Just some quality of life things many people need:

• Group filters with nested logical operators (or/and)
• Filter and sort in relations selector

Documents improvements (almost done)

Knowledge management in Fibery is not great, many people are struggling to setup Wiki, so we will focus on many improvements in this area:

• Nested documents (done)
• Files block (done)
• iFrame block (not done, but still in scope)
• Callout block (done)
• Custom emojis (in progress)

Getting started improvements

Progress was not that great overall.

• Better import from Notion, Confluence (we’ve made some progress here, now you can import markdown files. But overall we got distracted by ClickUp import)
• Invite users via a link (done)

GPT-3

• AI assistance in Documents and Rich Text fields (done)
• Invoke AI actions in automations (done)

Whiteboard View

We evaluated https://www.tldraw.com/ as a new technology for our Whiteboard and really liked it. However, we decided to not re-write Whiteboard so far. However, if it will be needed for some use cases, we will go for it.

Communication in Fibery research

We did a lot of research and discussions in this area, but implemented nothing.

July-Dec 2023 roadmap

We’ve made the following major decisions:

• We’ll put serious effort into Fibery simplification, polishing and emotional part.
• We’ll focus on 2-3 vertical use cases for product teams: collect feedback, work with insights, prioritize work based on feedback
• We’ll continue and finalize entity-level permissions and new table view
• We’ll significantly improve comments and notifications

Here are more detailed set of features in these areas

Permissions

We’ve started implementation and want to have the first working prototype in 4-6 weeks. We have to check scalability, this is the only remaining issue with the technical solution. If it will be fine, then we’ll move forward and finally release something here.

New Table View

We’ll spend around 3 months improving tables in Fibery and solve ALL major problems and missing things you reported. We expect to have the first release in 3-5 weeks here.

Comments and notifications

Comments in Fibery are awful. We explored novel ways to collaborate, but decided to not go for it. So now we’ll spend 2-3 months to solve major problems. You can expect features like:

• Full-text search in Comments
• Make comment section easily accessible from entity view
• Reply in comments / threads
• Emoji reactions on comments
• Read/Unread comments
• Comment resolutions
• Comments as first-class citizens (create Views with Comments)

• Fine-tune / configure notifications better
• Filter notifications by notification type
• Follow/Watch Entity and get notifications

Simplification, polishing, emotions

Scope here is less clear, but we are forming a team of 4 developers that will spend the next 6 months together solving a lot of problems. Some features are:

• hints, simple way to create view, cleaner left menu, simpler entity view, …
• more customization, colors, emojis, ….
• fix many annoying little bugs

Vertical use cases for product teams: collect feedback, work with insights, prioritize work based on feedback

Scope is not super clear here as well (we will have it in a month), but in terms of problems that we will solve here are they:

• improve References in text. It will be possible to add fields to references to set weight, priority, etc
• it will be possible to create views with References, move them from entity to entity faster, link reference to many entities
• we’ll experiment with automatic insights extraction from feedback using AI models
• we add more feedback collection sources (maybe feedback portal)
  Overall, we will catchup with Dovetail, Cycle and ProductBoard here. Our goal is to help product teams extract knowledge from raw data and make better decisions.

As always, your feedback is really appreciated!

[NMan]

@mdubakov

Simplification, polishing, emotions

Are improvements to the calendar UX and usability also planned here?
Planning tasks is currently not a very pleasing experience…

Thanks

[mdubakov]

@NMan

Are improvements to the calendar UX and usability also planned here?

Calendar View is out of scope so far, unfortunately.

[NMan]

Oh…

But I am excited for everything else Keep up the good work!

[YvetteLans]

This really made my day We are currently struggling with permissions, tables and comments/notifications. Creating all kind of (pretty ugly) workarounds so really glad that this is in scope for the coming months

And pretty sick to see what has been improved in the last months. Those new functionalities were a real game changer for our setup

@mdubakov

cleaner left menu

This is also awesome! In the meantime I’ve created a workaround for a clean left menu which is working pretty well. Maybe we can inspire people with it

Previously our CRM space looked liked this for a user (and then imagine in total 8 big spaces like this )

In our new set-up we’ve hidden all those databases and views for users and made our own menu.

• User now only has one space (“The Ultimate Workspace”; it’s just a placeholder without databases) and within that space a folder for what was previously a space (i.e. Inbox / CRM / Goals & planning).
• All views / spaces / databases are in ‘Hidden Spaces’ (I think we have around 75+ views / 25+ spaces and 100+ databases)
• In each folder we’ve created documents that are now basically the menu items within a ‘space’. We link all applicable views in those documents. In the left menu user will only see 1 document for views, 1 document for reports and 1 document for Wiki/settings per 'space’

It is really cool that with all the functionalities today (and some imagination + help from support) we can build the most awesome solutions

---

Note: unfortunately there is no room for smart folders anymore in my setup, but it’s a pretty perfect in between solution for non tech savvy users.

You can create smart folders + views in hidden databases and link those views in documents. But the problem is that it’s currently not possible to filter out entities like in a normal smart folder. And therefor if the system asks for which entity the view is, user will see all kind of entities that are not applicable for the situation. Which causes brain melt for my clients

[NICW]

Because the mention of Whiteboard I would love the ability to use Mermaid either in documents or both documents and whiteboards.

Mermaid js

Especially with the great implementation of chatGPT into fibery, the ability to have it generate diagrams and workflows right into fibery would be awesome.

[njyo]

That’s great news and massive thanks to the whole team working on releasing improvements regularly and tirelessly❣️

Besides the FRQs filed and that I’ll keep filing, our take on the plans for the next 2 quarters:

1. Permission improvements: YES, PLEASE. Currently, the solution is workable, but it’s cumbersome for me to know who has access to what and what they can do:
   1. The names and descriptions are confusing: What can Editors and Contributors do and what not? What if a document is in a space and embeds a view from another space of a database in a third space, what rights apply? It should be possible to see on each view (page, document, etc.) who can do what. Being able to add and edit entities in a database, but not change the database structure is crucial for collaboration. Is that an Editor or Collaborator?
   2. Space-based access rights make sense for entities, but for a Wiki it’s confusing. I would want people to be able to add sub-pages somewhere
   3. Hope this entails a “non-admin” mode for admins and/or the option to view Fibery as a different user for admins.
2. Table improvements: Yes please, especially the basic embedded tables in documents.
3. Better Notion and Confluence import would be something that many of us might rarely use, but would be used at least once per switch, and in that case is crucial. We have a few knowledge bases we need to migrate from both Notion and Confluence. So yes, please, to proper import.
4. Whiteboard: It seems to have got more stable already, so that is good. I take it can be a bottomless pit to invest effort to try to match Whimsical or Miro. To us, it is a crucial unique selling point of Fibery that we can have whiteboards that display our entities in there. What I can see would be good to have improved:
   1. Placement and re-arrangement relics when moving things. Especially lines seem a little susceptive to that, which means that things like “zoom into view”, which is super useful, sometimes breaks because of some random offshoot
   2. Allowing the perpendicular lines to be dragged so that in more complex flow charts they do not just line up anywhere.
   3. More flexibility with entity embed. Most notably: a) Ability to hide labels and b) Ability to show a full one-line text field: Many times what we need is just the a) name, b) summary and some c) tags. You’ve cleaned the Kanban cards, similar clean-up for the Whiteboard cards would be great. And when you’re at it, can you allow for #2 in Kanban boards as well, so that we can show a full summary?
5. Improved comments and notifications as well as added polish: Yes, great, thanks!
6. Collect feedback, work with insights, etc. catching up with Dovetail and co. is in our opinion, not crucial at all right now as we find it’s outside of Fibery’s core selling point. of course it would be nice for some to be able to replace those tools, but this may just lead to featuritis, while a lot of your core functionality still needs a lot of love to be able to compete on par with Notion, Confluence+JIRA, Trello, Asana in terms of polish as well as power. We would much rather have more power with automations, integrations and the things you listed above than adding another full product feature set badly (because if your team can catch up with those tools in half a year while doing all the other things too, what have they been doing?). I guess you could get 80% there, but so many places Fibery feels 80% there, that it’s still a tool for tinkerers and a hard sell. → so, please, rather focus on things closer to your centre of gravity.

Again, thanks for all the hard work you all are putting into this. Hope you don’t mind our candid feedback.

[B_Sp]

Great news with a few things on this list in particular:

@mdubakov

Full-text search in Comments

and

@mdubakov

Comment resolutions

These are huge features, in particular being able to resolve comments so they can act as sort of “lite” tasks. If you could guys could be sure to include that there is a follow-on comment explaining what the resolution is, you have a really differentiating feature here! Otherwise you just mark “resolved” but somebody reading that might not know what happened to resolve the comment…I wrote some more details on how this could look here

I also want to mention just to make sure it’s on your guys’ radar how good it would be to have a sort of activity feed on entities if you could Have references and comments with the option to show chronologically as they are added. It has become basically our top Fibery SOP in my team for members to scan BOTH comments and references to see the latest on an entity. At times we have the latest comment say 3 months ago, but the entity was referenced (and by association updated) many times earlier. Example: Closing the last task in a project - when that task is closed, I comment "I’m also closing out this project…"which I tag in the same comment, and voila I can update both in one, quick fell swoop. This saves me from having to go over and comment in the project’s entity that I closed it. Also, it gives context to the reader that the project got closed at the same time as when the last task was closed. There are so many uses of this ability to tag/reference multiple entities at once around Fibery, and having the comments/references stream sort chronologically would really help the foundation of using this method.

Thanks!

[mdubakov]

@njyo

Collect feedback, work with insights, etc. catching up with Dovetail and co. is in our opinion, not crucial at all right now as we find it’s outside of Fibery’s core selling point.

Well, we are focusing on product teams and product companies, and don’t want to compete with Asana and Trello, for example. We want to cover use cases that are demanded by product teams and these use cases are one of those. Note that we are not going to slap features, but improve the platform. For example, if you will be able to work with References in a better way, it can be applied to many other knowledge capturing cases, not only feedback management. Fibery as a platform is relatively OK, but we also need to enable quite concrete use cases to grow faster.

[X_Yuan]

Looking forward to the new Table release. Any details on what additional features we might see in the future? Hope to see the capability to have calculation row (sum, mean etc) and freeze row/column. And overall faster keyboard navigation will be great.

[Marloes]

Wow, this is amazing news. Really happy with this roadmap.

[Illusory]

@mdubakov

Whiteboard View

We evaluated https://www.tldraw.com/ as a new technology for our Whiteboard and really liked it. However, we decided to not re-write Whiteboard so far. However, if it will be needed for some use cases, we will go for it.

Not sure if the Fibery team has evaluated Weje (A free online web whiteboard for visual collaboration inside) but it has some interesting features.

[njyo]

Thanks for elaborating, @mdubakov. Glad to hear that you see that whatever will be done with References will work better across the product. I’m excited to see how that empowers the general use.

Guess what I wanted to bring across is that for our product team, I do currently not see this as that crucial. I might be missing visibility tho.

I just hope that the Whiteboard gets the love it needs. To us, that’s one of the biggest selling points and currently sadly just workable…

Thanks!

[mdubakov]

Hope to see the capability to have calculation row (sum, mean etc) and freeze row/column. And overall faster keyboard navigation will be great.

In the first release we will mostly have the same feature set, with some additions

• drag and drop rows
• group rows by parent entities
• freeze columns

Then we will add more features, like totals for columns, etc. We will not stop till Table View will be powerful enough and usable enough.

[Marloes]

Since you are working on the emojis, I would like to give some feedback.

In a couple of databases we are using single select fields as a workaround for state.

Due to the possibilities we have with the normal state field (like state = final in formula’s) we would like to change those single selects into a traditional workflow field. But we don’t like the looks of it.

• The emojis are not as bright as our version in the single select.
• The emojis are a bit to big. We would prefer a little more subtle emoji.
• And the black circle indicating the progress in combination with an emoji doesn’t look nice either.

See these 2 examples:

• It would be very nice if the black circle indicating progress were optional, so users can choose between a black circle, an emoji or both.
• Then if the emojis would also be a bit brighter and more subtle that would be absolutely fantastic.

Wonder if you guys agree with this.

[Mike_Yermolayev]

Hello, @Marloes,

Could you tell me please how emojis were added to single-select? Were they selected with our icon/color picker or were they inserted using native OS emoji picker as a part of title?

To me it looks like you inserted native emojis to single-selects but for Workflow field you selected them with our picker. As a part of emoji-color-picker-unification we’ve decided to use Twemoji (twitter emoji) for all non-apple users in our pickers

So, as a workaround you can still insert native emoji to workflow field as a part of text but in that case your colleagues sitting on Linux or Android will see emoji in their OS style (e.g ✅ White Heavy Check Mark Emoji)

[JackC]

Whilst we’re talking emojis, some way to convert icons to text in formulas would be useful.
eg. I have a multi-select that sometimes gets a bit hectic. The ability to just string together the emoji icons so views with less space can get a shorthand would be handy, and the thing that’s stopping me is that emoji icons can’t be inserted into text, even if the emojis themselves are allowed.

[Marloes]

Hi @Mike_Yermolayev

The emojis in the single-select were added via the default option from Microsoft as part of a the title. And you’re also correct that we used the emoji picker for the workflow field.

So yes, we can replace the emojis in the workflow field with our own emojis provided by Microsoft. But unfortunatelly, we still dislike the way it looks. I had the hope that choosing an emoji would replace the dark circle. Now we basicly have 2 emojis

See the image below were we have changed the emoji into our own (as an inline text emoji).

[Louis-FelixBorealys]

@mdubakov

Permissions (some progress)

We’ve finalized all technical details and started real implementation of entity-level permissions. It was slower than we expected, but we made progress.

Just out of curiosity, if I have a CRM that I share with partners companies, will there be a way that I can add child notes to a company/person without being accessible to the other partners companies? (child relation)