Written by: Joey Muething, Align Product Manager

This is Part Four of a Four-Part blog series I’m writing about Align’s product vision and roadmap for 2019.

In Part One, I talked about the guiding principles of the Align product and design team. You can find it here.

In Part Two, I talked about features you can expect to see this year that will help larger, complex teams use Align more efficiently. You can find it here.

In Part Three, I talked about features that will allow individual team members’ day-to-day contributions to be visible to leadership, celebrated by the rest of the team and connected to larger strategic goals. You can find it here.

This post will dive into:

• Support For Larger Teams
• Team Contribution and Transparency
• Insights and Integrations

More Insights, Less Typing

Align is much more than just a repository for your strategy docs or a to-do list.

We’re focused intently on ways the Align product can guide you to more successful strategic planning and day-to-day insights on short-term adjustments.

We also understand that a full, insightful picture of your team’s performance may require information from other tools to be integrated into Align, or Align information to be sent elsewhere. We’ve heard our users loud and clear on this front, and we’re looking at integrations and programmatic solutions to make that information transfer fast and easy.

Huddle Search

Something we’ve heard a lot is that users want to be able to check in on the details of a topic they vaguely remember was discussed in last month’s Daily Huddle.

Or maybe you were on vacation and want to check if a topic of interest was mentioned while you were out?

We’re looking to make your meeting updates in Align searchable and discoverable. You’ll be able to search by keyword, team member, or specific Huddle.

Ingest Information from Other Tools

Goal management in Align is just one part of your team’s workflow. And often you have overlap between tasks that are part of your project management software and tasks related to your strategic priorities. We don’t want you to have to do double the work.

We’ve already built task management integrations with Google Tasks and Office 365. If you’d like more information on how to use these integrations, check out our FAQ page within Align on the topic, or let us know if you’d like a walkthrough.

We’re also looking to expand our footprint into more of the task management tools you use. We’re looking into Asana, Trello, and a few others.

These are the most common tools our users have expressed interest in, but if there’s other task management software your team uses, we’d love to hear from you.

Similarly, a lot of teams are focused in on their sales and cash metrics as their most important Critical Numbers. No surprise there. Integrations with tools like Salesforce and Quickbooks is another area we’re focused on, so that your team’s topline metrics are updated and top of mind in Align as you execute on your other strategic priorities.

Again, these are the most common requests we’ve got for ingesting sales data, but let us know if you have other needs.

Export Align Information

Lastly, since your strategic priorities are just one part of the overall view of your team’s work, we want to make it possible to easily get your Align metrics into your other tools.

We’re in the early stages of building an Align API that will allow you to integrate your Align priority metrics into your own internal dashboards or third-party software like Tableau, Datorama or PowerBI. These tools are the three most common dashboard destination requests we’ve heard from you.

For those who want to export Align data but don’t want to wrangle with an API integration, we’re also looking to publish an Align application on automation platforms like Zapier.

We’ve also gotten a lot of requests to push Huddle summary information to your team’s Slack channel of choice.

Want to Learn More?

Consider this overview just the beginning. If you’re particularly interested in any of the features I mentioned in this post, please let us know so that we can get you more involved. That engagement could take any number of forms:

• We can have a one-one-one call to talk in more detail, so you can provide more feedback and ask more specific questions
• I can include you in our update groups. That means when we have scheduling updates, design mockups, or any updated news on features, we’ll let you know first.
• You could also join our testing groups in order to get early use of a beta version of features.

For our current Align users, any time you have questions, feedback or problems, don’t hesitate to reach out to me or your Align advisor.

Not a user, but want to see what we’re about?

Schedule a demo today.