A central part of my job as a product manager is to understand what users care about. What energizes me most and helps me develop empathy for users is speaking to them directly about their problems, goals, and ideas. Here at Stack Overflow, I have the unique privilege of interacting with users who work at some of the most innovative companies in the world and rely on both Stack Overflow for Teams and stackoverflow.com to access various types of knowledge to do their best work. And many, if not all, of these users know and love features that are foundational to both of these platforms, like the question-and-answer format, tags, and voting.
However, to paraphrase, “With great privilege comes great responsibility.” My product, design, and engineering peers and I are constantly looking at ways we can augment these fundamental features in Stack Overflow for Teams so that users still experience their familiarity and core value, but can use them to build thriving, self-sustaining communities that collaborate and share knowledge in a business context instead. Because in spite of all of the AI innovation that’s happened over the last year, we still believe that a human and community-centered approach to knowledge management is the best way for organizations to unlock the benefits of AI. It also helps that with our recent migration to Microsoft Azure, we can deliver new features and enhancements to Stack Overflow for Teams faster than ever!
This is why we felt compelled to enhance some of the most essential Stack Overflow for Teams features in the latest release. All of the new improvements were scoped and built through the lens of the following outcomes that we’re looking to drive for our users and customers:
- Collaborate with peers more often and get answers faster
- Foster a knowledge-sharing community with less context switching
- Build custom workflows tailored to organizational needs and culture
I share more about what we’re doing to help our users achieve these outcomes below.
Collaborate with peers more often and get answers faster
The core objective of Stack Overflow for Groups is to allow extra environment friendly collaboration and knowledge-sharing in order that customers have extra time for problem-solving and creativity. Probably the most sensible methods we obtain this within the product is through tags. Tags arrange data in order that it’s extra discoverable in each Stack Overflow for Groups and stackoverflow.com, however they’re additionally used to attach customers to the fitting subject material specialists (SME) in order that they get immediate, complete solutions to their questions. This workflow has a direct influence on a corporation’s median time-to-answer and reply ratio—success metrics accessible through the Dashboard—so it’s of their greatest curiosity to have SMEs designated to tags.
In current analysis, Stack Overflow for Groups customers instructed us that they discover tags one of the crucial useful options within the product, however that they want to see extra actionable insights surfaced on the web page to enhance tag well being and in the end lower the time that it takes customers to get solutions. We used this analysis to reimagine a tags web page that permits customers to:
- Filter by “No SME assigned” and extra shortly assign SMEs to tags with out one
- Extra simply see insights like variety of posts, watchers, and SMEs
- Full extra duties instantly from the web page, like including a brand new tag
Along with tags, one other timeless characteristic within the product that permits customers to crowdsource suggestions, options, and concepts is the question-and-answer format (Q&A). Q&A fits a lot of our customers’ knowledge-sharing wants, however over time we discovered that many wanted a complementary long-form documentation resolution to seize extra context like how-to steering, bulletins, and insurance policies. This resolution in Stack Overflow for Groups is known as Articles, and it obtained an improve on this launch that makes it way more collaborative.
Particularly, customers can now collaborate with others within the platform to take an article from a personal tough draft to a refined piece of content material that’s able to be printed, voted on, and found alongside questions and solutions (out there on Enterprise and coming quickly to Enterprise). Further Articles enhancements embrace expanded enhancing permissions that scale neighborhood updates, Slack and Microsoft Groups notifications, and a particular label that shows if an article is authored by a topic skilled of one in every of its tags.
What’s in retailer for 2024: We’re giving customers extra methods to collaborate with their communities in order that they’re impressed to habitually contribute and devour data. The search expertise will even get enhancements to additional scale back the time that it takes to get a solution.
Foster a knowledge-sharing community with less context switching
A theme we hear over and over from our prospects is that they worth Stack Overflow for Groups and the way it helps them foster a knowledge-sharing neighborhood at their organizations, however that they need to expertise and use it with out having to change purposes as incessantly. Constructing an end-to-end product expertise that each enhances and minimizes interruptions to person workflows is feasible however requires tight integrations and suggestions loops. For this reason we made it a strategic precedence to construct integrations with Slack, Microsoft Groups, GitHub, and Jira. Embedded workflows are additionally central to a few of our OverflowAI options, like StackPlusOne and Stack Overflow for VS Code.
Whereas the updates to tags and Articles on this launch are important, we wished to present customers a further method to work together with and profit from their communities through Slack and Microsoft Groups. When evaluating our choices, including the flexibility to upvote content material from these chat platforms appeared like a no brainer. Voting is central to our mannequin of fostering engagement and high quality content material contributions. Stack Overflow for Groups customers upvote questions and solutions to point that they’re useful and increase them to the highest of feeds, making them extra discoverable in a while. On the flip aspect, customers who persistently contribute useful content material can accrue popularity factors, signaling to the neighborhood that they’re considerate teammates.
So, we added an “Upvote” button to Slack and Microsoft Groups notifications, permitting customers to inform their friends they admire their data and experience from the chat platforms they already use.
We additionally up to date our Slack integration to make use of Slack’s Block Package, giving notifications a cleaner and extra trendy look. This replace permits us to ship future Slack integration enhancements quicker.
What’s in retailer for 2024: We’re specializing in making these integrations much more automated and embedded in current person workflows to avoid wasting customers time and scale back context switching.
Build custom workflows tailored to organizational needs and culture
Builders are creators, tinkerers, and problem-solvers by commerce. Whereas not all Stack Overflow for Groups customers are builders, many are, in order that they’re at all times exploring new methods to make use of the Stack Overflow for Groups API. They proceed to shock us with the artistic options they construct to tailor the Stack Overflow for Groups expertise to their organizations, so we proceed to put money into making our API work higher for them! The truth is, API updates are a well-liked buyer request since a lot of them use the Stack Overflow for Groups API to:
- Combine Stack Overflow for Groups with different instruments, like ticketing techniques, portals, and chat platforms
- Report on and analyze neighborhood developments to higher perceive what data is being shared and by whom
- Migrate content material from different instruments in order that it’s centralized and accessible in Stack Overflow for Groups
This previous Could, we launched v3 of the API that gives extra endpoints, trendy design patterns, and Swagger documentation with dynamic API definitions and interactive testing. On this launch, we’ve strategically chosen so as to add endpoints and fields that make it simpler to report on tag and person exercise and scale article lifecycle administration.
What’s in retailer for 2024: We’re aiming to attain additional UI and API parity by including extra API endpoints that enable builders to work together with different options, like Communities and Collections.
We will’t wait to see how these updates velocity up the time it takes our customers to get options, reduce how typically they’ve to change workflows, and encourage them to construct new integrations. Our hope is that they may create a more healthy data administration basis in order that customers are extra poised to learn from AI in 2024 and past.
To be taught extra about these Stack Overflow for Groups updates, go right here.
