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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 one of the simplest ways for organizations to unlock the advantages of AI. It additionally helps that with our recent migration to Microsoft Azure, we are able to ship new options and enhancements to Stack Overflow for Groups quicker than ever!
That is why we felt compelled to reinforce a number of the most important Stack Overflow for Groups options within the newest launch. The entire new enhancements have been scoped and constructed by means of the lens of the next outcomes that we’re trying to drive for our customers and prospects:
- Collaborate with friends extra typically and get solutions quicker
- Foster a knowledge-sharing neighborhood with much less context switching
- Construct customized workflows tailor-made to organizational wants and tradition
I share extra about what we’re doing to assist our customers obtain these outcomes under.
The core goal 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. Some of the sensible methods we obtain this within the product is by way of tags. Tags manage information 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 appropriate subject material specialists (SME) in order that they get immediate, complete solutions to their questions. This workflow has a direct impression on a company’s median time-to-answer and reply ratio—success metrics accessible by way of the Dashboard—so it’s of their greatest curiosity to have SMEs designated to tags.
In latest analysis, Stack Overflow for Groups customers informed us that they discover tags one of the 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 finally lower the time that it takes customers to get solutions. We used this analysis to reimagine a tags web page that enables customers to:
- Filter by “No SME assigned” and extra rapidly assign SMEs to tags with out one
- Extra simply see insights like variety of posts, watchers, and SMEs
- Full extra duties immediately from the web page, like including a brand new tag
Along with tags, one other timeless function within the product that enables customers to crowdsource suggestions, options, and concepts is the question-and-answer format (Q&A). Q&A fits lots of our customers’ knowledge-sharing wants, however over time we discovered that many wanted a complementary long-form documentation answer to seize extra context like how-to steering, bulletins, and insurance policies. This answer in Stack Overflow for Groups is known as Articles, and it received an improve on this launch that makes it rather more collaborative.
Particularly, customers can now collaborate with others within the platform to take an article from a personal tough draft to a sophisticated piece of content material that’s able to be printed, voted on, and found alongside questions and solutions (accessible on Enterprise and coming quickly to Enterprise). Further Articles enhancements embody expanded modifying permissions that scale neighborhood updates, Slack and Microsoft Groups notifications, and a particular label that shows if an article is authored by a topic professional of considered one of its tags.
What’s in retailer for 2024: We’re giving customers further methods to collaborate with their communities in order that they’re impressed to habitually contribute and devour information. The search expertise may also get enhancements to additional scale back the time that it takes to get a solution.
A theme we hear again and again 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 modify functions as ceaselessly. 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. That is why 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 vital, we needed to present customers an extra method to work together with and profit from their communities by way of 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 enhance them to the highest of feeds, making them extra discoverable in a while. On the flip aspect, customers who constantly contribute useful content material can accrue status 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 respect their information 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 present person workflows to avoid wasting customers time and scale back context switching.
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 all the time 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 spend money on making our API work higher for them! Actually, API updates are a well-liked buyer request since lots of them use the Stack Overflow for Groups API to:
- Combine Stack Overflow for Groups with different instruments, like ticketing programs, portals, and chat platforms
- Report on and analyze neighborhood traits to higher perceive what information 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 further 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 realize additional UI and API parity by including extra API endpoints that permit builders to work together with different options, like Communities and Collections.
We are able to’t wait to see how these updates pace up the time it takes our customers to get options, reduce how typically they’ve to modify workflows, and encourage them to construct new integrations. Our hope is that they’ll create a more healthy information administration basis in order that customers are extra poised to profit from AI in 2024 and past.
To be taught extra about these Stack Overflow for Groups updates, go here.
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