Housemates Hack Pack: Cutting through the project management noise
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Housemates Hack Pack: Cutting through the project management noise

Tiffany Go
Head of Product Marketing
July 28, 2020

Welcome back to the Housemates Hack Pack! Be sure to check out the entire series. Each post in the HHP highlights around 3 tips & tricks that our very own Housemates (that’s what we call our employees... so don’t worry we’re all appropriately socially distancing and not all currently eating out at an indoor restaurant together) put to use every day in the app as we use Shortcut to build Shortcut.

This week’s tips come from Tiffany Go, our Senior Product Marketer. Tiffany knows our product better than just about anyone — as you might expect, considering the word Product is right in her title — and she has so many tips to share that she also shared some in our last post.

Hi everyone! I’m Tiffany, the Senior Product Marketer here at Shortcut. I wanted to share a few ways that Shortcut can help make things a little easier for you as you tackle your work day by day by day (by day).

In this post, I’m going to explain how to:

  1. Put your Activity Feed to good use
  2. Personalize your Shortcut notifications
  3. Create an Iterations backlog

Let’s go!

Put your Activity Feed to use

With your Activity Feed, you can see:

  1. Any changes or updates that have been made to Stories you own or follow
  2. Any @mentions of you that have been made on any Stories

When you open the Feed, you’ll see three different tabs. The first one is just an in-order stream of everything mentioned above and the second two narrow things down:

  1. Just the comments on Stories you own or are following.
  2. Any mentions of you or groups you are part of.

So next time you think to yourself, “Wait, what was that thing Product asked me about this morning?” Look no further than your Activity Feed, located right up in the corner of your account. Open it up and go straight to the Stories and work that are most pressing at the moment.

Take control of your notifications

Outside of your Activity Feed, you’ll be notified of activity within Shortcut through three possible methods: email, browser, and Slack notifications.

You can receive these often, not as often, or not at all based on your preferences. Changes you make to your own preferences have no impact on your team, they just change things for you. Select from:

  1. Most Events: Most events for the Projects, Epics, and Stories that you follow. This means you’ll be notified pretty much every time an update is made to something you’re involved with.
  2. Important Events Only: New Stories and comments. Someone assigns you a Story or @mentions you? You’ll see it right away.
  3. Daily Summary and Mentions: A daily summary of all the goings on, as well as direct @ mentions.
  4. None: This one is pretty straightforward. No notifications at all.

To change your notification settings, just reverse the order in which I wrote those words and go to Settings > Notifications.

Reply from your notifications

One reason to pay attention to your notification is because you can reply directly from them, both via email or in a Slack thread. Use @mentions in either and they’ll @mention that person within Shortcut. Converse within Shortcut without ever entering Shortcut.

See and groom your project backlog with Iterations

Never used Shortcut Iterations before? Iterations are a defined timeboxed period of development for a collection of Stories. Iterations can span multiple Epics and Projects, and are a great way for a cross-functional group to collaborate the same goal. Or to run weekly standups. Stories can be assigned to Iterations when they’re created (or at any point).

Go to Iterations to create a new Iteration.

The Iterations Story Slider allows you to drill into work by either Workflow State or Epic, whichever you and your team prefer.

If you choose the "Not Started" Workflow State (as shown below), a list of all Stories that are in that State will appear. This means that any Stories that are not part of an Iteration will appear in the Story Slider.

Now you can Bulk Move your Stories into an Iteration that you could simply name Backlog. Now you have a Backlog iteration all ready to go and can see the work that should be prioritized and the work that can simply be left in the Backlog.

If you assign Iterations to specific groups, you can then create weekly or bi-weekly Iterations. Move work freely between these weekly Iterations and the backlog to ensure the most important Stories are getting completed.

That’s all for this round of the Housemates Hack Pack! Be on the look for the next edition in two weeks.

And if you want to learn more, visit help.clubhouse.io or visit our forums. We’re here to help. And also to write blog posts. But mostly to help.

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