Tettra Updates

Previous Product Updates

2019-04-01T21:19:00.001Z

To read our previous product updates, go here.

Why We’re Hitting Pause on Importing

2018-12-13T14:57:00.001Z

For many teams, Tettra acts not just as a knowledge base, but also as a hub for information that’s written down elsewhere. We want to make it easy to share, reference, and leverage knowledge that you’ve already documented. It’s why we continue to invest in integrations with commonly used tools like Google Docs, GitHub, and Slack. Our importing function used to act as a solution for bringing content into Tettra from elsewhere. But recently, we decided to hit “pause” on this feature and suggest that teams copy and paste.

Why We Decided to Pause Importing

One of our company values is “Reduce scope before quality.” We’re bullish on creating the best possible experience. Rather than ship a broad but faulty feature, we’d prefer to keep the scope narrow (and then keep making incremental progress as often as possible.) This is driven by the value we place on trust; we know that customers trust us with their most important knowledge, so we want to foster that trust by only shipping well-built features.

Historically, we’ve used a third-party service to handle importing. Like many small companies, we’re choosy about where to focus. Though we like to build our own features, we also recognize the value of outsourcing some capabilities to others. In thinking about how to facilitate importing, our “make vs buy” discussions led us to buy this capability, rather than build it ourselves (at least to start.)

However, recent bugs in this third-party product have made our importing tool almost unusable. Some customers were left hanging with a cryptic error message or a never-ending pinwheel. Despite many attempts to resolve the bugs with our vendor, we’ve been unable to gain clarity about their future reliability. Ultimately, hitting pause on importing seemed like the best way of optimizing the customer experience.

What to Do with Content that Belongs in Tettra

For now, we’re encouraging our customers to copy and paste content into their Tettra pages. We’ve been hard at work to make the copy-paste workflow as robust as possible. Recent changes now facilitate copying in tables, images, and other rich page elements. Plus, in most cases, copying in content maintains the formatting from your original document.

We’re evaluating options, including pushing for resolution with our third-party partner, as well as the possibility of building this capability in-house. All product decisions come with tradeoffs, so if we go the “build route”, we’ll need to determine what else to put on hold. On average, we see about 150 file imports per month, so this certainly impacts a lot of our customers. But we don’t want to prioritize this at the expense of another feature that impacts thousands of customers per month, for example.

We’d Love Your Input

As always, we’d love any feedback from our terrific customers. If this impacts your workflows in a dramatic way, we’d appreciate getting insight into your processes. If copying and pasting slows down your team, we’d love to hear your perspective. Conversely, if copying and pasting is sufficient for your team, that’s also helpful to know. Given that another Tettra company value is “talk to customers”, we want to hear the good, bad, and the in-between!

Reintroducing Tettra: A Better Way to Share Scattered Knowledge

2018-09-11T19:56:00.001Z

Align your team by giving everyone access to the information they need to do high impact work

The way we work has changed. For decades, office work happened mostly on paper. Then PCs came along and everything moved to digital files. Nowadays most of our time is spent in the cloud. As software continues to eat the world, the amount of information we create and the number of cloud apps we use to get work done continues to rise as well.

This explosion of choice is exciting because we have better options for working efficiently and effectively. The proliferation of apps has even spread across departments, since more teams have the ability to pick the tools that best suit their needs. Sales teams use Salesforce. Marketers use HubSpot. Engineers use GitHub. Customer support teams use Zendesk. The list goes on and on.

With all this autonomy comes downsides. Fragmentation of tools and teams makes it tough to share context and agree on the best decisions, especially cross-functionally.

In a growing team, decisions need to be made at breakneck speed. Every decision can’t be passed up through the founders, executives, or even managers. If you want people to make high-quality decisions, they need access to the same information and principles that you have. The only way to scale decision-making is to codify principles and processes, so everyone can access and update them.

The problem is that many employees don’t know where to look for information when they need to make a decision. 36% of a typical knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems. 44% of the time these workers can’t even find what they’re looking for (source).

Teams that suffer from fragmented knowledge, poor communication, and undocumented principles can’t move together.

Continual misalignment causes employees to grow frustrated. They waste time looking for information or repeating work, and they don’t understand why decisions are being made. They get into flame wars about what’s the the best direction for the organization.

Eventually, those frustrated people will leave, taking with them all the institutional knowledge that’s trapped in their head or scattered in their docs, emails, and chats logs. This causes further knowledge gaps, chaos and misalignment. More people leave… and the cycle repeats.

On the other hand, teams that navigate this world of fragmented information have an incomparable edge. As Jim Collins cites in his bestseller, Good to Great, high-performance teams — those that invest in alignment and communication — outperform their peers by a factor of 7x.

These high-performance teams will find themselves able to innovate, pivot quickly, and adapt to any new challenge. They’ll make better decisions and spend time wisely on high-impact work. Talent will stay longer because they feel confident that their hours are being well-spent among a team of winners. Relationships are stronger because people know what their colleagues are working on and how they’re contributing to the collective mission.

The striking thing is that this promised land is attainable for all teams. It’s a matter of having the foresight and discipline to invest in making information, tools, and knowledge more accessible to all.

Any company can evolve from a siloed, bureaucratic corporation to a cooperative company — one that succeeds through clearly defined goals, shared alignment, cooperative knowledge, and most importantly, trust that every member of the organization is working hard to achieve the mission. When everyone is cooperating, from the CEO to the newest intern, your organization can grow and thrive, together.

The Missing Ingredient: A Cooperation System

This differentiator, the one that separates high-performance teams from more old-school teams, is what prompted us to build Tettra in the first place. Communication tools like chat and email are great for discussions, but leave a lot to be desired when it comes to organization. Department-level collaboration tools like Github, Salesforce, and Zendesk are very useful for getting work done, but they don’t allow you to cross-functionally share information in a place that’s accessible to everyone on your team. What’s missing is a cooperation tool that bridges the gaps between all these systems and an organized and accessible way. That’s what we’re building at Tettra.

Teams are already trying to solve this problem with wikis, shared folders, or intranets, but the current solutions fail for three reasons.

First, they’re complex and require a lot of busy work to add and organize content.

Second, these systems quickly get filled up with stale, out of date content.

Finally, they aren’t connected to your existing tools and workflows, so people forget to reference them for answers.

We saw an opportunity to do something unique and purposefully designed Tettra to solve these three problems. Having now worked with thousands of the worlds best teams, we’ve learned a lot about how teams work. We know how teams use tools to gather knowledge, and we’ve witnessed where information slips through the cracks.

We took everything we’ve learned about this new way of working over the past two years and rolled it into the best version of Tettra to date.

How Tettra is different

1. Tettra is simple
The best way to make your knowledge base successful is to ensure everyone feels comfortable contributing to it. If it’s a pain to use, people will shy away from documenting things. If it’s bloated with extraneous details, people won’t go there for information. Tettra makes it easy for anyone to contribute and seek knowledge with a simple editor and beautiful reading experience.

2. Tettra is smart
If your knowledge base doesn’t help you keep it up to date, people will stop trusting it for answers. Instead of forcing you to spend hours keeping track of updates, Tettra has a suggestions engine that tells you what content should be added or updated in the system and what content is no longer relevant. Suggestions can come from teammates, other tools you use, as well as our friendly Tettrabot, who helps you keep your knowledge base nice and tidy.

3. Tettra is connected
Even if your knowledge base is simple and up-to-date, if it’s not easily accessible in your normal workflows, it’s easy to forget to reference it. That’s why Tettra connects to your existing tools. For example, if someone asks a question in Slack, you can quickly pull in a Tettra page with the relevant content via a slash command. Easily references resources from a variety of other sources, such as Google Docs, GitHub, and Dropbox.

We’re just getting started with Tettra, and there’s so much more we want to build to help people transfer knowledge between individuals, teams, and tools. Give it a try yourself, and start building high-performance team. We now have a free plan, so it’s easier than ever to get started.

Give Tettra a try

If you’re already a Tettra user (thanks!), you’ve seen a lot of this new functionality roll out over the past few months. If you haven’t checked out Tettra in a while, I recommend taking another look by signing up for a free account today.

How We’re Preparing for GDPR

2018-04-12T20:31:00.001Z

Learn about Tettra’s ongoing work to improve data security and privacy for all our customers.

Like many of our customers and partners, we have been spending time over the last few months reviewing our systems and policies for the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This law, which goes into effect May 25, 2018, governs how companies process the personal data of EU residents and establishes stronger protections for the ‘digital rights’ of an individual.

We have always taken customer privacy and data security very seriously at Tettra, and we build our product with these principles in mind. We believe that regulations like GDPR are a positive evolution in privacy policy and consumer protection, and welcome the opportunity to continue improving our own practices in this area.

While Tettra is already in compliance with many parts of the regulation, we’ll be updating our policies and documentation over the next few weeks to explicitly address GDPR requirements. The changes we’re releasing fall into four categories:

Product updates to give customers more granular and explicit control over what data is shared with Tettra
Better documentation on existing tools for account export and deletion
Updates to our Privacy Policy
Updates to our Terms of Service

While GDPR applies specifically to our EU customers, we’re making these changes across our entire system, because we believe that all Tettra teams will benefit from the greater transparency and control over their data. You’ll find more information on what we’re planning in each of these four categories below.

Product Updates

We’re updating our sign-up flow to reduce the scope of data we request from your Slack account and make it clear what data/authorization we request from Slack and why. We have already moved some features that require additional Slack access to opt-in, and we plan to make more features that require Slack opt-in as well.

Clearer Documentation on Existing Tools

We recently added self-serve exports in the app, so you can download all of your Tettra content at any time, regardless of subscription status. We also already honor requests to delete all of your data from our systems. We will update our website with more details on how to submit a request and how we process those requests. We are actively working with our third-party service providers to be able to delete any personal data that is stored on their systems (for example, analytics and usage data tied to a specific Tettra user).

Privacy Policy

We will be updating our Privacy Policy to make it clear what data we collect, why and how we use that data. We’ll also update our policy around third-party integrations, including how data is shared and for what purposes.

Terms of Service

We’ll be updating our Terms of Service, so customers retain more rights to their content on Tettra. We’ll also be adding a data breach policy, which will cover our commitment to notify our customers promptly if we become aware of any unauthorized access to their data.

We expect to publish our updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at the beginning of May. At this time, we are not planning on providing a Data Processing Addendum (DPA) separate from our updated Terms of Service.

We hope this post provides some clarity on our upcoming changes for GDPR, our ongoing work to keep your data protected, and helps your organization in your own efforts as you prepare for this important new regulation.

If you have any questions about GDPR, our work around security and privacy, or ideas on how we could improve in this regard, reach out at any time at [email protected]" target="_blank" rel="noopener">[email protected].