State of the Parliament 2021/2022

Welcome to our second public State of the Parliament report! It's our pleasure to share with you a summary of our activities, achievements, and impacts made over the past year.

We published our first State of the Parliament 2020 in February of 2021. I had planned to do our second one in the beginning of 2022 but here we are in July. Probably not coincidentally we also neglected to do our annual planning until May, but this led to us re-envisioning our business year to align with our KnowledgeOwl birthday.

KnowledgeOwl was founded on June 1, 2015, so we just recently celebrated our 7th birthday. And we did end up creating our annual plan for June 2021 through June 2022, or KnowledgeOwl Year 8 as our Asana project states!

And here we are with our State of the Parliament for Year 7 (and part of Year 6). Below is what we’ve been up to since January of 2021!

Public product roadmap

Here is a snapshot of what our public product roadmap looked like in January 2021 (I used the versions and versions notes feature in KnowledgeOwl to find this - thank you Kate for using versions!):

• Infrastructure updates to keep KnowledgeOwl scale-able and stable
  We continue to add customers and knowledge bases. We haven't noticed issues with our scale yet, and we'd like to proactively update our infrastructure so that we don't. There won't be many changes from this that you'll be able to concretely see, but these updates should help us add more features in the future and continue to guarantee the up-time and performance you've come to expect. This project is continuing from 2020.
  Status: In Progress

• Permissions architecture updates
  As part of a series of ongoing security improvements, we're totally rearchitecting how permissions checks happen for all editing functions (creating new, editing existing, deleting) for categories and articles. You won't see major changes in the app, but these changes will ensure more consistency and security for all default and custom roles. This project is a continuation of work begun in 2020.
  Status: Initial Release Complete; Release Tail In Progress

• Modern Editor upgrade
  We use a third-party provider for our editors, and Modern Editor has a major new release with some upcoming smaller releases, as well. We'll test these extensively before rolling them out, but we're excited for some of the new functionality that will come with them!
  Status: In Progress

• Adding support for multilingual knowledge bases
  While we do have some customers using us for content in multiple languages, right now that's not a built-in option. We have long wanted to change that, and the infrastructure improvements we're making should make it easier for us to deliver on it. We're still defining how this feature will look and behave, so if you're interested in offering input on the feature or in helping to beta test it, please contact us.
  Status: Upcoming (preliminary work begun)

The good news is that the infrastructure updates, which began in early 2020, were completed in June 2022. This felt like a never-ending project and probably deserves a retrospective blog post of its own. I’m not sure how much details we should provide here, but I think a little information on what we did could go a long way. Also shout-out to Pete for working on this never-ending project for the better part of 2.5 years and thank you to Darren at Cloudbutton for all your support and advice.

The bad news is that we didn’t get to the Modern Editor upgrades or support for multilingual knowledge bases. And it doesn’t feel good. 

If you have been following along, better multilingual support has been on the roadmap since the beginning in 2020*. It was blocked by the infrastructure updates so we couldn’t make much progress on it until now. However, during our annual planning meeting, we decided that our top priority from a business perspective was new themes, so that is currently the big development focus of the quarter. We initially thought we might make progress on multilingual this quarter as well, but we realized there was not a way for us to do both. So it is currently on hold. 

*Internally we also debated whether we should work on multilingual or the contextual help widget in 2019, and multilingual got bumped there as well.

Modern editor is a similar story. We’ve been meaning to update it for years and other things just keep coming up. We want to update it to fix some bugs and get access to newly available features and functionality. However, with editor upgrades also come new bugs and quirks. Since it is the part of our software that our customers use the most, we are very aware of how changing to the editor can wreak havoc on your day-to-day work. We want to be extra careful that we don’t inadvertently break things during an editor upgrade. We need to make sure when we do update it that we have the time and energy to make sure it is a smooth and seamless transition to minimize any negative impacts it could cause. So it’s on hold.

This is the hard part of public roadmaps. As a small team driven by customer needs and feedback, we didn't want to overpromise and underdeliver based on shifting priorities. Instead we tried to share our top priorities for the year. And then we feel short.

One part of me loves the transparency of sharing our big goals for the year. That part also likes that when we fall short, we are doing it openly. But there is another part of me that feels bad. I feel bad that we haven’t completed multilingual or the editor upgrade yet. I feel bad that as a support owl I’ve been telling people these features are coming up for years, and they still aren’t done yet. We don’t like to overpromise and underdeliver, and that was the worry with these public roadmaps.

But we’ve also learned a lot through this process. We’ve learned that we haven’t traditionally been very good at balance big feature development and projects with the small features, enhancements, and bug fixes you can see in our release notes on a regular basis. We’ve learned that we aren’t very good at estimating how long things with take. And we’ve learned that we didn’t have a very good prioritization process to help our product and development team decide what to focus on and how to balance their time and effort.

All of this led us to prioritize a new defined and effective dev prioritization process , one that can handle small and large projects, as one of our top goals (or features!) for the quarter. We are in the very early stages of testing and refining this process, and our belief is that it will lead us to a new and improved customer-driven development process.

Company Retreat: Nowhere, Planet Earth

We haven’t had a company retreat or trip since the pandemic started. I know some remote companies have begun to bring back in-person retreats. With team members in different parts of the world and country, and some struggling with long COVID, travel is not something that is currently on our radar. Maybe next year will be a different story!

New team members

Some of you have had the pleasure of interacting with the newest members of our parliament, Will and Anne. 

1. Will Simpson is our Chief Operations Owl and Resident Wet Blanket. 

2. Anne is our Lead Support Owl and Breakfast Hoo-dini. 

A different looking parliament 

Our parliament has changed quite a bit in the last year and half. We had 11 owls at the beginning of 2021 and now we have 9. And that's with 4 hires, which means we lost six people.

• Four members of our original parliament from 2021 are no longer with us. 

• We had two hires during this time that are no longer here either.

As a small team, this was particularly difficult on many levels. 

New Content Strategy

We shaked things up with our new blog content strategy! In the past, we've been all over the map, covering a wide range of topics. But now, we're honing in on what really matters to us: Documentarian Quality of Life. We'll be diving into issues documentarians face, exploring KnowledgeOwl features (no sales pitches, promise!), sharing company updates, and featuring guest bloggers who align with our mission. Expect fewer but higher-quality posts, all written by folks in the documentation trenches. We're excited to embark on this journey and would love your feedback on our new direction. Got ideas for owl-themed category titles or burning topics you'd like us to cover? Drop us a line at blog@knowledgeowl.com – we're all ears! 🦉

Path to B Corp Certification

Our goal was to become B Corp Certified in 2021 (requires a score of 80) and become eligible for Best in the World Honorees (median score of 131) when we re-certify in 2024. And that didn't happen.

We had submitted for certification at the beginning of 2021 and we received notification that our assessment was closed in September as our score had been dropped below 80. It was disheartening to say the least, but we plan to wait and resubmit for certification after we lick our wounds and get our documentation in order. 

You can read more about why we are pursuing B Corp certification on our blog.

KnowledgeOwl turns 6! And 7!

IIn June 2022, KnowledgeOwl celebrated its 7th anniversary. Established on June 1, 2015, Silly Moose LLC  has grown from a two-owl operation in Colorado to a globally-distributed parliament of 9 with team members in two continents. 

Annual Customer Survey

The goal of the annual survey is benchmark and measure improvements in customer experience, customer outcomes, and social/environmental engagement. We are using the annual survey results to ensure our efforts are alignment with customer needs and desires as well as to track our progress over time.

We use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer experience. We ended up with an NPS of 48.4, which was down from the 2020 NPS of 56.7.  Luckily, according to our survey analysis, the change in the NPS scores isn't statistically significant. As part of our 2025 company vision, we will work to increase our NPS score to 90.

Your 2021 NPS (48.4) is extraordinary! Because NPS is a growth metric, it's important to understand how KO's NPS compares with others in your industry. The software industry has an average NPS between 30 and 40. KO's NPS of 48.4 means that KO should grow by word of mouth.

We also asked our customers to tell us how much they agreed that KnowledgeOwl cares about them as a person, our customers, our staff, the environment, and the community. We are using this to benchmark and measure perceptions of our social and environmental impact.

During the analysis of the survey results, we received 3 organizational recommendations on areas for improvement:

1. Keep an eye on NPS
   The KO NPS score is still high enough that KO is positioned for word-of-mouth growth. However, the NPS is down from last year. While the change in NPS scores from 2020 to 2021 isn't statistically significant,  because of how NPS is designed – with categories for promoters, passives, and detractors – it is more sensitive to changes in customer loyalty and engagement. 
2. Continue to drive the KnowledgeOwl cares message. 
   Like last year, the cares questions were positively correlated with NPS. This year the size and strength of the correlations increased. See the correlations in the Predicting NPS topic.
   When looking at the regression data, in 2020, care: person predicted a 0.28 increase in NPS. The care: community question predicted a 0.46 increase in NPS. And the care: customer question predicted a 0.54 increase in NPS.
   This year, a single care question was a statistically significant predictor of NPS. The care: customer question predicted a 0.92 increase in NPS scores. It was also one of the largest and most statistically significant predictors of NPS. See the Predicting NPS topic.
   It is also worth noting that there were some changes in the responses to these questions from 2020. Respondents were more likely to strongly agree or agree that KnowledgeOwl cares about the environment this year compared with last year. However, the cares: environment question wasn't a significant predictor of NPS.
   
   Respondents were more likely to strongly agree or agree that KnowledgeOwl cares about the community this year compared with last year. However, the cares: community question wasn't a significant predictor of NPS.
   
3. Customer goal consistency 
   This is mostly just an interesting observation; the percentages for each goal option in 2021 are very similar to those from 2020. This is particularly interesting when you consider that only about 1/3 of respondents (86) are returning from the 2020 survey.
   

Our 2022 annual survey is currently on hold and we plan to launch in the next few months after some internal upgrades.