Dan Podsedly • Monday, April 4, 2016 • Updates

Pivotal Tracker Analytics: Now Out of Beta!

It’s official! Pivotal Tracker’s new project Analytics features are now out of beta! As thousands of you have already discovered, Analytics bring a new level of visibility to your project and allows you to easily uncover bottlenecks and continuously improve your team’s performance. It’s a collection of simple but powerful reports that give insight into your project’s cadence, including fluctuations over time. You get a high-level view of progress, and the power to easily drill down into details. Read more...

Ryan Jones • Monday, March 28, 2016 • Productivity

Principles of Effective Story Writing: The Pivotal Labs Way

Different teams across projects and companies have different styles of story writing. Ultimately, it is up to you and the team to figure out what is most effective given the goals and context of the project. However, the core principles that guide our story writing here at Pivotal Labs can be used regardless of style or variation in either process or syntax. While the differing views on the “best way” to write stories can make it difficult to determine the most effective approach, there are a few core principles that guide our story writing. In this post, we’ll explore the three most common types of stories that you can create in Pivotal Tracker and the core principles that inform how we write stories. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Wednesday, March 23, 2016 • BuildTV

How to Create a Leadership Style That Blends with Your Personality

You’ll recall in that in the last episode of FemgineerTV, I interviewed Maria Giudice, the VP of Experience of Autodesk and author of The Rise of the DEO. We talked about how traditional CEOs have been replaced by a new breed called DEOs. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein • Wednesday, March 16, 2016 • Community

Case Study: Whole Whale

After spending his earlier years working client-side at nonprofits, George Weiner decided that he wanted to direct his time and talent toward helping nonprofits make the best use of technology to better achieve their aims. That led to the creation of Whole Whale. Read more...

Jeff Schomay • Monday, February 29, 2016 • Productivity

Spring Cleaning: Finding Dead Code with istanbul.js

Many cultures have the ritual of spring cleaning, a deep clean to get areas that aren’t normally covered—scouring the oven, dusting the blinds, and getting rid of your old junk. At Pivotal Tracker, we decided to do a little spring cleaning in our code base to kick off 2016. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Wednesday, February 17, 2016 • BuildTV

How Creators Can Become Company Leaders

I’ve got a new episode of FemgineerTV for you! In this episode, we’ll be talking about why traditional CEOs have been replaced by a new breed called the design executive officer (DEO), and how companies are basically being led by executives who embrace design thinking. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein • Thursday, February 11, 2016 • Updates

iOS Update—Version 3.2 is Now in the App Store!

Our mobile team has been hard at work over the last months improving the Tracker iOS app, and we’re excited to release the latest update: version 3.2. Get it now in the App Store! Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein • Wednesday, February 3, 2016 • Updates

Saved Search Improvements and Search Sharing

The new year is a good time to take stock of where you are, identify any issues holding you back, and make the necessary changes. To that end, we’ve made dotted lines with a Sharpie around minor problem areas in our interface and tightened them up to make them glow brighter than ever. Read more...

Lisa Crispin • Wednesday, February 3, 2016 • Productivity

A Day in the Life: Testing on the Tracker Team

The Tracker team as a whole takes responsibility for building in quality and making sure that necessary testing activities are done along with other development tasks. But we testers bring our own special value to the party, and we’re seeking another great tester to help us as we work to deliver the best possible product to our customers. Let’s walk you through a typical day of testing on the Tracker team. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Tuesday, January 26, 2016 • BuildTV

The Challenges Immigrant Tech Entrepreneurs Face

Welcome to a brand-new season of FemgineerTV! We’ve got some great guests lined up for you this season, and we’ll be tackling some tough topics related to startups, design, engineering, product development, and leadership. To kick the season off, we’re going to be tackling one of the toughest topics that not a lot of people talk about: The Challenges Immigrant Tech Entrepreneurs Face. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein • Tuesday, January 26, 2016 • Community

Case Study: Humana

Humana knows a thing or two about transformation. From its inception in 1961 as a nursing home company, through its period owning and running hospitals in the seventies and early eighties, the company founded by David Jones and Wendell Cherry has made a habit of reinventing itself. Now they are in the midst of yet another reinvention—as a healthcare provider with a laser focus on their customers’ well-being. Read more...

Dan Podsedly • Friday, January 15, 2016 • News

Changes to the Pivotal Tracker Web Services Agreement

We’ve changed the Pivotal Tracker Web Services Agreement. The updated version includes clauses for the Apple App Store, as well as new language that covers use of all Tracker applications, including web, iOS, and Android. Read more...

Dan Podsedly • Wednesday, December 16, 2015 • Updates

Tracker Analytics—Now in Public Beta!

Tracker has always focused on facilitating collaboration and transparency at the story level, but it hasn’t always been easy to see the big picture or interesting/worrying trends in your projects. In other words, there are plentiful trees, but no forest. With our new Analytics beta, we’re ready to introduce the forest to the trees. This effort has largely been driven by your feedback, and our continuous desire to improve the Tracker experience for our customers, and it’s now ready for a test drive. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Wednesday, December 16, 2015 • BuildTV

How to Get Started as a Founder Building a Tech Product with No Experience in Tech

It’s the final episode of FemgineerTV for the 2015 season! It felt like just yesterday I was waking up at 5 am on a January morning to buy bagels for Ben Congleton, our first guest, before driving up to SF with him to beat the traffic on 101. Still can’t believe we made it in one piece for the live pilot episode! Read more...

Dan Podsedly • Wednesday, November 18, 2015 • Updates

Performance Improvements, New Features, and a Peek at the Road Ahead

If you’re among the folks who have been wondering whether we’ve been trapped under a rock or lost the source code to Tracker, fear not! We are alive and well, and our coding fingers are in fine shape. Many of our efforts over the last few months have been focused on making Tracker rock-solid stable and secure, as well as iterating on brand-new features to improve the overall experience. But it’s one thing for us to say “We’ve been busy!” and hope you take our word for it; we thought it would be more useful to outline what we’ve been working on. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Tuesday, November 17, 2015 • BuildTV

How Mattermark is Creating Market Intelligence for the Startup Community

In today’s episode, we’re going to expand beyond the mechanics of funding, and learn about a startup that’s helping investors and founders learn all they can to make decisions when it comes to investing. Danielle Morrill is the CEO and co-founder of Mattermark, a data platform that keeps track of startups and their growth signals. Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein • Monday, November 16, 2015 • Updates

Android Update—Version 0.9

Since we first released the Android Alpha over the summer, we’ve been hard at work revising and improving it to stay on the path we outlined. And now we’re pleased to release Android v0.9, with a host of updates. Get it now! Read more...

Steve Lichtenstein • Wednesday, November 11, 2015 • Productivity

Guidelines for Agile Development Using Tracker

When you’re bogged down working on your day-to-day chores and features, it can be tough to stay focused on the broader goal of smooth agile development. And while we don’t pretend that we have all the solutions, Tracker is, after all, designed to facilitate precisely that goal. Luckily, the time we’ve spent getting deep down and dirty with Tracker has allowed us to suss out the better agile practices from the. . .less better ones. Read more...

Poornima Vijayashanker • Wednesday, October 21, 2015 • BuildTV

How Investors Add Value Beyond the Check

If you’ve been following along with the show, you’ll have learned what the investor-founder dynamic is like from the viewpoint of an entrepreneur. In the last episode, I sat down with the CEO & Co-Founder of StyleSeat, Melody McCloskey, to understand what it takes to raise capital at the various stages of a startup, from Seed to Series A and beyond. In today’s episode, we’re going to get the opposite perspective by diving into an investor’s mindset. We’ll try to understand what compels them to write a check and, more importantly, how they add value beyond a check. Read more...

Matt Conger-Eldeen • Tuesday, October 20, 2015 • Productivity

One Weird Trick to Switch from Polling to Push—with Zero Downtime!

Pivotal Tracker is an always-up-to-date tool that you leave open all day. When Tracker was young, the only way to accomplish that was some variation of HTTP polling. But the web has evolved since then, and so have the protocols. Websockets are supported by every major browser, and server-sent events are supported by most (with hacks for ones that don’t). Push technologies are a viable option for change propagation. Read more...