Today, we’re introducing our Customer Support Portal, which lets your customers keep track of all their Linear requests and respond to every email, chat, or Slack conversation.

As soon as you receive a message and link it to a Linear issue or project, the customer will see its title, status, and – if you want – due date on the Support Portal. Giving them full visibility into what's happening with their request.

Customers can respond to conversations and mark them important. If a Linear request is associated, they can change its importance as well.

Team requests on the Public Roadmap

If you use the public roadmap, activating the Support Portal will add your customer's and their team members' requests below the submit form. They will not only see the features you published, but every issue or project that's linked to someone with their company email address in Linear.

Embedded into the widget

To make the portal available for your customers, you can either add a link with SSO to your app to authenticate them or use our widget to display the requests. The counter will include all requests from their team members so that you can get more feedback from different people from the same company.

Custom domain, SSO, and authentication

The Support Portal comes with powerful features out of the box: You can adjust your portal theme, add a custom domain, authenticate customers with SSO, block certain domains from access, and much more. It’s the most personal way for your customers to interact with your team — and it’s available starting today on the Productlane Scale Plan.

Supporting Linear customer requests for projects

The newly announced Linear customer requests for projects are rounding up this release. If you link a thread to a project, it will now create a customer request in Linear, that will be visible on the Support Portal.

Send the Support Portal link to your customers via email or our widget, and enjoy receiving more feedback and managing expectations with customers.

With Linears' customer requests, all feedback from our portal is now clearly visible in your backlog, making it much more impactful. That's why we're releasing new upgrades for your portal today to help you get even more feedback into Linear.

Adjust the importance of requests

As soon as a customer submits feedback on an issue on the portal, it will create a Linear request that will now be visible for your customer on the portal. They can adjust the importance and add more context to it. The placeholder changes and asks them if they want to add more context in the meantime. Currently, this works only for issues, but it will work for projects as soon as Linear launches support for this in the next weeks out of their beta.

See the mail conversation on a request

There is even more: On the same request, your customers will see the mail conversation they had with you about the feature, so they know which context they already gave you and what they might want to add. To use this, add a shared email here in the settings.

View requests from team members

Enable your customers to see the portal requests from all their team members. If a customer authenticates on the portal with their work email, they can now see all requests from other team members with the same domain. That way, your customers know all the requests their company has sent you through the portal. They can readjust the importance afterward or leave new feedback on those, helping you prioritize your Linear backlog as sharply as possible. You can turn on team requests here.

Refreshed portal settings

We gave our settings a design refresh and made them clearer. Separating general portal settings from the ones for your Roadmap, Changelog and Support portal.

More improvements and fixes

Slack

• Changed the first message from the Slack integration to appear as a note

• Removed "undo sent" for Slack messages, as you can edit it quickly

• Fixed issue for users sending the first Slack message without email

• Improved formatting of Slack notifications

• Resolved "Push to Productlane" action not working for some workspaces

• Resolved issue where some replies were not received as Slack notifications.

Widget

• Added a new option to hide or show the widget icon

• Added an option to disable the feedback section

• Added a new option to hide or show the Changelog notification in the widget

Linear integration

• Made the Linear webhooks more robust

• Fixed customer requests not populating correctly for some types of feedback

• Improved error messaging to show why Linear customer creation might have failed, as domains can be blacklisted in Linear for example

• Resolved manual "Sync Linear" to include more Linear attributes

• Fixed a bug that didn’t let you create issues when default team is private

More

• Fixed an issue where mail attachments were received but not displayed

• Improved search for emails

• Improved formatting for emails

• Fixed a visual bug that looked like portal descriptions don't change

• Improved responsive toast notifications

• Improved responsiveness of timeline events on threads

• Improved inbox design and sorting for scannability

Over the holidays, we shipped over 250 UI improvements, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. If you go through the tool, it should all feel faster and simpler, and you might find a lot of instances where we reduced shadows, text, font sizes, or font weight to help you focus on the right things.

AI Titles

Our first larger feature this year reduces the effort of scanning through your inbox and makes issue creation much faster: AI titles. They work for all incoming feedback except emails. If you turn feedback into an issue or project, it will pre-fill the title, making the workflow of receiving feedback to creating the issue in Linear much faster.

Widget attachments

Your customers can now upload attachments to the widget, helping you debug faster and get more context from requests. We have also streamlined the animations and added some more polish to the widget.

Over 250 improvements and fixes

There are too many to list them all here. Some of them are:

• A lot of improvements on the Email and Slack formatting

• Reduced initial load time of the portal

• Prevented password managers pre-filling certain inputs

• On the roadmap, the new issue and project buttons are now at the top

• Added a button text color to the portal theme

• We removed the score calculation from the roadmap as few users can have too much power over the prioritization

• Changed the borders of all buttons to rings. Looks much better!

Today, we're doubling down on our Linear integration and our commitment to deliver purpose-built and perfectly integrated software, instead of endless customization that slows you down.

Linear's latest launch of customer requests allows you to display customers and their feedback from Productlane directly in Linear, making the feedback way more impactful and visible for your product team.

Show requests in Linear and mark highlights important

You can now mark individual highlights in Productlane as important, which will be reflected inside Linear. This is really powerful, as customers often send you messages with multiple feature requests or bugs, that have different importance.

Bi-directional sync of Linear Customers

Linear now supports different customer properties like stage, tier, or revenue. We natively integrate these, meaning you can now edit and create these from within your thread and company view.

Public roadmap importance button

Now, you can get more high-quality customer feedback on your portal. After upvoting a feature, users will be asked if this feature should be marked as important. To do so, they need to write some context around the request, which will be visible as an important request in Linear.

Make the switch

With the combination of Linear and Productlane, your user's feedback will have significantly more impact on your actual roadmap, compared to using any separate tool for your feature requrests. You can even move your entire customer support to Productlane.

Use our Productboard importer, which transfers everything smoothly with one click. Or use our CSV Upload to bring all feedback from your legacy tools to Productlane, link it to Linear issues, and start really influencing your roadmap with this feedback.

Today, we bring together what belongs together: User feedback and customer support.

We've been working hard on a large set of features to help you move your customer support to Productlane. In addition to emailing and Slack Connect, you can now support your customers in-app with our new support widget.

Here's a glimpse of what we're releasing today:

• Widget: A beautiful and customizable widget to unify your support, feedback, and changelog

• In-App Changelog Notifications: Part of the widget, you can send out your changelog to users to increase feature adoption

• Custom Data Sidebar: Have all relevant customer data from your system in the sidebar right at the customer's conversation

• New Search: One search for all your emails, slack connect messages and call recordings.

• Company & People View: Making sure you always know the status of all linear issues connected to a customer or company

• Slack digests: Sending you a once-per-day summary of all your feedback

• Portal-only title: Communicate projects and issues in a way your customers understand by adding a custom title for the public portal

Widget

Within a few minutes, you can unify your Support, Feedback, and Changelog into a beautiful, customizable widget that can be embedded into your app. To deliver the best possible experience for your users and capture their feedback wherever they are.

It's designed to be visible, but still in the background. It's not a huge chat bubble that's screaming at you; it's just a question mark that subtly indicates if a new changelog or support response is waiting for you.

Made for B2B Support

Especially in SaaS, you want to categorize requests into bugs, feedback, or questions quickly and want to know the urgency of it. We built this natively into the widget, and your users can select the feedback type and its importance. The most urgent requests will always be shown first in your inbox.

Changelog notifications in your widget

Many of you have been waiting for a way to embed the Changelog into your app and notify your users of a new feature. Today, we're happy to finally release this. Make your Changelog available in your app, and send a notification to all your users. New changelogs will automatically be shown on top of the widget icon so you can increase feature adoption and make your customers happy.

Contact and feedback form

The widget comes with a contact form that works for bug reports, product feedback and questions. You can authenticate your users when setting up the widget, so you know who the request is coming from and users don't need to add their email. In the coming weeks, we'll add attachements to it and we'll also start working on live chat soon.

Highly customizable and dark-mode supported

If you make the widget part of your application, it should match your brand. That's why you can customize every single color that's used in the widget, even in dark mode. (And we hope you do it responsibly and don't break the design 😅)

Sidebar customer data

In Productlane 2.0 you find a brand new sidebar in your threads. Sidebar sections help you display any type of customer data from your database or any 3rd party app for each company or person in every thread. Display things like their pricing tier, usage, activation milestones, and more to enable an excellent and fast support experience for your customers. You can set up the sidebar here in the settings.

Improved Search

We have also improved the search, given it a dedicated page, and added many more parameters that are searched through.

Slack digests

If you have installed our Slack integration, we automatically enabled a new digest for you. Once a day, you will get a notification for every new feedback that has been created on that day.

New company and people view

If you open a company or person in Productlane, you now see all linked issues and projects with their last changed date, so you know what feature request is being acted on currently.

Syncing the real Linear issue status and due dates

The Linear integration has gotten even more powerful. Up until today, we've only synched the high-level status group. Now we sync the real Linear status of issues and display that on your portal. So that you know if something is now "In review", on "staging" or any other status that you can customize in the Linear workflow settings.

Portal-only title and description

Last but not least, we have something special for everyone who wants to have their portal in another language than the one you use in Linear. You can now not only add a custom description to a project or issue on the portal but also add a title that's different than the one in Linear.

More improvements and bug fixes

• Images in the body of your changelog are now zoomable on-click

• You can now sort your inbox by newest or oldest first

• Polish-alert: New empty states throughout the tool

• We added a loading spinner to the top left when data is syncing in the background

• Fixed a bug where the content wasn't reset when creating a new issue

• Fixed a bug when uploading email attachment sometimes didn't work

• Links in the Linear issue description now open in a new tab

• Fixed editor jumping Issue when opening Inbox Item

• Fixed Intercom filter that was not working

• Fixed Emails that were hard to read in dark mode

• Slack links now open in a new tab

• Project links are now off per default

• You can now add hex colors during tag creation

• Certain interface elements are hidden when the portal is not public

• Your CC email is now removed if you're the sender

We have completely reworked the Productlane inbox to help you prioritize feedback, answer customers faster, and close the feedback loop. The new view will also make it much easier for you to grasp new statuses like "unsnoozed" and "close feedback loop". Giving you more peace of mind by reaching inbox zero.

1. Grouping

We understand that with a lot of incoming feedback, a plain list of the threads can become overwhelming and does not incentivize triaging your feedback. That's why we are now grouping threads for you, to give you a less overwhelming view and an easier way to get started. Threads are being grouped by:

• Priority
  Ordered from urgent to no priority, you can focus on important feedback first.

• Close the feedback loop
  Threads where an issue has been done will return to the inbox in a separate group.

2. Priorities

We want to enable you to get to the most important feedback first. Priorities given via the Productlane widget and roadmap are being used to highlight those at the top of the inbox. This, for example, can include bug reports, where you should answer your customer quickly and have an issue created fast. We use the following priorities:

• Urgent

• High

• Medium

• Low

• No priority

3. Inbox actions

In addition to the priority, you want to see the next step for this item instantly. This is why we brought in inbox actions. We show a label at each thread, that either contains an action or a thread status.

These are the actions you'll find:

• Reply within
  If new feedback or a reply to an open conversation comes in, we will show you this label. This is to nudge fast replies and efficiently handle feedback. Your reply time can be adjusted individually per workspace in your settings.

• Waiting for a reply

  In case you didn't manage to reply to the customers' feedback, you'll see a label highlighting that this thread has been left unanswered for a longer time than it should. This also helps you prioritize the answers for those.

• Mark done
  A thread that has been replied to can now easily get marked done right from the thread list overview without needing to open the thread itself.

• Unsnoozed

  Unsnoozed threads come back to your inbox, which can increase the number of threads without receiving new feedback.
  These are now clearly distinct from other threads by showing an "unznoozed" label again to have a less overwhelming and clear inbox view.

Set the inbox response time in your settings to ensure making customers feel their feedback is taken seriously:

More Improvements and bug fixes

• Added new priority icons to the portal

• Added new empty states all around the tool

• Improved a lot how emails are displayed, especially for Microsoft (it's hard)

• Fixed a bug where the editor was visually jumping when opening a thread

• Fixed a bug where some emails took long to load in the sync engine for customers

• Fixed a bug where the email body was empty for a few customers

• Improved J/K and arrow navigation for filtered feedback

• Fixed a bug on the portal where actions were blocked after logging out and in

• The editor now scrolls fully to the bottom when opening a thread

• Improved placement of attachments button in the email reply editor

• Fixed a bug where a Slack reply always opened an empty quote

• The link creation now stops when hitting enter after a link

• Fixed a bug where Hubspot contacts did not show up in threads

• Improved loading times on threads

• Improved the changelog edit options so you won't accidentally delete them

• Improved layout of invite people modal

• We included Linear's new "Initiatives" so you can better group your roadmap.

• There is a new "list contacts" API endpoint so that you can sync all segments from different tools 🎉

• Triage issues are now included on your portal

• Embedded videos had weird dimensions in the changelog. Fixed!

• Fixed a bug where the dash wasn't accepted in allowed domains

• Fixed a bug that prevented image uploads from working

• The "add issues" button in the changelog is now more visible

Another week, another feature to help scale your customer support. Snippets allow you to save and reuse responses that you use often. A pre-written message for closing the feedback loop with customers is now only one shortcut away. Just type ";" to select a snippet and directly create and edit snippets from within the conversation.

User feedback on the portal

We shipped another highly requested feature this week: Your users can now view the feedback they gave you through various channels on their portal.

If authenticated on the portal, they now see their feedback, including the linked linear project or issue and its importance level. Faces of your team members indicate to your users that their feedback has been seen and acknowledged.

More improvements and fixes

• AI Suggestions now also work for emails and slack messages

• Slack conversations now have a link back to the Slack conversation

• Removed a bug where projects were created 2x sometimes

• Make default status triage (if enabled) or backlog

• Display thread on people/company/project etc details

• We improved the thread list view, more on that coming soon

• Emails and Slack messages are now also visible on the people and company details

• Minor fix on the Select all button in the issue selector

We're incredibly excited to bring another huge feature to you this week.

With our new Slack Support App, you can now use Productlane as your helpdesk for your emails and your Slack connect channels.

Sync Slack threads with Productlane to reply to feedback, start a conversation, ask for more context, and build relationships.

Never forget to respond to a customer again

While you can use both Slack and Productlane to answer your customers, with Inbox Zero in Productlane, you can always double-check that no customer message goes unnoticed. With Snoozing, you can set more reliable reminders that push conversations back into your inbox when the time has come. When connecting a Linear issue and marking the conversation as done, the message will move back to your inbox as soon as the Linear issue is complete, so you can close the loop personally.

How to install Slack

You will need to reinstall Slack on the settings page. After that, you can quickly invite our new Slack app to your channels. It will automatically turn Slack messages into Productlane threads, and you can respond, snooze, and close Slack conversations in Productlane and link them to Linear.

A customer support tool made for Support and Product teams

After emailing, this is our next step to turn Productlane into a customer support tool, that's accompanied by the launch of our new homepage this week.

We're building a customer support tool for Support and Product teams. Made for short messages, feedback, bug reports, as well as long-form transcripts and call recordings. Replacing the need for tools like Dovetail, Canny, Productboard, and – ultimately – Intercom to connect all feedback with your issue tracker and pull it out of its silo. So the product team can really start connecting with users.

Launching our shared inbox was only the start of enabling you to fully support your customers and close the feedback loop directly in Productlane. To make conversations in Productlane feel lighter and more productive, we have just released new helpful features: snooze conversations, undo message sending, and add an email signature.

Snooze: Keeping your inbox clean

With a lot of feedback and messages landing in your inbox, it can easily get overwhelming and hard to stay on track with the status of conversations as you strive for inbox zero.

Snoozing helps you decrease the mental load of a full inbox whilst still having important messages at hand all the time. Snoozing is perfect for conversations that:

• are waiting for a reply

• need some internal feedback

Signatures: Ensuring professionalism & consistency

Improving the Productlane email experience by letting you add an individual signature for your conversations. This ensures all emails from Productlane contain consistent contact information and demonstrate professionalism like being sent from your standard email account.

Adding a signature:

Open your Productlane Settings, go to "Your Account" -> "Email" and add your favored signature.

Undo: Unsending a message

Did you forget to mention something, or do you want to correct a typo after you have just pressed send in Productlane? No worries. Easily undo the sending of your message within 10 seconds after sending.

Add more feedback with "Send to Productlane" Chrome Extension

Add feedback from anywhere with the 'Send to Productlane' option for every selected text in the browser.

Takes just one click: Highlight text, send it to Productlane, and turn feedback into action.

Install the Chrome extension here:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/send-to-productlane/knpflangjmbnhdmemcnlejnnaomangpg

Need help setting it up?

https://productlane.com/docs/guide/chrome-extension

Shoutout to Nick Morton from Ghost for building this amazing add-on!

Today, we're incredibly excited to ship one of the largest updates we have ever made.

It brings your product team closer to the user and takes communication further: The Productlane shared email inbox.

Shared inbox for customer support & feedback

Sending & receiving emails in Productlane will enable product teams to reply directly to incoming feature requests and bug reports and close the feedback loop even faster.
You will be able to move customer conversations to Productlane and have our shared inbox become your single source of truth for user feedback, research, and support.

For companies where the product team is responsible for customer support, we saw our beta users even replacing their support tool completely with Productlane.

We are convinced that especially in small companies, product and support teams should work much closer together and share their insights with each other.
That is why our mailing feature only marks the starting point for many more features related to customer support. All this while remaining incredibly fast, polished, and integrating natively with Linear.

Exciting shared inbox use cases

• Automatically receive emails in your Productlane inbox, create Linear issues around the feedback, and answer directly: your whole customer conversation happens in Productlane.

• Close the feedback loop even faster and completely: Any conversations where a related Linear issue has been done will reappear in your inbox automatically. Making it easy for you to follow up with the customer reporting a bug or a feature request!

Take a closer look at the Productlane shared email inbox

Threads: Improved and simplified note handling for teams

Aligned with our shared email inbox we have improved the way we display incoming feedback to make it much easier to scan and to handle, especially for teams.

Here is an overview of what we have changed:

• Thread overview:

  • less distracting view by using fewer & clearer icons for each thread.

  • new statuses: your new thread overview statuses will be "To-Do" & "Done".

• Thread navigation: Instead of just one inbox, we now cluster your threads by assignments to make it easier to handle feedback as a team.

• Improved thread sidebar: we improved the way we display contact information and linked issues to also here make the information easier to scan.

• Assignee: The thread sidebar also allows you to assign a person to a conversation. Making it much easier to handle feedback and customer support.

• Comments: Simplify internal communication regarding incoming feedback and open questions by using internal comments in your customer conversations.

Today, we introduce a new way to make your life much easier when handling vast amounts of feedback data and enabling you to reach out to multiple people simultaneously.

Contact all people associated with an issue or project

If you navigate to an issue or project detail page, you can now copy all emails or download a CSV of all people who are associated with it. It helps you to quickly ask for more feedback or follow up on features with multiple people at once.

Multi-select

Do you want to process or even delete several notes at once? Click the checkbox next to the note and use the shortcuts E to process and D to delete. You can just as quickly move back notes from processed to your inbox by selecting them and pressing E.
In case you want to process all notes effortlessly, we enabled select all for you as well:
CMD + A. This allows you to handle several notes with just one click.

Inbox filters

Filters save you time when wanting to take a closer look or handle only a specific group of notes. On your notes overview, just click "Filters" in the top right corner and filter by

• Origin: Filter by the original feedback source; see which source creates the most feedback.

• Importance: Filter by importance; handle high importance notes first.

• Creator: Filter by the creator; find notes created by only you or by a colleague.

• Segments: Filter by segment; find individual feedback types, e.g., filter by the role of the feedback provider.

Happy New Year! We're starting into 2024 with a new feature that will enable you to share your Linear roadmap with customers – without making it public to the whole world: 

Private customer portals allow you to set multiple allowed domains of your customers in the portal settings. After that, only people with an email address for those allowed domains can access your portal. 

This will help you build more trustful relationships with your most important customers, giving them complete transparency of the status of their feedback and feature requests.

Single-Sign-On

To make that process even more seamless, we added the possibility to authenticate your users from the Productlane link within your App. With SSO, you can directly send your customers to the roadmap, and they don't need to log in anymore but are directly authenticated and ready to give feedback and upvote. 

These features are available in our new Business package, suited for companies and agencies who want to offer clients a seamless and collaborative experience with a private portal.

Public-facing description of issues & projects

You can now set a description that will not be synched with Linear and will only be visible on your portal:

Stability improvements and new hosting

We have put a lot of work into making Productlane more stable, moved our hosting to AWS, and improved a lot of things under the hood. To make the tool snappier and more reliable than ever before. 

Project timeframes

Last week, Linear announced their new project timeframes, and of course – we also support them. Simply select a month, quarter or year and it will shop up on your portal.

More improvements & fixes

• The widget in Hubspot now has a link to the note you created.

• When you hit enter, you now go from the title to the body of the changelog content.

• We improved all detail screens of issues, projects, and tags.

• Canceled issues now don't show anymore in the AI Suggestions.

• The call recorder now sends a message of the note into the meeting platform chat. 

• Written portal feedback now has the default importance "Medium".

• You can now turn off the Slack bot comments in a thread

• New Hubspot notes now create Email and Slack notifications

• We added shortcuts for selecting person, company, and importance on a note

• Fixed a bug where MP4 file upload didn't work

• Fixed a bug where you couldn't add feedback in Hubspot

• We added a new 404 page

• Add reporter for notes created from Hubspot/Intercom/Plain

• Fixed a bug where highlighting sometimes didn't work in the transcript

We revamped one of our most popular features and made it more robust, secure, and clean: Our portal helps you make issues and projects from your Linear feature request team public for your users or team. Now with these new features:

1. User login: Your users can now sign up on the portal page to verify their email, track the feedback they gave you over time, and get automatic updates on newly added projects or issues.

2. A new way to upvote: We changed the functionality of the upvote button to directly prompt users for more feedback after they upvote.

3. Changelog tabs: When you share new updates with users, they can now directly switch to the portal and give more feedback with our new tabs at the top.

More improvements

• You can now choose your own OG Image for the portal

• The Linear issue attachement now changes when person or company is changed

• You can now transfer the owner role in the settings

• The Slack integration has been improved, so no images or formatting gets lost

• We now support markdown on Linear issue attachements

• Only show the highlighted part of the feedback in the Linear issue attachment

• Fix into linear sync extreme loading times

• Improved styling of segments to make it more scannable

• You can now add labels and projects when creating issues

• Added search icon to contacts page

• Added CSV Export button in settings

• You can now allow email access to a workspace

• Added roadmap issues to API and upvote endpoint

Bug fixes

• Improved stability of the Slack integration

• Fixed error while editing changelog page

• Improved video player loading time for insights to enhance UX

• Fixed bug causing duplicate projects

• Fixed inability to open links when highlighted

• Added missing completed status in project selector

• Issues from invisible teams were visible on issues. Fixed!

• Fixed Slack bot sometimes not responding

• Resolved issue with theme settings not saving

• Fixed missing first message from Intercom in note

• Made Linear synching more robust

• Addressed speaker change affecting transcripts

• Fixed inability to remove Company segment

• Resolved video player issues on Safari browser

Connecting call notes and feedback with Linear is now faster than ever. With our new AI suggestions, we directly suggest the right issue or project from Linear for each new line of your note. Create Linear issues while keeping the full context of the customer note for your team.

Video recordings & transcripts in Productlane

That's not all! We're also launching our video upload beta. Upload recordings manually or let our meeting recording bot join your calls and make timestamped notes with Productlane. Process user interviews in 5m instead of 1h. Sign up for the beta here: https://tally.so/r/3xMk2o

Linear roadmaps & due dates on the portal

Looking for a shortcut to get more feedback and manage expectations with your users? You can now publish your Linear projects on our portal – and even display their roadmaps and due dates if you want to.

Email Signup

You can now sign up or invite your team without a Linear & Google account and just sign up via email.

More improvements & fixes

• Fixed sync engine issues

• Resolved CMD Z not working in Changelog editor

• Added the creator of each note

• Included attachments in forwarding emails

• Resolved duplicate project creation

• Implemented error boundary for issue selection

• Fixed an issue when creating a new workspace

• Added a clear filter button to the segments filters

• Fixed a bug where notifications were received for own comments

• Removed cancelled projects from Productlane

• Fixed a bug in the company create form

• Resolved the extra scrollbar appearing in dark mode due to virtualization

We have been shipping so many new things this month. A whole new API, a CSV upload, Emailing within Productlane, and, first and foremost, our Hubspot integration.

It's one of our most requested integrations and works similarly to Intercom. Sync all your users and companies from Hubspot, send new feedback, and view the delivery status of that feedback all within Hubspot.

New API

We don't believe in locking in our customers. We want you to do everything you can dream of with your data, so we're enabling all important endpoints in our API.

We rewrote our entire API and documentation to make it future-proof and scalable, you find the new documentation here: https://docs.productlane.com

CSV Upload

So far, you could only send us new feedback via email, and we uploaded it for you. The amount became difficult for us to handle, so we built it directly into the tool. You can upload new notes with the name and email of the user it's from. We then automatically generate the right company from the email or assign the user to it.

Email users from within Productlane

We also added a huge new feature that enables you to close feedback loops with customers even faster. When the reply button on the top right of the note only opened a mailto: window in the past, it now opens a form on the note to send emails to your users even quicker.

The email form is automatically open for completed notes, making it even easier to close feedback loops. We're thinking about more ways to automate the feedback closing in a personal way. Let us know your ideas!

Website Updates

Our website also got a little refresh, showcasing all the new features we built in the last months on the homepage, adding our team and investors to our about page, and adding a blog where we will share new learnings here and then.

Productlane Manifesto

We built Productlane to help companies build simpler software by making the right feature bets. Read more about how we think and what we believe in our Manifesto.

More improvements & fixes

• We added new emails to remind you to keep inbox zero and publish new projects on your portal

• You can now turn opportunities into projects and issues quickly

• You can now view the delivery status of connected issues & projects in our Intercom integration

• Enabled YouTube videos in our changelog

• Improved the design of all our emails

• Added ability to delete people & workspaces from Productlane

• Improved the design of all our emails

• Added the portal settings to the settings page

• Added functionality to disconnect Slack button

• Fixed issue with extra scrollbar in dark mode

• Resolved spacing bug in the Changelog

• Fixed an issue where duplicate contacts were created with Intercom

• Improved some spacing on the portal

• Added Segments to people & company page

• Slack channels now ordered alphabetically

We started Productlane 2 years ago as one of the first tools you can use only with a Linear account. While this helped us to grow quickly and become the go-to solution for every company that uses Linear – the time has come for us to evolve.

Sales or Customer Success teams often don't have a Linear account especially in larger organizations or agencies. However with Productlane, these teams can be better aligned with the roadmap and close feedback loops.

That's why we've made some really big changes by enabling you to have multiple workspaces and invite your team members via Google authentication.

Enabling agencies to use Productlane

Agencies using Linear teams as a client's differentiator can now create multiple workspaces in Productlane and connect the different teams with their respective workspaces - enabling you to create your own portal for each client for even better collaboration.

New onboarding

To create a sweet first experience for your new team members to get started, we also overhauled our entire onboarding. Watch the video below to see it in action:

The idea for Productlane was born out of frustrations that call recordings were buried in Notion, invisible to anyone in the company.

But seeing a real person using your product is so important for the whole team.. And uploading them in video-cutting or research tools is such a pain.

Luckily, Grain built a very simple way to record user calls for not only PMs, but Sales, CS and everyone who's talking with users.

With their Mac App, you can even take timestamped notes, and every new line in your notes is connected with a little snippet from the recording.

If you add these timestamped notes into Productlane and connect them, you now see a video highlight reel on each opportunity, project or issue.

How it works:

New private and public portal

We're building Productlane to help you focus on the features with the most impact. Because every new feature can clutter your tool and make it harder to use.

Especially your main navigation has a sweet spot when it gets too complex, so we combined the changelog and portal and gave both small UI lifts.

Our users also love to make their portal only available for their organization through Google auth. So the name "Public roadmap" didn't make much sense anymore.

If you use Linears Intercom integration to track feature requests in your issue backlog, we have something very special for you this week:

Productlane imports all Intercom conversations (same for Slack, Zendesk and Front) that are linked to a Linear issue and displays those with new helpful data:

You now see the user, company, and their segments next to each feature request – all synced with Intercom. This means, next to every feature request, you see the amount of paying users, how many sessions they had, if they had been active in the last 30 days, which company size they're in, and much more. This enables you to identify:

• Feature requests from potentially high-paying customers

• Problems people mentioned that led them to churn

• Opportunities to delight your power users and make them love your tool even more

… and much more.

New segment filter

We also made significant improvements to our segment filter. You can permanently hide all segments that are unimportant to you, and when you filter for a segment, the importance score and trend are recalculated, and all other segments are hidden. Also, the segments are now visible and filterable on the company and people list.

More improvements & fixes

• We added dynamic OG images for the portal

• Larger improvements in speed and indexability of the portal pages.

• We now fetch the profile picture from people's emails.

• We now only display the connected sentence of an issue.

• Added functionality to download logo URLs from Linear.

• Enabled opening a company from people's details.

• Added an "Open in Linear" button to Project details.

• Addressed an auto-saving bug in the editor.

• Resolved the problem of not displaying all Slack channels in the selector.

• You can now still assign a person when their company has been deleted

• Made note creation from within Slack more stable

• In the note search, deleted notes were visible sometimes. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug where you couldn't edit a project when no icon was selected.

• Added Live Server functionality

Productlane is built for teams. From the beginning, our vision was to align every person in the company around the user. Taking interview notes, processing feature requests, discussing new feedback – this is now all possible together, with collaborative editing and comments.

You see the cursor and a little profile icon of your teammates, and can discuss new feedback in the comment section on the right. Mention team members by pressing "@" and they will be notified immediately.

Pricing updates

To celebrate collaboration and follow our vision, we decided to make Productlane free for up to 5 users with unlimited usage – including our Slack and Intercom integration.

Zapier Integration

We also added a very simple way to bring even more feedback to Productlane. From NPS or Churn Surveys to App Store Reviews and Helpdesk tools, you can now consolidate them all through Zapier.

AI summaries beta

Something really exciting is waiting for Productlane power users - if you have lots of feedback or interview notes attached to an issue, project or opportunity, you can now summarize it with our new AI summary feature on the top right of the page. We're releasing this as a first beta, and more AI functionality is in the making - including auto-suggesting links for new feedback and suggesting new opportunities from your Linear and Intercom data.

More improvements & fixes

• There is a new green outline around the editor to indicate if you can use shortcuts

• We show now for some of your users their profile pictures

• ESC now closes the issue, project and opportunity selection modal

• We enabled the feedback endpoint in our API

• When hovering connected items on the editor, it's highlighting them now

• Made note deletion possible with keyboard

• Made typography in editor a bit better readable

• Made most screens responsive (it's not perfect yet and work in progress!)

• Importance icon is now hidden on the overview when there is no importance selected

• Fixed a bug where the cursor jumps to the new line randomly in the editor

• Fixed a bug where you couldn't edit project when no icon is selected

• Company segments are now displayed separately from user segments

• Upvoted projects are now also displayed on company details

• There is a new scroll effect when hovering connected items on the editor

• Tab selector has now a hover effect

• Deleted notes are note in the note search anymore

In the last weeks, we made the biggest change to Productlane so far. It lays the foundation for our vision to make Productlane the fastest and highest-quality product discovery tool in the industry: Adding a sync engine.

You need to do it when the codebase is still manageable, as it's almost impossible to do later. We needed to rewrite lots of code and stop building larger features for weeks.

But we're really proud of the result. Productlane now feels like a native app. Seamless in every interaction, it will save our users countless hours by removing all load times. The sync with Linear is now more instant than ever and it's ready for exciting and collaborative features such as commenting, a multi-cursor editor, and more.

Improved design

We also took the opportunity to improve large chunks of the frontend. The design – especially the navigation and editor – is now much more lightweight and in the background. We made the wording clearer and removed confusing terms like "Insights" and "Repository", which are now just "Notes" and "Processed Notes".

Better search

We improved the search and made it more performant so that we were able to put it back into CMD+K. You don't need to go to a separate page anymore and can just open it with a simple keystroke. Only for the insight search, you need to click one more time, the rest is directly in CMD+K.

Tags are now opportunities

After testing our new Tags feature, it was pretty clear that it seemed too broad and wasn't clear enough what to do with it. "Tags" can be everything and nothing at the same time. So we named it into the main use-case we built them for: Opportunities. A bucket for your feature ideas, observations, or problem areas that are too early to put into Linear already.

The groups are now customizable, so you can make them fit for your individual use-case. You can use them for a specific tool area, for an outcome you want to achieve, or as a bucket to keep track of competitor mentions.

Forward email to Productlane

The new version also comes with a highly requested new feature that enables you to send feedback to Productlane via email. In the settings, there is now a new email page, where you can copy a unique email address for your organization, where everything that is sent to, converted into a note in Productlane. Save this email as a new "Productlane" contact, to make it super simple to forward new feedback to it.

New domain: Productlane.com

Productlane not only continues to mature as a product but also as a company. With our growing user base, it was also time for us to invest a little bit in our brand and buy a new domain. You now find us on productlane.com instead of productlane.io.

More improvements

• The score of issues is now calculated into their projects

• When you hover the linked items on the editor, it now scrolls to the right position

• You can now search for the issue ID in the issue search

• Project, issue, and opportunity creation is now faster and prefills the title

• You can now open links in a new tab with CMD + click

• The company name is now shown on the Notes list

• The feedback widget now also supports dark mode

• The project ID in the feedback widget is not required anymore

• "Bots like Typeform or Zapier can create insights" in Slack is now on for everyone as a default

• The opportunity / issue / project search is now cleared after selection

• Notes are now formatted correctly on all other detail-pages

• You can now send feedback from within CMD+K

• CMD+K now supports searching through opportunities and companies

• Company and user segments are now separated with different icons

• The company is now shown in the issue link in Linear

• The screen for editing projects has been improved and put into a modal

• Completed issues are now displayed in Productlane as well

• Issues & projects are auto-linked after the creation

• There is no alert anymore when you close the feedback modal on the Public roadmap

• The shortcut to link an issue makes the text not italic anymore

Introducing: The easiest way to track user feedback from Intercom.
With one click, you can move a whole Intercom conversation to Productlane.

No questionnaire or input fields will prevent your team from tracking feedback, and your engineers can read the entire conversation in Productlane without an Intercom account.

Intercom is available on our Plus plan, and you can start a trial here in our settings.

Raycast extension

We're also launching an effortless way to track feedback from wherever you are: Big shoutout to Dima, Co-Founder, and CTO of Novu, for building a Productlane Raycast extension!

With 19k Github stars, Novu is one of the most popular open-source solutions for managing user notifications – You should try it.

You can find the extension in the Raycast Store.

Preview: Feedback and Changelog widget

There is even more to announce! Highly requested – we're currently testing our feedback and changelog widgets.

1. The feedback widget enables smaller companies to skip customer support tools and – as Grafbase does it – use Productlane as their primary support tool. Teams using a customer success tool can communicate directly with the product team through the widget.

2. The changelog widget is a beautiful way to tell the story of your recently shipped updates that your users can read without leaving your tool.

We look forward to your feedback on the widgets to polish everything for the release!

This week, we’re really excited about a feature that will play a big role in Productlane, especially for doing user research: Tagging.

We’re testing a very opinionated approach that’s based on our own way of building products, a mix of the Linear method and Teresa Torres’ “Continuous Discovery Habits.”

It’s made for SaaS companies, but might not work for everyone yet. So we’re keen on your feedback! We created three default tag groups that have a specific purpose:

1. Opportunities
   Discover patterns and verify problems before jumping into solutions

2. User tasks & goals
   Get a feeling of what your users do every day to find problems they don’t know they had

3. Evergreen tags
   Keep track of timeless insights like pricing feedback or why people love your product

Please let us know if you have a use case, we don’t solve with the default tag groups! We might make them customizable in the future.

Issues page and issue details

You now have a page for all issues that you linked through Productlane. See each issue's importance score, company segments, user personas, and trends! If you use our importer for Intercom, Front, or Zendesk links, you will also see them on the page. And on the details, you now see all insights connected to the issue.

Paste images to insights & changelogs

A small but mighty feature that many of you waited for: You can now paste images into insights and changelog.

More improvements & fixes

• We improved the companies: You now see all todo and done projects and issues of a company

• We simplified the navigation and combined People, Companies and Segments

• There are now only upvoted projects that are "Todo" on the people details

• Fixed a bug where you couldn't enter the domain when there was a "/" at the end

• You can now book a demo through our website's homepage

• You can now create users and companies through our API

• New setting to disable automatic changelog drafts in the settings

• Imported insights from Front, Intercom, and Zendesk don't create issue links anymore

• Changelog drafts have now auto-save

• You can now link to a project twice on the insight

• Fixed a bug where the email was shown instead of the company on the insights

It's been wild weeks and we're heads down working on many smaller improvements for all the new users coming into Productlane recently. But we we’re also able to ship a larger feature that will enable a complete new usecase for you:

Share internal Changelogs with your company and align all employees around your roadmap with a private portal. Use Google authentication to only allow access to people from your organization.

You find the setting behind the Share button on the top right of the Public Roadmap or Changelog page.

Add Front, Intercom & Zendesk links to Productlane

Most of you already link to existing bugs or issues from helpdesk tools with Linears native integrations. We have built an import that you can see these links now also in Productlane!

By that, you can

1. See the aggregated link amount (the importance score)

2. Spot trends (how many new links have been added within the last 4 weeks)

3. Get a high-level overview of which company or user has requested things.

With the click of a button, you can add all helpdesk attachement links from our Import / Export page in the settings.

More improvements & fixes

• On a companies detail page, you now see their done issues and projects

• People search is not case-sensitive anymore

• Fixed a bug where the same person could been added multiple times

• Improved the look of companies logos

• Fixed a bug where the add company modal hit random reloads for some users

• Fixed a bug where the persons company wasn't displayed for some sources

• Companies are now sorted alphabetically

• Fixed a bug on the company settings that prevented new logos from being saved

The new week comes with a new key feature in Productlane: Companies. Because insights often come from multiple people within the same organization, the company is now generated from your user's email. If you give it a segment, it will show on every employee's insight.

Insight trends

Next to the project and issue importance score is now the trend to see if a new topic is rising. The score shows you the increase since the last four weeks, so you can find out if something is still relevant or might have been fixed with another feature.

Preview: Display issues

A long-awaited feature is coming very soon: We struggled long if we wanted to build it because using projects to connect user insights gives you a better picture of your user's needs and doesn't clutter your issue backlog with feature ideas. But we now found a way to display both and released the first glimpse of it.

On your roadmap, there are now three new projects: Unstarted issues, Started issues, and Backlog issues. We're working on displaying their score and segments, calculating them into the linked projects, and automatically importing attachments from Zendesk, Intercom, Slack, or Front to Productlane to show you trending issues. Let us know what you think!

More improvements & fixes

• Editor power users watch out: We just made your life simpler by adding the shortcut "CMD + shift + I/P" to quickly connect issues and projects with your keyboard

• You can now view the team members who are in Productlane in your settings

• We improved the project search, so you quickly find the projects you need

• We added the description of a project to the public roadmap page, so you can double-check that no internal notes are published

• You can now search the Linear issue ID in the Issue picker

• We made some improvements to our API docs (check them out, they're beautiful – thanks to Merlin)

• Segments are now in the main navigation, as you might want to edit them frequently

• Fixed the date picker closing on click in Safari

• On the people page, you could only view three upvotes. Fixed.

Our vision is to create a new standard for product discovery. To help you identify impact, align your team, and close the feedback loop with customers.

Today, we're one step closer to that vision, as we're launching our new rich text editor: You can now add user interview notes and longer feedbacks and connect parts of that with projects and issues.

If you select a text, in the popup with the styling options, there is now a button to connect an issue or a project. If you do that, that highlight is visible on the project detail page and helps you get important context much faster.

Link multiple issues

To make full use of the new editor, you can now link to multiple issues from one insight. We're working right now on displaying these issues in Productlane and import existing issue attachements and linked conversations from Intercom, Front, or Zendesk. Stay tuned for the next release!

New search

As a single source of truth for your user insights, it's essential to make them not only searchable through linked issues and projects but also through the insights themselves. If you now click on the little search icon next to the "Add note"-button, you see a beautiful new search page where you see all essential results at a glance. (To initiate it for the first time, you need to log out and in again or "Sync search" in CMD K)

API Docs

Our users are getting more creative with what they can do with their data in Productlane. For example, Grafbase used our API to rebuild the public roadmap on their website and deliver a seamless experience for their users. For that, we extended our API and created a dedicated page for our docs: https://docs.productlane.io.

Do you have more use-cases for our API in mind? Let us know!

Backups every minute

With more and more users getting on board recently, we want to ensure your data is safe. That's why we installed a proper backup system for our database. Now, your data is back-upped every minute instead of every 24 hours.

Other improvements

• You can now edit people on the people details page

• Project Emojis are now visible in Productlane as well

• We tweaked the editor UI a little bit, adding the source to the right and not into a button anymore

• You can now change the date on a changelog post

• With our Slack integration, you can now fully connect with Zapier, and also send messages to it, not only receive them.

• New projects are now hidden per default on the public roadmap for new users

• We made the automatic background gradients for changelog images a bit fresher

Our vision is to create a new standard for product discovery. To help you identify impact, align your team and close the feedback loop with customers.

Today, we're one step closer to that vision, as we're launching a preview of our new editor: You can now add user interview notes and longer feedbacks and connect parts of that with projects.

We're right now adding the possibility to connect multiple issues and display them within Productlane, and more improvements on the editor are coming, so stay tuned!

Other Improvements

• Removed Milestones from "Create project" and "Edit project" page

• Limited the maximum number of segments shown on the projects page

• Users can now sort projects on the public roadmap

• Adjusted the position of the CMD K shortcut

• Added a chevron arrow next to a person's name in the insights section to open their profile

• Added a button for adding people in the people selector

• Improved the people picker

Bugs

• Fixed an issue where an endless spinner would appear if a feedback was submitted without selecting a person

• Improved the hover effect on project for the public roadmap

• Fixed a bug where the team was not synced when creating a project from within Productlane

• Allowed other files than PNGs for changelog image upload

• Fixed an error message that appeared when creating a project without a status

• Fixed a bug in the changelog with long URLs

• Fixed an error that occurred when saving feedback

• Fixed a bug where project links were not working

• Fixed a 502 error that occurred when uploading GIFs in the changelog

• Fixed an issue where the people creator would fade away

• Added the "Give Feedback" link when the project doesn't have a description

• Fixed a bug where the company logo was not displaying on the public roadmap

We finally shipped a feature that was blocking many of you from adopting Productlane: Hiding Linear teams you don't need for your daily research work.

You find this new option by navigating to Settings > Teams in Productlane. 

Please note that for some older accounts, you need to "Sync Linear" with CMD + K in case no project is visible after turning on the setting for the first time. After that, everything will be synced constantly.

Changed "milestones" to "project status"

With Linear's new update, "milestones" will be deprecated, so we changed the grouping on the projects tab and your public roadmap to the "project status". We like the simplicity, but we might switch to their new "roadmaps" as a replacement. But we're unsure yet if it will become too complex, as you can now have one project in multiple roadmaps. Please let us know your feedback on what you'd prefer! 

People picker

When adding insights like user interview notes or feedback manually, so far, you always needed to type in the persons' email. We made this a lot easier by letting you create that person only once and then being able to select it from a dropdown. While creating a person, you can now also directly add their user segment.

Other improvements

• We redesigned the project details. They are now full-width, so you can better read the insights.

• We fixed a bug that insights didn't move back to the inbox after completing it in Linear for some accounts.

• Some weird font weights have sneaked into our Changelog headings. Fixed!

• Fixed a bug on the changelog and public roadmap page, where content was displayed twice. 

With our new Slack integration, we've been able to cover 3 major feature requests at once:

1. Zapier integration
2. Forwarding emails to Productlane
3. Inviting your team to add feedback

How this works:

Every new message creates an insight in Productlane: Every message sent into a selected channel will automatically create an insight in Productlane that you can then connect with Linear issues and projects later.

Slack bots like Typeform or Zapier can create insights: Slack bots can be connected to your #insights-hub channel and will also create Productlane insights automatically. This works for Typeform, Zapier, and many other bots. You can set up Zapier to enable email forwarding.

Involve customer success or sales: Let your team add interview notes, call summaries, lost deals, and any other insights that will help prioritize the roadmap. They can post everything into the Slack channel, and you can process it later in Productlane.

For public Slack communities: Never miss another feature request in public Slack communities. Badge-connect all feedback at once, without needing to deal with Slacks UI to create or link issues.

For Slack connect channels: If you communicate with your customers in Slack connect channels, you can click on the "More actions" of a specific message to push it quickly to Productlane. When the feature is shipped, you can automatically follow up with that customer in the Slack thread.

Notifications: Discuss new feedback with your team directly in the thread of a notification.

The more insights you store in Productlane, the better you'll be able to understand which users you can solve a problem for. Segment users by company size, whether they are paying customers, how active they are, and prioritize your roadmap accordingly.

Attach images to insights

We're also launching another major feature: You can now upload images to an insight. Your users can do this on the Public Roadmap and you can upload them when adding a new insight in Productlane.

Other improvements

• When you receive new feedback via email, the "Reply to" field now contains the feedback giver’s email address

• You can now search for multiple keywords in the projects search

• There is a new option on the projects page to temporarily sort  by importance

• Fixed a bug on the Changelog and Public Roadmap where some things were not shown correctly in dark mode

Have all your user feedback in Notion? Host your changelog in another tool? You can now upload your existing data into Productlane and enjoy its benefits without having to start all over: Connect feedback with feature ideas and see, which customer segment it helps the most, and let the feedback jump back into your inbox as soon as the feature is marked done in Linear.

Open the import settings to get started.

Public roadmap improvements

We also shipped some improvements to the public roadmap. If you hover over a project, you now see the Linear description without clicking on it. When you create new feedback on the left, you still see the description fully while the existing projects are searched through.

Other improvements

• You can now search projects and users with CMD + K

• The email subject line for new feedback now has the user email in it, to avoid emails being threaded

• You're awesome! The changelog draft email now celebrates you for finishing projects. 🎉

• Changed the wording from "Mark processed" to "Move to repository", to clarify that it doesn't mean that feedback has been solved.

• Fixed a bug where the changelog detail page couldn't be opened

• Fixed a bug that prevented syncing projects properly for some accounts

We had an intense launch last week and were overwhelmed by your feedback, thank you so much for signing up for Productlane! Our vision is to make managing feedback and sharing it with your team effortless. To help you build more user-centric and successful products. This was a great step towards that.

To let the feedback keep flowing in, we added another often requested feature: You can now connect a custom domain to your public roadmap and changelog. Just open the custom domain settings to get started.

Dark mode switch and better theming

To streamline your branding, you can now enable or disable dark mode for your users in the custom theme settings. We've also redesigned the settings page to better distinguish dark mode from light mode colors.

Pricing

Both features are available in the Plus plan, which we introduced last week. We designed our pricing to enable companies of all sizes to get value out of Productlane with a Free account. As soon as you scale up your teams, you can upgrade your workspace to connect more Linear teams and set a custom domain and change up your Public Roadmap's and Changelog's theme, starting at $40.00 per Linear team / month. View our pricing here.

Productlane is now available for all Linear users. You find it in Linear's new integrations directory.

After some intense work the last months to make the core functionality stable and valuable, you're now ready to complement your Linear workspace with a smart user feedback repository to close the feedback loop, a beautiful changelog that writes itself, and a customizable public roadmap. 

All you need to do is open our website, where you can simply log into Productlane with your Linear account and get started.

Keep the feedback looping: When you send out a new Changelog, your users can now leave feedback on it without leaving the page. A small input field underneath each post enables you to be even closer to your users and signal to them that you truly value their feedback.

Users can choose between three reactions to indicate how they feel about your newest updates. The icons have the same accent color that you can set in your settings. After leaving feedback, they are asked for their email so you can get back to them and stay in touch.

What do you think about this new feature? Leave your feedback below 👇

You can finally link feedback to existing issues! This is one of the most requested features and was a blocker for many of you, so we rethought our approach here.

We limited it to only projects initially because we see them as a better place for your feature requests. You want to keep a high-level overview of your projects and feature ideas and not have every bug in there. On the other side, you don't want ideas in your developer backlog where you're really not sure if you want to build them.

After we invited more users from the waitlist, we realized that you also want to track how often a certain bug or small issue comes up. We're happy to let you know, that you can now do so. Just click on the "+ Issue" button in the feedback details to open a dropdown with all your open issues.

We won't display any of them within Productlane, as we see the segmentation only important for larger features and you can view them directly within Linear anyway. Read here how you can view Productlane feedback directly in Linear.

Productlane guide

We worked on a new guide to help you get the most out of Productlane. You find it here.

Other improvements

• For some portals, the title and OG image weren't shown when posting on Twitter or other socials. Fixed!

• The new project backlog status is now implemented and visible on the roadmap

• The project status icons have been updated

• We removed project status and target date from the portal, as those are often changed by accident in Linear

• We gave all icons on the portal the accent color that you can set in your custom theme

• You can now change your organization's name and logo in the settings

• In the settings, you now find the option to disable and enable the feedback link within a Linear project

In the last weeks, we realized how powerful it was to publish our own Changelog. People on our waitlist got excited reading it and recommended us to more people, even before trying the tool themselves.

We didn’t expect potential users so urgently wanting a tool to write Changelogs – that’s why we decided to make the experience even better.

Issue importer and grouping by label

With a click of a button, you can now add all issues from the last cycle to the Changelog and they are automatically grouped by their label like “Bugs” or “Improvements”.

Additionally, we added a preview of each issue when you hover over it, to help you decide at a glance if the issue is worth putting in your Changelog.

Built-in image editor

Want to quickly update your team or users about a new release, but don't have time to design a nice title image? We got your back. When you upload a screenshot to your Changelog draft, you can now add a background gradient to it and customize the color, border-radius, and padding of the image.

Custom color themes

We understand how important it is to keep a consistent theme and branding for your company. When sending your Changelog to your users, investors, and teammates, you can now adjust the colors of your page to better fit your brand.

We designed it to be easy to customize and to work in both dark and light mode. You only need to set a few colors, such as the background, text and accent colors, which we then use to generate complementary shades for borders or hover effects.

Want to build a beautiful changelog fast? Sign up for our waitlist!

Other improvements

• We added a customizable "Home" link to the portal and Changelog, so people can now click on the logo to get to your website

• Changelog URLs now look a lot better

• In the reply e-mail of a feedback, we added the project in the subject line

• The project view count is now hidden when the portal is not published

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug where marking the last feedback processed, users were directed to the “Processed” tab

• Portal updates were very slowing when adding large amounts of feedback

• The login page didn’t redirect to the admin area anymore when you were logged in

• Autosaving didn’t work anymore on Changelog

• We changed the issue deletion to just unlinking it

• Couldn’t select other teams on issue creation

• Changing default linear teams did not immediately reflect on the page

• After opening the project creation modal, the keyboard listener was still attached

• Next / Prev feedback navigation wasn't working smoothly

• Large strings and other content overflowed the changelog page

A new week has passed, and we have some exciting updates for major workflows. Thanks to every one of you who gave feedback or wrote us to get access earlier. We're super happy to see so many of you jumping on our waitlist every day – don't hesitate to drop us a message and get bumped up the waitlist!

We worked on one thing to help you really delight your users: A smart feedback inbox. It tackles a problem we had ourselves and saw with our first users: When you receive feedback, it's scattered in Linear tickets, Notion, Intercom, Front, Slack, and other tools. 

That makes it really hard to get back to your users and let them know that you acted upon their feedback. Currently, this is a lot of manual work, you need to go through all links on a Linear ticket, or search wherever a user requested a feature and contact them afterward.

That's why we built this process into Productlane. After adding a feedback, you can connect it to an issue or project. When those are marked done in Linear, the linked feedback in Productlane will now bump back in your inbox. That way you can get in touch with all your users who gave feedback, create that magic moment and make them really feel heard.

Create Linear issues from Productlane

So far, you were only able to connect a feedback with a project, now you can do the same with issues. The Linear issue status will be shown directly on the feedback list, so you know how things are progressing.

Review projects before publishing

A big blocker for a lot of you was that projects were public on your portal by default. This was of course not an ideal situation, and we understand that leaking upcoming features are the last thing you want to do. Now, every new project needs to be approved for publishing on your portal. So you can do your work in peace and communicate only the features your users need to see and give feedback on.

Changelog improvements

We can see how many of you are interested in writing your changelogs in Productlane. That's why we improved the experience of writing them. Importing issues from Linear is now easier and faster since we improved the UX all-around. Keep an eye out, we are listening to your feedback, and we are looking for ways to improve the experience even further.

Other improvements and bug fixes

There is also a slew of other fixes and minor improvements:

• The feedback input on your portal now grows when you type more text

• You can finally drag & drop Projects 👐

• “No milestone” is now selected per default when creating a new project

• Fixed a bug where a click on the changelog link led to the bottom of the changelog detail page

• Fixed a bug where, when logged out, the changelog page did not forward to the login page

• Fixed a bug where text on the changelog detail view was floating over the navigation

• Sometimes the linear API errored out and took down the whole app (fixed 😅)

• Fixed a bug that prevented scrolling on long feedbacks

• When you change the name of your Linear org, the name will now be synched in Productlane

• Fixed a bug, where the people search sometimes didn't work

• You can now delete people

As always, we are looking forward to hearing from you about feature ideas and more suggestions, so we can continually improve Productlane.

Best!

We launched on Producthunt two weeks ago and it was a blast! Thank you so much, we were busy since then keeping up with all the new feedback that came in. We try to send invites to around 10 users per week to make sure everything runs smoothly for you. If you have a more urgent need, please leave us a message and we're happy to prioritize you!

Simple upvotes

We got a few requests that the public portal is more useful when users can upvote directly, without leaving feedback. We see the problem, that an upvote is not as insightful as written feedback, but we now tried to combine the best of both worlds. Users can upvote by just leaving their email once and are prompted to leave more feedback after each upvote if they have an urge to do so. By leaving their e-mail, as a product manager, you can contact them directly to get more feedback from them. Let us know what you think!

E-Mail Notifications

Sometimes, users get feedback on the portal which is more urgent and requires a quick response. That's why we added a customizable e-mail notification for each new feedback that comes in through the portal. As well as when a new changelog draft is ready for you.

Fixes & Improvements

• You can now search through people when using "CMD+K" or just use the shortcut "U"

• You can now select the project in the new feedback modal

• Fixed a bug that made import Issues to a changelog not working

• The feedback on the people details view is now sorted by creation date

• When saving the feedback, it's now saved with breaks

• Fixed a bug where the changelog editor overflowed with long strings

• Fixed a bug where you needed to reload the page on the feedback details, when you created a project with CMD K, so it appears in the project dropdown

• Fixed that newly created projects are not in the CMD+K search, only after reload

• Improved the load time for saving projects due to the Linear integration

• Fixed a bug where a big black line appears on some screens

• Improved readability of the segments labels

• Reworked the options menu on feedback details and added shortcuts

• We removed the default "Public Portal" Link on the changelog

• Changed the sorting to show the newest feedback on the project details on top

• Fixed a bug where ticking the checklist didn't work sometimes

• Truncated the text in the milestone and team selector buttons

• Fixed a bug where changing the milestone to "No milestone" didn't work sometimes

• Fixed a bug on the portal where the link in the footer didn't work when clicking a bit outside

• We removed the "edit"-button in the project details and put it in the 3 dots-menu

• Fixed that the Esc shortcut navigated back to a deleted feedback

• Fixed a bug where the CMD Delete shortcut for feedback didn't work sometimes

• Improved the look of the initial loading screen 🎨

• Fixed a bug on the portal, that the feedback form got wider with an error message

• Fixed a bug where the tooltips did not disappear sometimes

• We disabled the tooltips mobile (Obviously you have no shortcuts there 😏)

• New items count in the sidebar now updates after creating or deleting feedbacks

• Fixed a bug that the "GR" shortcut to go back to the roadmap, sometimes opened the Email reply

• When you archive a changelog, you now don't need to reload anymore to make it disappear

• We removed the roadmap link on the changelog when the roadmap is private

Hello World. We are excited to announce Productlane with this first Changelog post!

After months of hard and fun work building the core of our product, including a deep Linear integration, custom public portals, project checklists, segmentation, and much more, we finally added support for changelogs and with them the final piece of our MVP.

From receiving feedback on your customer's problems all the way to sharing your current and past progress, Productlane is the easiest way to communicate with your user base.

Integrates with Linear

We are big fans of Linear and all the goodies it has, so we built Productlane from the beginning to perfectly integrate with it: A similar interface, CMD+K, shortcuts, dark mode, real-time sync, 100ms rule, you name it. We (and luckily also our first users) love it.

You can directly log into our tool with your Linear account and find everything there being synched in real time. The public roadmap in Productlane is the same as in Linear and as soon as you mark a project done in Linear, it appears as a changelog draft in Productlane.

With a Roadmap

Sharing your progress and future plans has never been easier, as a matter of fact, you already have all the info in Linear, it is only a problem of visibility. After you sign up, a public roadmap page is ready to be shared with your customers! Check ours out!

You will also see your users can submit feedback immediately. Internally you have the ability to segment this feedback by things like "High MRR Customer" or "Power User" so you can really focus on building the next feature that matters.

With a Changelog

Our changelog is a place for you to promote your product to users and we built it to live up to that. There are no distractions on the page, it's built to engage with your brand, sign up for your product, and maybe give you a follow on Twitter, but not more.

A new draft will be automatically created as soon as you complete a project in Linear. To save you even more time, you can add all issues that have been done since the last changelog within a single click.

We are already hard at work on the next features, including integrations with more systems and platforms like Slack, Hubspot, and others. We are super excited to hear from you! We are slowly letting users in, to make sure everything is working and tweaking things as necessary, so go and sign up for our waiting list!