First of all I want to thank the Bear team for an amazing app - I use it as my primary note and idea capture app, which means I use it for most of my working day. I love the current version of the app and Panda already looks fantastic - particularly native gfm Markdown & tables. I look forward to using those features and web support in the app when they’re ready.
This post is a plea for more communication. I’m not looking for delivery dates - I’ve worked in software for many years and know that providing dates is hard and troublesome for many reasons. As a product manager I know how important expectation management & communication is and I think to be honest you could do better.
With the Panda beta you’ve taken a big step in sharing future progress however there doesn’t appear to have been much change in the last few weeks. I’d suggest that with communications little and often goes a long way - perhaps you could share a weekly or fortnightly post with an idea of what you’ve been working on with respect to the beta?
Also, perhaps you could establish a cadence for new versions of the app so you can continue to get fresh feedback - perhaps aim for a new version of the beta every month?
I’ll leave you with an article from Seth Godin which inspired me to reach out - https://seths.blog/2020/05/craftspeople-and-time/. I don’t agree with all of it (e.g. “Tell us when you’re going to finish”) but I think a lot of it may be relevant - particularly “We’re buying the process from you, not just what you’re making”.
I agree that we could do a better job of communicating our progress on Panda.
We strive to stay active with our community and, in general, I think we do a decent job across most of our channels (Reddit, Twitter, email, support, and more recently, this forum). But it can also sometimes be difficult to balance the time we spend communicating (either direct or indirect) with time spent actually developing the app. We’re still working on that.
I like the idea of more frequent posts here about Panda’s development. Weekly might be too often, but something like 2-3 weeks could work. That said, there may still be times where we simply do not have much to say, or even a new version to release. Text editors are complex, and most of the time we’re working on boring, under-the-hood stuff that may not translate very well to a progress update. But we certainly can see what we can do, because we want to do right by our amazing community and testers.
In the spirit of this discussion, we do hope to release a big update to Panda this week. Moving forward, I’ll talk with the team about more communication here and you should hear from us again soon.
I’m in love with Bear and also use it as a core part of my daily workflow. I can’t wait for the new editor to be baked in as many of the features it will have are ones I’ve been hoping to exist for a while now.
I’m also a software developer, so can relate to under-the-hood stuff that doesn’t translate into progress updates … at the same time, sometimes a brief note about being deep into whatever problem you are working on is just what’s needed. Maybe it’s more about the reassurance of progress than anything else?
Thank you @modusop for putting this eloquently! And thank you @matteo for the awesome response!
