How does Quip prioritize which features or improvements to work on?

By Patrick Moran

(this is reposted from our CEO Bret Taylor's live session today (3/2/16) on Quora found here)

Our mission is to build products that change the way every team in the world works together.

Quip is unique because it combines communication and writing, so you can make decisions and be productive without email. Given Quip’s broad focus, we’re as focused on improving the workflow and communication experience within the product as we are about adding features to our editor. Kevin Gibbs and I generally think about expanding the product in three areas:

Content — Quip currently lets you express yourself with text, checklists, and spreadsheets. What new forms of content can we enable in the product?

Communication — How can we improve the communication experience in and around the product? How can we improve the “signal-to-noise” ratio in the product?

Platform — Almost every one of our customers has extended Quip via our API. How can we expand our platform to enable Quip to work seamlessly in the complex set of tools at your company?

We try to balance our focus between these areas because they all equally important parts of the foundation of the Quip experience. Generally speaking, on a 1 - 3 month cadence, Kevin and I make a document representing the current milestone based on a mix of customer feedback and the team’s perspective on where the product should go.

For a variety of quirky internal reasons, we always name our milestones after whiskey. Here is a recent milestone:

(this is reposted from our CEO Bret Taylor's live session today (3/2/16) on Quora found here)