What’s new in July: our biggest product update this year

The latest news from Balsamiq:

Insights from one of our biggest product updates

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Ciao friends,

We’ve got some exciting news to share! Our July 2024 release is finally here, and so far, it’s our biggest product update of the year. We added features to get to know you better, added more plans, and shipped features that reduce friction.

Since this was one of our biggest releases yet, we wanted to give you a peek into how we approached it and what we learned.

New in Balsamiq

Updated onboarding

We revamped our onboarding to help you get started faster and more efficiently:

User segmentation questions: When you sign up (or sign in for the first time since the release), you’ll now answer a few quick questions about your role and company. While we’ve historically relied on user interviews to guide our product and content decisions, we’ve grown over the years and felt ready to add quantitative data to the mix.
“Your First Project” launch page: Instead of landing on the old projects page, new users will dive right into “your first project.” Less setup time, more creating!

Cleaned up project navigation and settings

Managing your projects is now faster with redesigned project navigation. Instead of a separate page, you now land on the last project you were working on (or a new project list page, if you don’t have any).

If you’d like to see a list of all your projects, the project list pops up with Shift + CMD/CTRL + O.

Plus, no more switching to a separate page to adjust your Space settings. Space settings pop up right over your project, and the People tab got a cleanup too.

New pricing and plans

Our old pricing plans were simple, but we realized they didn't offer the flexibility you needed. We had three project plans, which worked for some but not all. Initially, we thought we’d switch to per-user pricing, in line with other SaaS tools in our space. But that didn’t sit right with us.

Wireframing (and product thinking) is a team sport, and we never want to limit your ability to collaborate. Plus, bigger businesses have been signing up for Balsamiq and asking for more services.

So, we decided to make our pricing more adaptive to customer needs:

More per-project plans: Now, you have even more project quantities to choose from, so you only pay for what you need. And as always, you can have unlimited users working on your projects without worrying about extra per-person costs.
Business and Enterprise plans: Both plan types are available for any project quantity. Enterprise plans unlock additional features and services like SSO with SAML and security forms assistance.

We also moved away from an internal licensing tool we built years ago and added features like:

Pause subscription: Pause your subscription when you’re not actively wireframing, no matter your plan.
External billing admin: External billing administrators no longer need to sign up for an account, reducing friction and simplifying billing management.

Why we bundled it into one release

Typically, we plan for a release every other month and the features that are ready to go make it into the release. This makes things easier for our team. This time around, we had to do it all at once to prioritize:

A cohesive customer experience
Streamlined internal operations (especially for our Support team)
Focused feedback on the full picture
Internal tech needs (we needed to address some tech debt)

What we learned

Like every project, we wrap things up with a retrospective. We don’t often share those but are making an exception for you, our inner circle. Here’s what helped us make this release successful and could be useful for your team, too:

Using staging ourselves: Every Balsamico does their work in staging to test customer-facing features early and often. We call this dogfooding, and it helped us catch and squish bugs quickly.
No rush: We delayed the release twice to ensure everything was just right, without pressure. Every big release comes with unexpected challenges, and taking unnecessary stress off the team lets people do their best work.
Collaboration across teams: This was the first time our project Slack channels included a representative from engineering, UX (product), support, and marketing. It was the most efficient way to keep everyone informed and stay flexible as details changed.
Clear (not distracting) communication: We use dedicated Slack channels for each project, wiki pages to document insights and big decisions, and 🟢 emoji to get the “green light” from stakeholders. We also have a custom bookmark emoji to show that you’ve saved a message in Slack and will reply to it later.
Tag-teaming QA: Liz (PM) and Stefano (engineer) tag-teamed to find and fix issues that were less visible to those of us in staging.

We also faced some challenges, like juggling multiple projects with many dependencies and managing access control changes. We also moved from Pivotal Tracker to Jira for technical project tracking, which added a layer of complexity.

But we tackled them head-on and came out stronger. We have another big release coming up later in the year, and we’re using the lessons learned from this one to make it even better.

Happy customer of the month

II can remember the feeling the first time I saw and used Balsamiq and used it to communicate (as a developer iirc).
Quick enough and simple enough to allow a conversation and from that shared understanding to be created, without the extra details and expectation that something higher fidelity.
It was like a breath of fresh air. — Jari Worsley

Wireframing Academy news

Company News

Things tend to slow down over the summer here. Most of our effort went towards the big release, but we did test the first version of our new all-hands format (a written report with recorded updates from rotating teams and financial snapshots). It went well, and we plan to evolve it over time with more context.

Our managers also started a book club to continue developing management and leadership skills like vision setting and skill evaluation. Our marketing team’s considering starting a book club, too, and might even open it up to people outside Balsamiq if there’s interest.

That's it for this month!

See you next month, with more behind-the-scenes news from your friends at Balsamiq. If you have any questions or feedback, just hit reply and I’ll get back to you.

And as always, consider this your open invitation to join our research program and help us make Balsamiq better. Thanks for reading.

Arielle for the Balsamiq Team

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What’s new in July: our biggest product update this year

New in Balsamiq

Updated onboarding

Cleaned up project navigation and settings

New pricing and plans

Why we bundled it into one release

What we learned

Happy customer of the month

Wireframing Academy news

Company News

That's it for this month!

Most new customers find Balsamiq via recommendation...

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