Allow users to define their own organisational jargon

[tomnixon]

At the moment, the app has its own organisational jargon. e.g.

'Team' refers to the full set of people working in the whole organisation. 'Initiative' refers to a circle (and 'sub-initiative' to a circle-within-a-circle) 'Authority' is the person with overall responsibility. 'Helper' is someone who isn't overall responsible but is participating. We also have plans to add 'Role' for how someone is participating.

From the customer research it's become clear that different progressive organisations like to use their own terms for these things. For example, Strategyzer use Driver instead of Authority and Developer instead of Helper.

I think it would be better for Maptio to be customisable than to enforce a particular set of jargon. This could be editable on a config page.

[tomnixon]

Perhaps we could do some scoping for this, @Safiyya to see what's involved in making it happen and a time estimate. I know customers will really like this from insight already gathered.

[Safiyya]

@tomnixon, some questions and some remarks

Questions

• [ ] Translation to appear only in the editing panel i.e. Authority => Driver, Helper => Developer, etc ?
• [ ] Translation to appear in menus and titles i.e. My teams => My Guilds, 43 members => 43 brothers, etc?
• Who can edit the configuration? Can we still get away with not having a permission system ?
• [ ] Do we have signed up users who have requested this feature? If so, who?
• Effort/Impact matrix : assuming we dont need a permission system, this is low/medium effort on dev (dont know about UX) , what would be the impact?

Remarks

• This does not give the ability to users to create their own schema and constraints i.e. there will still be one Authority assigned to one Initiative , they cannot go off and create their own system

[tomnixon]

Yes, it will still operate within current constraints - it's just about changing to your own organisational terminology.

It was requested by Alex Osterwalder who I am hoping to onboard in the next few weeks - I know he'll like this feature, plus he is a key influencer who it would be good to impress and make a fan. I know that lots of progressive companies have their own cute names for a team member. Like being a 'Googler' for instance. I think it will create a real emotional connection to Maptio if it allows you to bring your own tribal language into the tool.

I think for now we still don't need a permissions system. I've been saying to customers that it's like having the whole thing on a whiteboard in the office - anyone with access to the office can rub things out or add to it. That's fine for now, for the small teams we are testing with. We'll see what kind of permissions customers request.

Perhaps we can develop this in iterations. As a starting point, the two key pieces of jargon which I'd like to see editable are Initiative, Authority, and Team Member. Shall we start by making these things configurable and later we can look at other things? Just to be clear, these things are configurable at the level of a map.

When it comes to Authority, as well as being able to change this word, the tooltip for the (i) needs to also be configurable.

[Safiyya]

Agreed for all the above but "Just to be clear, these things are configurable at the level of a map." , I think it would rather be configurable at the team level i.e. if a team creates a new map, they still have access to that translation layer.

[tomnixon]

Yes, OK let's go with that.

[Safiyya]

This shouldn't be extremely heavy (6-7/10) in terms of effort , if we go iteratively as you suggested. The main effort is going to be on UX and possibly some performance issues. As no other users have requested that yet (?), I'd rather wait for Alex Osterwalder to be a prospect/customer first and then make it happen when/if he asks for this again.

[tomnixon]

Alex Osterwalder did mention this on the call yesterday and he really lit up when I said we were planning to allow people to use their own jargon. Definitely really resonated and it's another good differentiator from the more dogmatic systems like Holacracy.

[tomnixon]

I'm keen to get this enhancement into the list of priorities before too long. It does come up quite frequently in onboarding calls. The default jargon of 'Authority' and 'Helpers' is not popular with many people. Having the ability to customise jargon like this is also a big selling point and differentiator with products like HolaSpirit and Glassfrog which are heavy on Holacracy jargon. People really love how Maptio is flexible and relatively free from organisational dogma, so I think this enhancement will make quite a difference.

[Safiyya]

Before I start this, I had a review of existing code and features as a lot has changed since the last discussion.

Do we agree that :

1. Jargon to be translated is

   • [x] Authority (main driver of this request)
   • [x] Helper (main driver of this request)
   • [ ] Role (is it necessary?)
   • [ ] Team (i personally don't see the point and it's also more work because user-dependant)
   • [ ] Members (i personally don't see the point and it's also more work because user-dependant)

2. What should we do with the placeholders and labels

   • "Who's helping with this initiative?"
   • "Enter the name of a helper"
   • "Who's accountable for this? Enter a team member"

3. Is there any (i) that needs to be added ? We used to have information tooltips describing "Authority" and "Helper" (see https://github.com/Safiyya/maptio/issues/190)

4. Are these tooltips customizable too ?

[tomnixon]

1. If it makes it faster we can just start with Authority and Helper for now - these are main drivers and will get most of the impact. I wonder if the word 'initiative needs to be customisable too' but doesn't feel like a priority.

2. Perhaps the config page for this will need to know the singular and plural version of the helper alternative. e.g. Singular - "a helper", Plural - "helpers" Then we can have the right grammar in the interface The format could be "Helpers in this initiative" (where Helpers is the plural form) "Enter the name of a helper" would use the singular form "Who's accountable for this?" would be "Who's the authority for this?" No matter what you call it there's only ever one authority so don't think we need plural form for that.

3. I don't think so for now.

Also, don't forget these customisations also need to appear on the page listing a team member's leading and supporting roles above the two columns. Could be simply 'Authority of initiatives' over the first column and 'A helper in initiatives' over the second one.

[Safiyya]

Good catch.

1. TODO

   • [ ] Initiative editing panel
   • [ ] Summary page
   • [ ] CSV export

2. I think that we are opening ourselves for a lot of trouble on this one, people will start asking for other languages grammar support. Language is definitely something we should look at in the feature but thats an whole different piece of work and not really "minimal" How about we replace

   • "Who's helping with this initiative?" by "List each one of your helper"
   • "Enter the name of ahelper" works
   • "Who's the authority for this? Enter a team member" works