Hi team!
Thank you for your early support of Ranker! Today I’m excited to announce a few evolutions to our product, starting with a new name that our team is very excited about!
Our new name, Condorsay, is a fun phonetic tribute to the Marquis de Condorcet, the 18th century French mathematician who, in addition to helping pioneer ranked choice voting, believed deeply in the power of harnessing our collective wisdom to improve humanity. You can read more about him and his crazy life on Wikipedia.
In the past few months, our team has conducted dozens of interviews with managers across a diverse set of industries, and have learned a lot about how teams make decisions, especially how they talk about them in meetings and other discussions. We’ve heard the same themes throughout: especially in a remote world, it is exceedingly difficult for teams to achieve clarity, focus, and alignment around their work without intense and frenzied effort. While corralling a large, cross-functional team to focus their efforts on a small set of clear priorities is a challenge as old as time, framing productive discussions to arrive there remains a wheel that is reinvented constantly.
We’ve been iterating our tooling alongside these discussions, and have been pleased to hear feedback that we’re starting to make a real difference in how teams collaborate. By forcing everyone to confront the same set of tradeoffs before meeting, our forced choice surveys encourage a type of in-depth introspection that is otherwise very uncommon among groups. In the coming months, we’ll be working hard to evolve Condorsay into an indispensable tool to focus every discussion around the most important things, and allow teams to understand and align with each other with even greater depth.
We believe in “building in public,” and will try to update this Substack when we have new things to share (we have a lot of cool stuff on the horizon, so stay tuned!). With that in mind, here are a few relevant product updates:
Templates gallery: Last week, we launched a templates gallery at condorsay.com/templates to inspire our community with the vast array of discussions that our tooling supports (from roadmapping, to icebreakers, to “Should I get a dog?”), and are adding new templates every day. Please give it a try and let us know what you think!
Binary choices: Given feedback that it was confusing to create decisions with two options (yes/no, pro/con, etc), we have added a toggle to the “Create” page which allows you to either create a decision with two options that have competing values/reasons that you need help prioritizing (think pro/cons list, “which city should I move to?”, yes or no binaries) or a decision with more than two options (useful for decisions like “Where should I eat dinner?”, “Which feature should we ship next?”, “Which investment opportunities should we pursue?”). If you try this feature out, please let us know your thoughts!
For those interested, I recorded a quick video on Loom demoing these features:
We continue to be unbelievably grateful for those of you who have helped us evolve by testing and offering feedback — THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts. Expect to hear from us soon with more good stuff.
With gratitude,
James and the Condorsay team
P.S. Please reply with any questions, feedback, or suggestions for people we should be talking to!