We’re closing the door on 2023…and it’s hard to believe how much we’ve released this year.

We’re envisioning a totally new future for project management in 2024 and beyond, and we’ve been laying the groundwork with all of the AI Copilot features we’ve shipped — so let’s look back at all that we’ve built this year, how our team has grown, and where we’re going with Height 2.0 next year.

Part 1: What we built this year: New features ✨

This year, our team launched over 40 new features, including companion apps, integrations with other tools and softwares, increased security features, and a plethora of innovative AI features.

Here’s a recap of what we launched this year, why you loved each feature, and how they make an impact.

#1: Upleveled, more customizable automations

In 2022, we released automations in beta — and this year, we worked to uplevel those automations to help streamline your work further. By making automations more customizable than ever, we were able to save users tons of time through flexible triggers and more.

You can now automatically update a task’s dates, assignees, colors, and icons. This sounds like a small update, but it makes a big difference:

We also made it so you can set up automation triggers without specific attribute values: for example, a trigger when a task is assigned to anyone, so you can cover multiple possibilities at once. Then, we expanded those triggers even further to include subtasks, tasks with relationships, task family members, and filters — for example, you can create an automation for when all subtasks Status = Done, automatically update the parent task to Done.

Now, we realize that setting up automations can be a bit of a learning curve. That’s why we made it simple to get started with automation templates. All you have to do is select a template (which is fully preconfigured with rules, filters, and actions) and get started or customize to fit your needs. Simply choose a template, each set up with pre-configured rules, filters, and actions — and then customize them to fit your exact workflow.

#2: AI features inside Height’s core product features

At the beginning of April, we started weaving AI into Height’s core product experience. At the time, it seemed like every company was adding a chat-based AI feature to their product in one way or another. But we wanted to do something different: truly layer AI into the features that would address the pain points we hear about again and again. This goal is one we’re going to pursue full speed ahead in 2024 with Height 2.0.

We brought the power of ChatGPT right to your tasks with Copilot Chat: you can @mention Copilot like you would any other teammate to get suggestions, information, summaries, outlines, ideas, and more.

And speaking of summaries, we built Copilot Catch-Ups so you can effortlessly catch up on key points and progress without spending time scrolling and reviewing every single message.

Copilot Catch-Ups is also a favorite feature for James, one of our Product Marketing Managers at Height: “I frequently get pulled into tasks that have already had a lot of conversation and activity, and summaries makes it easy to figure out what's been previously discussed and decided.”

#3: Tools to make staying organized even easier

The core of building a project management tool means making it easy for you to stay organized and collaborate smoothly to accomplish your goals. Whether your team has two members or hundreds, we’ve been working to ship features that make organization effortless.

Easier sharing and collaborating

For those collaborating with guests outside your workspace, we added additional sharing options, including the ability to share your smart lists with guests and external users.

Native time tracking and integrations

And for those who track their time, we developed native time tracking right inside of Height (yup, you can track time right within individual tasks with one click). So far, people have found it super useful:

We built two-way integrations with Toggl and Harvest, so you can sync your time data from Height to those platforms effortlessly, as well as link timers in Toggl and Harvest to Height by adding the task ID.

Automated list management and task organization

We also worked to make managing your to-dos even easier. Copilot, our AI assistant extraordinaire, can now split messages into subtasks for you, supercharging task creation. This is especially helpful when you’re receiving lots of feedback in a task’s messages, and creating individual subtasks would be helpful but time-consuming — Copilot does the work for you.

This feature is incredibly helpful for users, but also for our team here at Height. Liisa is one of the Software Engineers who worked on the feature, and it’s still her favorite: “Can I pick my own feature? I would say splitting a task into subtasks is my favorite because I use it a looooot.”

Copilot will also keep your workspace organized by helping you avoid duplicate tasks. During task creation, Copilot will scan your workspace for similar tasks and suggest potential duplicates — and for tasks you’ve already created, duplicates will be suggested in chat.

#4: Ways to work while on-the-go

When we launched our iOS companion app in 2022, we got a ton of messages asking for an Android and iPad app, too.

Those sought-after apps dropped this year, making it easy for you to stay updated and collaborate on the go with push notifications, inbox management, and task creation all from your phone or iPad.

#5: Fun, exciting replacements for repetitive tasks and meetings

This year, we wanted to make work more fun. We’ve always been big fans of games at Height — we have biweekly game times scheduled on the calendar where we play things like Longwave and Drawbattle. Toward the beginning of the year, Michael decided there had to be a more fun way to host (let’s face it, traditionally boring and repetitive) standup meetings. Thus, Be My Guess was born, our game-based alternative to the traditional standup. In the game, you lie about your team members’ updates to try and trick the rest of the team. You earn points by guessing other people’s real answers, and by tricking people with your lies.

It’s so much fun, and everyone who’s tried it agrees:

We play it quite frequently on our Thursday afternoon standup meetings here at Height, and it’s a favorite amongst the Height team. Yina, one of our Software Engineers, even shared that it’s her favorite launch of 2023: “Before this game I never thought a standup could be so much fun!”

AI-generated standups made formal updates a thing of the past

Though Be My Guess is a lot of fun, we know a lot of teams do need formal standup updates. But why force your team to spend time each week recapping what they worked on, when that information already exists?

We built Copilot Standups to automatically comb through task activity and provide updates to the team at your preferred cadence, so you can actually focus on doing the work instead of recapping it.

For Kira, one of our Software Engineers, Copilot Standups is her favorite feature launched this year. She shared, “Copilot Standups are awesome. They take away the administrative overhead of progress tracking, so we have plenty of time in our standup meetings for catch-up & socializing — which I feel is super important for us as a fully remote team.”

We heard you: drafting release notes feels tedious, so we made it automatic

Writing product updates shouldn’t take up the time you could spend building your product. Whether you call them changelogs, release notes, release logs, or whatever — with Copilot Release Notes, we made it possible for AI to draft a complete write-up of what your team’s been working on, in seconds. All you have to do is make small edits to fit your voice and style, saving you lots of time.

For Melika, Product Marketing Manager at Height, Copilot Release Notes is a game-changer: “I love Copilot, specifically release notes — as a PMM, it's super helpful to have a starting point drafted for me!”

#6: Prioritized security and collaboration

In 2023, we prioritized enhanced security and collaboration with new options to protect our users and their work, both on a task level and a project level.

When you’re working with clients or other external partners, you can now keep select attributes on a need-to-know basis — keep sensitive information hidden with attribute permissions.

#7: Easier ways to get started in Height

This year, we made it easier to get started on Height by effortlessly importing your projects, tasks, and data from other platforms and creating a library of pre-built, customizable templates.

For those joining Height from other project management tools, the thought of manually importing all of the projects, tasks, and lists you’ve created is…more than daunting. So this year, we made it possible for you to import projects from Asana, Jira, Monday, and GitHub Issues in just a few clicks — you can bring over tasks and subtasks, descriptions, attributes, and more so it’s easy to dive in.

Part 2: How our team worked this year

We’re pulling back the curtain and sharing exactly how much the Height team actually accomplished this year (don’t judge us).

2023 By the Numbers 🤓

• Total tasks completed: 5,563 (a 6% increase from 2022, woohoo! 🎉)
• Total tasks created: 8,601 (this is over 2,000 more than last year’s total — we took on a lot this year)
• Highest number of tasks completed in one month: 680 (We really enjoyed that “done” sound in March!)
• Oldest task completed: Our templates gallery — the original task was from March 26, 2019 (it only took us four years to check this one off 😉)
• Person who completed the most tasks: James (A new winner for this year! James checked off a whopping 702 tasks this year 👑)
• Person who created the most tasks: Kat, our COO (She held her title from last year, a surprise to no one 👏)
• Project with the most subtasks: Our templates gallery (this project was a big one - clearly, with 394 subtasks! ✅)
• Task with the most comments: Updating Height’s colors (the design team fine-tuned these to perfection through over 300 comments on one task! 🎨)
• Number of subtasks created with Copilot: 467 (Staying organized is easier when you don’t have to create the tasks yourself 🤖)
• Number of standups created by Copilot: 214 (No more “What are you working on right now?” messages for the Height team! 🧑‍💻)

2023 By the Reactjis 🖼️

Our team really liked these reactjis this year:

👍 - our top contender from last year reigned supreme again this year
👀 - for when read receipts just aren’t enough
🙌 - who doesn’t love this one?!

But we also enjoyed these:
1️⃣ 🙏 💯

How the Height team grew this year

In 2023, we grew to over 20 team members.

Height is fully remote, but this year, we welcomed teammates working globally in even more countries. We have people working in Europe, Brazil, and across the United States and Canada.

It’s an eclectic mix of people, but it works — and that diversity shines through in our team playlist for the year, a mix of everyone’s top few songs from 2023. Check out the playlist below!

We also hosted two company offsites this year: one in Costa Rica, and one in Cape Cod. These opportunities for in-person time not only help our team bond, but also spark inspiration for projects and work in the months that follow.

Costa Rica offsite trip 🌴

At our April offsite in Costa Rica, we stayed in Playa Hermosa near Jaco, where most of the team found themselves trekking to a local cafe for coffee each day. For Kira, one of our Software Engineers, this little coffee ritual was the most fun: “The little cafe tucked in the jungle near our villa in Costa Rica was my favorite.” Christophe, our Head of Design, agrees: “I think the affogatos in Costa Rica were a highlight, for sure!”

Aside from coffees, tons of conversations around AI and our CEO Michael saying “Imagine a world,” and sunset beach walks, we were so grateful to have the opportunity to see tons of wildlife, especially sloths.

However, for some of us, like Liisa, a Software Engineer, the wildlife we didn’t see was the most entertaining memory: we went on a boat tour to see monkeys in the jungle, and though the guide hyped up the fact that we’d see dozens to a hundred monkeys, we saw one. single. monkey. The sloth sightings more than made up for it, though 🦥

Cape Cod offsite trip 🌊

At our fall offsite trip to Cape Cod, we stayed in Harwich, a cozy spot perfect for our mostly-remote team members to connect. For Arnaldo, one of Height’s designers (who worked on all the beautiful images throughout this post!), “Being with the team was great — my favorite moments were when we just talked about life and got to know each other better outside of work.” We also got to know each other well during our ice cream making challenge!

No one could have expected the magic we’d witness when we headed out for a whale watching excursion, (except for me, who suggested this spot after visiting a few times before). We got to see so much all in one trip: large feeding groups, humpback and minke whales, and even a double breach. One breach is rare, let alone two whales breaching at once, so it was a sight to behold, and a favorite memory for Benny and JJ, two of our Software Engineers. Seb, our Head of Engineering, also thoroughly enjoyed the whale watching: “I loved the whale watching tour. We had a lot of luck and got to see whales up close, feeding, jumping…it was a treat!”

Growth at home: our team’s personal accomplishments this year

We believe in celebrating more than just work accomplishments. The entire team’s had a big year personally, too! Here are some highlights from 2023.

• Jessica became a first-time mom to baby Charlie and made the most of her maternity leave by taking Charlie to Europe! ✈️
• Akila is getting Invisalign next week, which she believes will (hopefully) be fun 🦷
• Kaitlin bought her first house in March, saw Taylor Swift's Eras Tour in Tampa, and started a new hobby collecting shark teeth and seashells on the beach 🐚
• Kat went on her first cruise to Alaska, got into Reformers Pilates, and did the Wiliwilinui trail ⛴️
• Melika started up her pottery hobby again and made several vases 🪴
• Kira spent a lot of time sewing clothes in 2023. This year, she made 4 pairs of pants, a bomber jacket, 2 hoodies, 3 sundresses, 4 pairs of overalls, several bags and purses, and probably a dozen shirts (including 2 for her cats) 🧶
• James officially joined team #cordlessvacuum 😏
• Liisa got back into climbing and skiing, got to visit the African continent (it’s been over 20 years since her last visit!), and took 48 trips on the Swiss public transport system ⛷️
• Arnaldo is moving into a new apartment in a few weeks and is very excited about it 🏘️
• Amita started playing the piano again after an almost 10-year-long hiatus 🎹
• Rory got into programming in assembly for a retro computer called the Foenix Retro System (same CPU as the SNES or Apple II). He also made a working snake clone in 65816 assembly, which was pretty fun, actually! 👨‍💻
• Yina’s second baby arrived early this year, and she's a ball of cuteness! 🤗
• Seb took a couple of woodworking classes, then decided to make his own bench with white oak. He went from building a cutting board, assisted by a teacher to building a whole bench by himself, which was challenging but rewarding! 🪵
• JJ fostered 4 very adorable kittens 🐱
• Christophe joined the Height team in 2023, which both he and we think was a pretty good decision. Also, his son started walking and speaking and one of his first sentences was "I love pasta” — very on-brand for Christophe 🍝

Part 3: What’s next — looking toward 2024 and Height 2.0

We know projects need to be managed. But in the future? They don’t need to be managed by humans. We’ve started laying the groundwork for an automated project management with all of the AI features we launched this year. But in the future, with Height 2.0, we’ll be able to offload all the tedious work of managing projects for good: things like triaging bugs, re-stacking priorities, and chasing down statuses will be fully automated.

We’re thankful for each and every one of you. Height is, ultimately, about supporting people, and we’re so grateful for the chance to build out tools and resources that make work better. Cheers to 2024! 🥂