It’s about that time when we “leak” some details about what’s next for Harpoon as a product. Although we’ve given hints to many of you while chatting or emailing, it’s always nice to post an official "state of the union" so to speak.
A Quick Recap
Over the last year we’ve made some exciting progress and improvements. We started with a massive update to Harpoon's code base, while although invisible to you, immediately improved the expandability, performance, and security of our software. It also set us up for the next series of new features and enhancements.
We were happy to launch recurring auto-billing for your clients, introduced our beta of bank syncing for expense transactions, added accrual-based reporting, and introduced the ability to attach receipts to your expenses.
We also focused on finishing out the build of our API, allowing our team and others to build integrations with Harpoon. This included our new integration with Zapier which enables you to create automated workflows between your Harpoon account and hundreds of other products and services. If you haven’t tried it out yet you can get started via your Integrations screen. On top of that we’ve been pushing smaller improvements, bug fixes, and maintenance updates that have kept Harpoon in tip-top shape.
So at this point Harpoon’s feature set has reached a certain level of maturity where a good portion of our customers' most popular feature requests, along with the ground-level vision our team has had for the product, have been fulfilled. For many companies this would be a time to sit back, ride things out, and soak things up for a bit. But we’re doing just the opposite. In fact, we’re working on the most ambitious release we’ve ever tackled.
Three Is a Magic Number
Earlier this year at a team retreat we spent a number of days planning the future of the company and reevaluating every aspect of the product.
- Who is Harpoon for?
- What are the strengths of our product?
- What are its weaknesses?
- How can we remove points of friction from our existing user experience?
- How can we better support our growing base of larger teams?
- What layers of financial clarity are missing from the product?
- How can we surface more financial intelligence from the data we already have?
- How can we provide more customization options for our customers?
- What gaps still exist that aren’t being fulfilled by Harpoon or by any other products in our space?
- Where can we replace manual tasks with more automation?
- What aspects of the product already make Harpoon uniquely valuable and how can push them further?
- What feature requests are still outstanding that fit with our vision for the product?
- Etc, etc, etc...
Answering these types of questions led to a prioritized list of new features, a redesigned product interface, and a new foundation for the future—a package we’re calling Harpoon 3!
The Not-So-Detailed Details
We feel it’s important now to let you know we’re heads down working on Harpoon 3 and have been for some time. And although we could be releasing new features for v2 as they’re ready, that would require reworking many of those features to fit properly with v3.
So our strategy at this point is to continue pushing bug fixes, maintenance, and security updates for v2 as needed. And although it’s possible a new feature could still show up in v2, the bulk of our new features are being packaged for the release of v3. So hopefully that helps set proper expectations for those of you waiting on a particular feature.
When will Harpoon 3 be released? Nice try! We’ve learned not to announce specific release dates. But we’re making good progress and as of this moment are on track for launch this year. How soon depends in large part on how many of these new features are bundled with the initial release of v3 vs. being bundled with follow up releases. We’ll know more as we dig deeper into things.
Do You Need to Prepare?
At this point we expect a seamless transition from v2 to v3 with no effort required on the part of our customers. We’ll be sure to give you plenty of notice before Harpoon 3 goes live. The only thing we’d recommend is to get excited! From the progress we’ve already made Harpoon 3 will be a killer release and well worth the wait!
As always thanks for your support. If you have questions about upcoming changes to the product feel free to reach out!
