YouTrack Roadmap 2024
We’re getting lots of feedback from teams that have recently started using YouTrack, and we’re adjusting our product development plan for YouTrack in response. This flexibility with regard to our medium-term plans is possible for us since, in the longer term, we remain committed to our product’s core values and our vision for it.
We kicked off the new year with the first major update of 2024, which used your feedback to enhance the experience of working with Helpdesk agents. In this post, we’d like to highlight what’s next on the agenda in our YouTrack roadmap for 2024 and confirm our longer-term plans.
Growth trends confirm our long-term commitments
Reflecting on the past year, we’re thrilled to see the YouTrack customer base growing rapidly; we’ve recorded a double-digit percent increase in the number of teams who’ve started to manage their projects in YouTrack. We’re seeing a great deal of traction across a variety of company types and sizes – from enterprises with thousands of team members completing huge migration projects to small startups who are still in the process of getting their teams together.
The adoption of project management practices is rapidly increasing within companies. For example, when one department starts using YouTrack, team members from other groups often quickly follow suit, and the overall number of YouTrack users in the company typically grows 3–5 times within several months. Lots of teams beyond product management and software development need a powerful project management system to facilitate their workflows, which is helping YouTrack expand to numerous other departments, such as legal and compliance, HR, marketing and design, finance, administration, support, and more.
In 2024, we aim to further enhance YouTrack’s ability to manage a wide array of tasks and workflows – accommodating a range of needs, from the simplicity welcomed by new teams and team members to the complexity and flexibility required by multinational corporations.
We remain committed to giving you the freedom to choose where your applications and data are hosted. That’s why we’re continuing to develop YouTrack Cloud and Server in tandem, so teams can easily migrate between cloud and on-premises hosting as needed.
What we’re working on in 2024
AI assistance
As of December 2023, AI assistance is available for free to all teams using YouTrack, offering the ability to summarize content and create multiple replies. AI-powered functionality is going to be a big part of the product’s future development. Firstly, we’re working to add more features to facilitate your work with tasks, such as the ability to have AI create, autocomplete, and proofread texts for you on the go. Secondly, the search functionality will be AI-powered across all your content, meaning that YouTrack will be able to show you relevant results even as you adjust the phrasing of your searches and replace filters and queries with your own words. Going forward, we’d like to offer AI assistance for creating tasks and filling in their details, making to-do lists and dividing tasks, setting up projects, easily reviewing activity and updates in your projects with curated digests, facilitating no-code automation, and more.
The team behind JetBrains AI is focused on making it more powerful every day, and the YouTrack team is working hard to bring its power to your projects in YouTrack. The AI functionality in YouTrack is now free, but it consumes resources. When AI-powered features start to consume more resources than you have available, we will give you an option to pay for JetBrains AI credits that you will be able to use in YouTrack.
The roadmap we published a year ago did not mention AI, but it nevertheless became available by the end of 2023. This year we’re also open to the ways in which new AI capabilities could redefine the way you work with YouTrack, with a view towards putting AI at the center of your project management experience. As always, we’ll keep you posted on our progress, but we won’t pause our work on the functionalities most teams use in YouTrack every day.
Welcoming new teams and new team members to YouTrack easily
Organize multiple tasks and projects with new navigation sidebar
As YouTrack continues to gain traction with a wider variety of non-technical teams and projects, we’re actively looking for ways to simplify the organization of tasks and projects for all team members. At the same time, YouTrack remains a very powerful project management solution with extensive built-in functionality that is designed for enterprises but also available to small teams for no additional cost. Since we want to keep YouTrack flexible in order to meet the needs of any team regardless of its size or complexity, we’re planning a major redesign of the UI/UX, including the introduction of a new sidebar navigation option that places all of YouTrack’s features at your fingertips while also allowing you to focus on individual projects more easily.
Start all kinds of new projects and onboard team members
We’re planning to change the process of setting up new projects with the release of a step-by-step wizard. It will give project administrators the ability to use various project templates and tailor them to the needs of specific teams, all while making it easier to onboard new team members to existing projects.
Please let us know in the comments what kind of projects and templates you’d like to see first!
Helpdesk projects
We’re happy to see that a sizable portion of the thousands of teams that join YouTrack every month are choosing to explore YouTrack Helpdesk and are starting to work on their support tickets in YouTrack. These support teams range in size, from the small ones to huge departments in organizations with hundreds of support agents. Based on your feedback, we plan to add a simpler way to link Helpdesk tickets to related tasks in non-Helpdesk projects. We also aim to provide more customization options in the ticket creation form, and we’ll explore how we can enhance our support for an internal Helpdesk team scenario where your team members use regular YouTrack projects and simultaneously operate as reporters in Helpdesk.
Apps
Giving users the ability to create apps for YouTrack opens doors for further integration possibilities, as well as additional customization of the UI and functionality. Some apps will be provided with YouTrack out of the box. Our customers and technical and consulting partners will be able to create apps and install and use them in particular YouTrack instances or share them via JetBrains Marketplace. The advent of AI assistance has challenged us to redefine the ways apps should be created, but it also presents a great opportunity to make the creation of apps a low-code experience. In any case, we’re looking to make it possible to create apps for YouTrack later this year.
Planning canvas
We’re working on a way to enable teams to start planning using a whiteboard interface that can then transform their drafts and plans into full-fledged project tasks in just a few clicks. Additionally, we’d also like to make it possible to move existing YouTrack tasks to the planning canvas to allow for additional interactions and the creation of alternative versions of your projects.
Knowledge Base
To cater to the needs of teams who use the Knowledge Base extensively, we’ll be adding more fields and attributes for articles so that arranging and cataloging documents will be less time-consuming. AI-powered search and content creation functionalities may also redefine the experience of teams working with the Knowledge Base, so we’ll refine our plans for the future after the new AI capabilities have been made available to you.
Looking ahead: broad goals for 2024 and beyond
YouTrack for everyone
How would you feel if we got rid of YouTrack issues? We’d like to allow you to use whatever name you’d like for the tasks you’re working on. From now on, you’ll start with a simple task, and then it will be up to you to decide whether you’d like to call it an issue. Later you will have several additional options to choose from. For example, you might want to call something a “document” in a legal team project, a “purchase order” in accounting, or a “job or “employee” in recruitment and HR.
With such a diversity of teams and projects, we’d like to offer everyone the opportunity to choose exactly how to plan their workdays. That’s why we’ll create the My Workspace area, where each team member can keep track of everything they are planning to work on.
Project administrators can expect several changes in the near future. First, we’ll be making it easier for administrators to customize fields in tasks. We’ll also refine roles and permission schemes to provide the desired flexibility without creating an additional configuration burden for administrators. We know that the easier everything is for administrators, the better the YouTrack experience will be for your teams!
YouTrack for enterprises
With a growing average team size and customer base with each release, we’re adding more enhancements to improve cloud stability, performance, and fault tolerance, among other things. The current 99.9% availability threshold has been maintained for several years now, and the team is working to guarantee that YouTrack Cloud will be able to handle even more data with speed and reliability for companies with thousands of users and millions of tasks.
For our customers who choose YouTrack Server, adding support for multi-node installations is still our priority. This will provide enhanced performance and availability at scale. Beyond this, we’re also becoming more adept at supporting extremely large YouTrack installations, gaining more experience every day through our maintenance of youtrack.jetbrains.com – JetBrains’ own public project tracker, with about 1 million active users and over 3 million tasks. We’d be more than willing to share the insights we’ve acquired from this experience with you. Please feel free to get in touch with our support team for more information.
Premium support is available on request for larger teams seeking assistance with their migration to YouTrack, customizations, and more. What’s more, we’re also expanding our team of YouTrack-certified consulting partners who can help you with your projects. Please feel free to contact us for more information about any of these topics – we’re always happy to help.
Let us know what you think
Please keep in mind that these plans represent our general points of focus. There are improvements in the works for many of your other favorite YouTrack features. Furthermore, our current vision might change when we delve deeper into specific customer scenarios.
Subscribe to our blog and follow us on X to keep up to date with all our latest news. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to comment below. If you’re interested in more details on the features we’re working on, please feel free to check out our public project tracker. This is where you can find feature requests and vote for them. You can also subscribe to receive notifications about our progress on them by clicking the star icon.
Every year, we get thousands of requests from you that inspire us to look for ways to make YouTrack better for teams. Thank you for choosing YouTrack, and we look forward to many productive and successful years ahead working with you on the new features.
Your YouTrack team
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