@richl we usually share this at a high level in the form of a blog post near the beginning of the year: Tiller's Focus Heading Into 2024, Plus A Quick Look Back - Tiller
Right now our focus is similar to 2023 in that we still have a lot of room to improve the overall quality of the bank feeds and make it easier for people to get started with Tiller. In addition to that there is always a constant list of operational improvements to simply to keep our software scalable, efficient, and secure.
Last year our big initiative to improve bank feeds fell into two major areas:
- Improving the way the data coming from yodlee is processed so that if for some reason we’re unable to accept an incoming “package” we can process yodlee’s retry events - this improved the reliability of the feeds by ensuring people didn’t end up with gaps in their transactions requiring them to manually go fetch them
- Implementing Fastlink 4 (the new UI for account refreshes/adds)
Much of the year was focused on a better start up experience
- A new Tiller Console (also an operational/architectural requirement)
- More features in Microsoft Excel (Manual transactions, Manual balances)
- The Spending Trends sheet and some other experiments with the Foundation Template
Additionally, we did a lot of under the hood operational and architectural improvements to increase the efficiency of our engineering team and laid some ground work for upcoming development.
It might seem like a small amount of work but there is so much out of view that’s happening from our engineering team. We just added a new engineer and he’s already showing tremendous output despite the somewhat insane complexity of our system/software.
So I would say we did pretty darn good for 2023
As for this year, we’re pretty close to offering a subset of our beta group access to a second aggregator to assess it’s reliability compared to Yodlee and we just released a new debt template and template management features for Excel in the last two weeks.
Google Sheets has had a big head start on Excel and now Google Sheets is lagging behind Excel from a performance perspective, which is likely going to require our attention in the near term.
We don’t like to give specific roadmap initiatives or timelines simply because we don’t want to promise something and then be unable to deliver due to some other opportunity or just realize that the level of effort to build something isn’t worth the return (not only to us, but also to customers). I think this is pretty consistent with most other companies (they don’t share specific public roadmaps).
Every feature we build adds complexity to our code that must be regularly maintained. We’re still trying to clean up from ancient features/systems that are no longer in use. So we choose carefully.
Believe me, I can’t wait for a day when we’re just crushing users’ feature requests and I think you’re right we are spread too thin, but we are working on that too.