Querying the future

Have you ever had specific questions about what your co-workers are doing and had to go to lots of difference sources to track the answers down? In my experience, some of these questions look like:

• When are the people I want to meet with free?

• What areas of the codebase does this team or group of teams work on?

• What features are these several product managers responsible for? Is there documentation on these features and a timeline of future feature releases I can look at?

• What customers has this sales rep recently talked to? Can I get the transcripts for the last three calls?

• Where did this person work before my company? What did this company do? How might that experience figure into their opinion on question XYZ?

Interestingly, all of these questions have data sources that have APIs the answers could be pulled from (in order of these questions, Google Calendar, GitHub, JIRA / Google Sheets / Docs / ProductBoard, Gong, LinkedIn, Tegus).

Free Blocks as of now has entirely focused on answering availability questions it can source from Google Calendar. This is the thinking behind Group Mode, which, given a set of co-workers, can tell you what times the entire group is available to meet at. Paired with individual availability and commitment sharing features, Group Mode is a powerful tool for querying calendar data.

What if Free Blocks could offer these same query capabilities for any work related knowledge area? For example, Free Blocks could be used to construct messages that describe an entire team’s strategy and rationale behind that strategy for a given quarter:

Additionally, while Free Blocks right now is only available as a Google Workspace Add-on for GMail, in the future it could exist as a REST API or other medium that allows users to answer whatever questions they’re interested in:

POST api.freeblocksapp.com/teams/strategy
{
  team_ids: ['abc123'],
  quarter: 1,
  fiscal_year: 2023,
  fields: [...],
}

Providing flexible APIs like this would allow teams to build the “materialized views” they need to succeed such that it isn’t necessary to have 17 browser tabs and other apps open with the relevant information. Free Blocks could also handle authentication and authorization around this type of data sharing. Certain employees should and should not have access to this type of data, and it should be easy for companies to configure an API like this through scopes.

This post has mostly focused on just “read-only” type APIs and use-cases, but there’s no reason Free Blocks could not start writing to different project boards and scheduling calendar events in an attempt to optimize project management or at least give project managers a starting strategy for consideration. As a project manager, I often find myself strategizing in a sometimes automated fashion (ex. here is the available free time of the people working on this project, here is the expectation for when a limited availability release should land, let’s work backwards…), so this does seem like a great job for software.

Want to help Free Blocks build our future roadmap? Chat with us by emailing info@freeblocksapp.com and give our Google Workspace app a try today.