New blog series: Pathfinder Community & Learning Product Updates
We're eager to give you a peek behind the curtain, showcasing the product and engineering efforts driving the creation of community and learning sites and features.
In this blog series, Larkin Plaeger-McCollum, our Senior Director of Product Management for community and learning resources, along with other product and engineering leaders, will provide insights into recent launches, upcoming developments, and most importantly, the rationale behind the changes we're implementing.
Please share your feedback in the comments and reach out to Larkin if you ever want to talk in more depth about our community and learning roadmap. We value your input and we’d love to hear from you!
Mission Control, Bot Store, Pathfinder Community, Bot Games, Automation Anywhere University — if you recognize these names, but you find it hard to remember all of them, you’re not alone.
Based on your input, we’re excited to share that Pathfinder is now live as a home base where you can find all of these resources.
Bookmark it, memorize it, share it with your team — whenever you’re looking to connect with automation peers or learn new automation + AI skills, head to Pathfinder as your starting point.
Let’s take a look at some other updates that come with this new community and learning hub.
Mission Control Upgrades
Mission Control is one of the most in-demand resources from large or fast-growing automation programs. It helps you define your program strengths and growth needs, and provides detailed, step-by-step guidance for how to grow next.
Now, Mission Control has evolved from a beta program to a cornerstone of our strategy to help customers accelerate automation growth. To enable the best performance and faster feature development, we rearchitected Mission Control and moved it from Community onto the Pathfinder site.
Bot Games Enhancements
Many of you may recall our inaugural Bot Games as a fun hackathon event, but it has since evolved into much more than just that. You use Bot Games for your individual learning, or as a resource for training team members throughout the year. Our latest University learning trails are also designed to incorporate more mini-challenges so learners build skills through hands-on exercises.
We want to support you in all of your learning needs, so we rearchitected Bot Games for future scale. Challenges are now more performant and on an infrastructure that will enable future growth.
We took this opportunity to tie each challenge submission you make with your user account (which is why Bot Games is now behind login), and I wanted to share some of why we’re excited about that change.
- Easier recognition: Now that we have your name and email when you login, it’ll be much faster for you to download and post a challenge certificate — no entering contact info or submission ID required.
- Gamification: Our developer community has been requesting tools to record personal bests and see new global, regional, or company-wide challenge leaderboards. Now that challenges you complete are linked to your user profile, we can build this type of gamification in the near future.
- Analytics: Our goal is to design Bot Games that stretch developer skills and enable you to try out new Automation Success Platform features. With better data about challenge submissions, we can design the best possible challenges for our community.
Pathfinder Community Improvements
You’re probably noticing some major enhancements to our Pathfinder Community — our goal: make it easier and better for you to find what you need right when you need it.
All the changes you’re going to see came from direct feedback from you, our members. Some of the most prominent changes include a streamlined navigation, improvements in our guides, and all new program pages.
What’s next? Come find out at Imagine!
Ok, shameless plug here, but we really would love to see you in person at Imagine! Right now, we’re building a couple new things that will premier at the conference.
- Bot Games coding challenges: You know and love them, and they’ll be back at Imagine and beyond. Brush up your skills, or be ready to learn them during live build sessions: this spring’s challenges will inspire you to try our greatest new features.
- Bot Games Lightning: Have you ever wanted to pseudocode a challenge rather than building the whole thing line by line? Join us at a live event to try the newest Lightning edition of Bot Games — a game to test your automation skills in 60 seconds.
Until next time...
I’ll be back in a few months to share more new features, but for now, please drop a note in the comments! What features do you wish we’d build? What questions do you have about any of these Pathfinder websites that you’d want to hear more about in a future post?
