Recent Updates — Zoho Sprints
Sprints had notifications, but no way to actually announce things — new features, what changed, what’s coming. I built the channel for that.
TL;DR
Sprints could notify you about your own stuff (tasks, mentions) but the team had no way to announce things to everyone — features, updates, news. The PM wanted a real announcement channel. I built one feed for it. Fought the “one flat list” brief so the stuff you need to act on doesn’t look like the stuff you can ignore. Shipped in 2 weeks, 50K+ users, nothing changed after handoff.
Key Takeaways
- Sprints had personal notifications already. This was the team’s channel to broadcast to everyone — features, updates, news.
- The brief wanted one flat list. I got action items to look different from the FYI stuff you can ignore.
- Shipped as designed. Icons swapped in eng review, nothing else moved.
The Problem
Sprints already had notifications — task assigned to you, someone mentioned you, the usual. What it didn’t have was a way for the team to say “hey, here’s a new feature” to everyone at once. That’s what the PM wanted. An announcement channel, inside the product.
The catch was the content. Four different things would live in this one feed — feature announcements, product updates, subscription reminders, community posts. A renewal reminder needs you to do something. A feature announcement is just FYI. Treat them the same and people tune the whole thing out.
The brief said one flat list. I didn’t think that worked, and I said so early.
How I Got There
I sketched it on paper first — what’s urgent, what’s not, what actually needs the user to click something. Made the problem obvious: a reminder and an announcement don’t belong in the same visual bucket.
My first cuts were too heavy. Big cards, lots of hierarchy. Looked sharp in Figma, exhausting in a feed you check daily. My manager told me it didn’t feel like Sprints — felt like a portfolio piece. Fair. I stripped it back.
The thing I didn’t budge on: action items and passive ones can’t look identical. Reminders get a CTA and a colour cue. Announcements don’t. Showed both side by side and the PM was sold.
What Shipped
One feed, sorted by time, no tabs. Tabs would’ve split attention — you should see what’s new in one glance.
- Colour does the sorting — action vs. info, no reading required.
- Short by default — title and a line, tap for the rest.
- CTAs only where they belong — which also gave eng a clean hook for the buttons.
Shipped the way I designed it. The only thing that changed was the icons — I’d left placeholders in, we swapped them in eng review. Marketing and product both run their updates through it now.
What I Learned
The flat-list fight was worth having because I could point at a real cost, not just a feeling. That’s the part I think about — pushing back only lands when you can name what breaks if you don’t.