Happy to explain, I’m TrainerRoad’s Community Manager, and part of my role is to update our athletes when feature requests are on the roadmap, what we’re working on, and to submit new feature requests to the team for consideration!
Apologies if my answer was terse and not satisfactory, my aim was to avoid discrediting your complaint by telling you why you shouldn’t feel the way you do. Rather, it felt more constructive to ensure that what we are working on really is big, as we’ve already confirmed in previous posts that this run/swim feature is on the roadmap.
Your feelings are totally merited if you don’t want to renew because we don’t have this feature in place yet, we’d be sad to see you go but would understand.
This feature is on our roadmap, so mentioning that again (including your request for timeline) would seem redundant, as we’ve mentioned it a few times previously:
I should take this opportunity to also discuss something important to keep in mind about feature releases: it’s challenging and labor-intensive for our team. Resolving each bug and issue presents another one, and we work very diligently to ensure features are released to be as effective and impactful as possible.
Again, we totally hear your frustration and wish that rolling out big features could happen more quickly, and wish that timelines could be more clearly defined for them.
We’re glad that this is on the roadmap though, as we know it will be a super valuable tool for our athletes! Cheers!
There is no timeline for this, and there is no reason to believe it will come in 2021 so I would look at another calendaring/tracking solution as I have.
The TR workouts/plans are still good, so that’s what your renewal is paying for. It just isn’t a calendaring/tracking solution for triathletes.
Ive been trying TrainingPeaks free for a few months, everything synchs in to it without hassle, even Apple Workouts which is important as a user of the most popular smartwatch in history. Its nothing amazing but it fits the requirements.
@prc I recognize and appreciate you coming to the forum to voice your frustration towards TrainerRoad for this not moving forward, but attacking someone who is here to help is not appropriate. If you took the time to look you’d see what an asset @IvyAudrain has been to the TrainerRoad community within the forum, Youtube, and Reddit. I’m sure there are people in this thread who she has helped out in the past.
I am the COO of TrainerRoad, and was formerly the Product Manager earmarked to work on the run and swim integration. Nate has come out and clearly said this won’t be worked until after our new mobile apps are out (now in beta) and we’ve been able to develop Group Workouts on mobile.
Nate has alluded to another project we’ve been working in parallel with our new mobile apps, and that is the project we think will blow people’s minds. Sure it is something everyone is free to have an opinion about, but we’re excited and feel everyone who uses TrainerRoad will be positively impacted in some way.
While this may be considered an excuse to some, we’re using resources the way we feel will have the most impact. We want to make cyclists faster as fast as possible, and we feel our roadmap reflects that.
If you have criticism that isn’t appropriate for the forum you can feel free to email me directly Brandon@trainerroad.com, but let’s make sure we continue to be excellent to each other here.
i think, it depends on finishing Andoid and iOS App betas first, as a Android User i think, this will take a little bit longer, too many little things have to be fixed first and this is very time consuming,
If this is done, we see a light at the end of the tunnel!
I agree. He’s my random and uninformed guess on what might happen. If I were to guess I think we’ll see a sequence where Andriod and iOS get out of beta and launched to general public. Then after that public launch has settled down for a few weeks we’ll get the beta of the new feature. That beta will last for a month (since feature vs. code rewrite). Then it will be interesting to see how they stage all of the features for swim & run. Maybe the first thing is a month after new feature launch they offer some beta for people to start matching their swim and run. Then we get swim/run structured workouts created from the existing tri-plans that can push to garmin. Then after that we start getting some more sophistication in the swim/run workouts.
So putting it on a timeline (this is best case in my mind)
January: iOS launches (they won’t launch until holidays are passed)
February: Android launches, new feature beta
March: new feature launch
April: Basic swim/run sync
May-Nov: Misc improvements, maybe betas of features
Dec: Big bang launch of Tri planning (in time for TR team to start their Ironman training)
I should add I’m excited for whatever new feature is. I really want swim/run, but TR totally surprised me with the calendar and plan builder as features I didn’t know I’d like so much. Can’t wait to see it and happy to know that swim/run is a priority once that launches. Based on all the mentions of feature here as well as Nate’s mention I guarantee that as much as we’re chomping at the bit for it, the TR Dev team is dying to get it completed.
Hi Nate!
You got 86 thumbs up for this post back in April, so I think it is an significant post. Could you expand on the time dimension of this roadmap update? As in, should we think 21Q1, or Q2? Or 2022H2? I think the recent flaring up of this topic is simply because we have no idea of the time associated with the roadmap. Back in april we all had a big hope, but now I’m not sure if you originally meant months, or a roadmap of 3+ years. Any time indication would be welcome. Even a conservative one!
Hey! Again, the reason those timelines aren’t concrete is because as aforementioned, that process of building features is so tricky; it reveals new bugs and issues each time one is resolved. The last thing we want to do is say yes, ‘x’ finite date, to then rush out a feature that’s not going to serve athletes effectively or needs some refining. We’re working super diligently to get this released as soon as possible: correctly.
Because of clear pressure from customers pushing them to offer a new feature or function (add the ability to uploading runs/swims as requested in this OP), and demanding to know when it will happen as well.
To acknowledge the fact that this is something they do want to do, have added it to the “to-do list” and plan to do so when the time and priorities allow.
This thread in particular features repeated and emphatic demands for this feature. I think TR was realistic in their basic statements of plans (planning to do it) as well as not making promises to a hard timeline (some relative placement with respect to active projects).
All the speculation in the world won’t help here, and wondering about internal processes is a moot point, IMO. Most companies in industries like this would not likely divulge relative specifics like actual project plans or hard timelines. We don’t get specific info from other training apps, or other things like new bikes, trainers and such. Not sure why some expect this to be any different?
+1
TR must have an internal work breakdown including effort estimates, and therefore a timeline. It cannot be managed otherwise.
Probably TR doesn’t want to share in fear of not delivering on time. But not giving any timeline generates a lot of unrest, as is obvious in this thread.
Hence my question, what is the rough timing? 21Q2? 23Q1? On a timescale of half a year accuracy I expect TR to be able to estimate, and simply sharing that would go a long way in resolving frustration.
Correct, as stated here and elsewhere, they don’t share timelines for this and other reasons.
This is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. They simply can’t win here without either upsetting people, or making a timeline public that then leads to risk of blowing it, or rushing an incomplete project to meet a prior estimate.
Yes, they are more connected than just about any similar company in this realm that I have seen. I think TR and us are all benefiting from this close connection.
But when they have given the info that they already have (notably more specific than just about any other project in their history), and stated that they don’t plan to share more than that… it would be great if people would take that for what it was vs the repeated push for even more info… that we have seen in this thread.
Like most other Feature Requests here, adding your comments and “+1” are great. But the repeated (Is it coming yet?) refrain serves no real benefit for anyone.
Yeah its a bummer, I feel like I’ve been really transparent about the reasoning behind that timeline:
I hope our resonates with our athletes that we do hear how frustrated they are and we know how much they want this feature, but again, with the number of moving pieces, device, and APIs that go along with any feature, new bugs and issues are revealed each time one is resolved.
We don’t have hard timelines and deadlines because we aren’t interested in pushing something to production that doesn’t work or function to our, or our athlete’s standards.
I do not remember them making anything close to those statements you have in quotes, in this thread.
Maybe you can point to those specific statements/quotes from TR reps in this thread?
I know there were more timely statements (although still notably vague and lacking defined dates) in the Masters related feature request. Perhaps we are seeing wires crossed here between feature requests / discussion threads?
For search of “soon” in the thread, this is the first mention from a TR rep:
This is about “thing 1” specifically, NOT about the run/swim info. The connection IIRC, was that “thing 1” has to be released AND the mobile update released, before starting on the run/swim request here.
Importantly, the run/swim feature was stated to START development upon the completion of both items shown above. So even when we see those, that is just the beginning of this process. We don’t have any real way to know how long the actual implementation of the run/swim feature will take.
No, it’s really not the same. You can’t take comments (specifically about timing for a feature or features) from one topic and just pull them into a separate topic to try and prove a point about something totally different. That’s misleading and not fair to the comments given and their context, that is important.
Well you could just go back to the first two responses from Bryce, it was on their roadmap in Oct ‘18 and “not quite next in line” in Dec ‘18.
Neither statements communicate that maybe this will happen within the next thousand years, they both indicate that there is some short to medium term target date - now its two years later, and the message now is…maybe sometime.
Over the years it has been commented in the podcast note than once how popular this platform is with triathletes despite cycling being their forté. A basic need of any triathlete is to import all their activities.
Its not super sexy, its not ground breaking, its not AI, its not going to revolutionise training as we know it. True. It is not the Vo2 max intervals of training…its the sweet spot. It would remove the pain every single day faffing around typing into a poorly scrolling browser interface that process pisses me off. It should piss me off. It ticks every box in the “how to annoy a user” checklist. Being annoyed doesn’t make me faster!
Consequently I think - and it’s obviously only my view, but I suspect also others not just in this thread - TR should stop being transparent and nice about it and call it one way or the other:
It’s too hard/not as valuable to us, you should use something else. Come to TR for cycling.
Commit to a date, embrace triathletes.
I have heard that the continually varying formats and non standardised activity files are a total ballache, maybe they don’t want to commit the resources for a non core service - fine, just say so and we can all move on.
I try to make it clear whenever I take on the moderator duties, and this is not one of those cases.
In this case, I am speaking for only myself and not TR in any capacity. Any issue people have with me or my posts above, related to this thread and others, sits squarely upon my shoulders and no one else’s.
Thanks for the reply IvyAudrain, I understand there is complexity involved. Therefore I understand the motivation behind your communication, although I think half-year blocks are coarse grained enough to make us both happy.
Combining that with the post of JoeX on 2018’s roadmap ‘not quite next in line’, the available information has the following effect on my expectations: very little hope for 2021, praying for something triathlon related in 2022. And I’m not religious
