Aaah autumn. The season of falling leaves, changing weather, and pumpkin spice lattes. And while we haven’t shared an update blog in a while, there’s actually been a lot of change going on around the TutorBird office. Instead of our usual list of improvements and fixes, we wanted to take a moment to give you a glimpse into what we’ve been working on behind the scenes.

First, let’s get the bug fixes out of the way:

• We made a change to the conflict detection logic so it no longer detects a conflict if the tutor has been marked absent.
• We fixed an issue with the Student Portal that was preventing parents from updating their own information.
• We removed the edit & delete buttons for news posts that are not editable by the current tutor.
• We fixed an issue where tutors could not send a payment receipt while recording a payment manually.

So what else have we been working on?
You’ve heard us mention the team is hard at work working on some major upgrades to the platform. Here’s what that actually entails…

TutorBird has been around for a number of years (we just celebrated our 7th birthday this month 🎉). As we’ve continued to grow, we’ve realized that we needed to completely upgrade the entire platform to improve the speed for everyone, be able to introduce the new features and integrations we’ve wanted, and get things ready to start working on a mobile app version.

While we haven’t had too many external updates to share recently, internally we’ve been making a lot of updates:

• In early 2020 we created a new UX team whose focus is on taking our member feedback and turning it into real solutions for the product. They’ve been redesigning every page of TutorBird to create a more modern UI and improve the layout.
• Our front-end developers have been working with the UX team to implement these layout and design changes in the new version and making sure everything you see is working exactly as it should.
• Our back-end developers have been rebuilding each and every feature on newer technology, and making sure it’s properly connected together so we can have a seamless transition when the new version is released.
• As our member base has grown, so has our support team! We’ve added a few new faces to the team and are so excited to have them on board to continue supporting you by email and phone.
• We started an onboarding program for new members, offering an opportunity to connect 1:1 with one of our support team members during your trial to learn more about TutorBird and get your account set up. We’ve also been running small group demos online for tutors who are looking for general info before signing up.
• Our marketing team has been focusing on some product education pieces in order to help our members better understand the ins and outs of TutorBird. This includes our Getting Started Guide, email campaigns for new members, and reorganizing our Help Center.
• We’re also in the process of expanding our office space. The team has grown during the pandemic, and as we started preparing to return back to working in person together we realized we were running out of room!

We’re very proud of the work we’ve been doing and are so thankful to have such an amazing community of tutors to work with! ❤️