Originally published at blog.shepherdpro.com

We’re super excited to announce that Shepherd Pro has leveled up from alpha to beta. Work has been ongoing since our alpha and this release is packed with powerful new features designed to enhance your user journey configurations.

If you’ve been tuned in, you know we initially launched with analytics tied into the inner workings of our core open source library. This allows Shepherd to better inform how users of your tour are progressing and illuminating how successful the onboarding, or whatever outcome you’ve designed for, has worked. You can see a basic form of this in the Pro application and we’ve offered integrations into some popular analytics providers, like PostHog & Amplitude. This enables you to track user engagement step-by-step, gaining valuable insights to optimize your user journeys.

Since our alpha launch, we’ve worked with our users and developers to learn more about what additional features are the next most important for managing onboarding flows. We ran a Quira quest (hackathon with technology specific requirements) to work with developers implementing open source into their projects to get more feedback on the learning curve to get started.

I’ve also built journeys directly for our customers and have worked on more advanced use cases where the end user’s journey experience (e.g. whether they see a journey at all or even just particular steps along that flow) are dictated by that user’s specific criteria and activities.

It’s really exciting to see all the complex situations and ideas for journeys we’ve discovered in this time!

To build on these discoveries, we’re launching two major features as part of our beta application and javascript library updates.

Advanced Targeting Options
First are advanced targeting options where you can now add options in the application to determine if a journey is shown to your user.

• User Details: Personalize journeys based on specific user attributes, such as a user’s email address or specific user id (all based on any user data you send as properties when initializing Shepherd).
• Journey Interaction: Target users who have not previously seen a journey, or who may not have completed that particular journey to the final step.
• URL-Specific Targeting: Trigger journeys by specific URLs for contextual relevance. For example, users who end up on a specific landing page may have a different funnel than those who are accessing your site from the home page and therefore you may want to show them different journeys that lead to different conclusions or have varying steps based on where they are currently in your application.

Seamless Journey Creation
Next, we’re introducing the ability to have your entire journey configured within the Shepherd application, and no longer limiting the configuration experience to within your application only. This is starting with simply using the same JSON configuration as would be applied directly in code, but not requiring deployments of your application for those changes to be active.

Say goodbye to a code only experience! You can now create, update, and configure journeys entirely within the Shepherd application, streamlining the process for a smoother, more intuitive experience. You no longer need to make deployments for changing text, content, order of steps, and much more.

Looking Ahead
Our journey from alpha to beta showcases our commitment to continually improving and expanding Shepherd Pro. While these updates are exciting, they’re just a glimpse into our future plans as we explore new SDKs, targeting options, and more detailed journey configurations. If there’s something you’d like to see in Shepherd Pro, please let us know.

Stay tuned for more updates, and happy journey building!

If you’re interested in learning more, schedule a demo to chat with me directly! Or join our growing Discord and see how other developers are building with Shepherd.