Inspiration

Happy Wednesday, Lucid community! If you've ever hosted a large team session, you probably know the feeling of excitement quickly turning into a scramble. Sticky notes pile up, voices get lost, and then the initial energy dissipates. It's frustrating and inefficient. Enter breakout boards.This fantastic capability lets you leverage the power of smaller groups to drive greater alignment and engagement. And who doesn’t love that? Essentially, breakout boards are private rooms within your main canvas. They allow you to instantly compartmentalize content and divide your large group into focused teams, giving every participant a voice. In a nutshell, breakout boards can help you:Turn chaos into clarity: Say goodbye to endless scrolling. Use the main board for your high-level overview and dedicate breakout boards to specific tasks, such as research, brainstorming, or analysis. Keep a running record: For recurring meetings (like sprints or standups), simply dedicate a new, dated breakout boar

The engineering world is a constant balancing act between accuracy, velocity, and standardization.  I recently broke down the challenges in a blog post. Here’s the rundown: Accuracy: Maintaining a single source of truth is challenging with numerous documents being shuffled around and important context being lost in various threads. In fact, a study commissioned by Lucid uncovered that 44% of knowledge workers identified misalignment as a major workflow blocker. The fix: Lucid’s team hubs connect silos and bring important resources together in one central location.  Velocity: More than just working quickly, velocity is about sustainable performance and continuous improvement. Project friction, like last-minute scope creep, design changes, and miscommunication, can slow velocity and drag morale. You end up spending a lot of time meeting instead of building. The fix: Visualizing complexities with teams helps everyone align quickly. Personally, I think our Lucid Cards for Jira and Lucid Ca

Hey Lucid Community! As a senior engineer at Lucid, I know the pains of messy diagrams. Shapes everywhere, lines breaking, and nothing makes sense when you need clarity the most. Enter: Auto line routing As part of our assisted layout feature, auto line routing helps you instantly clean up chaotic diagrams, making the logic easy to follow and saving you precious time. Here’s the hack: highlight the diagram you want to rearrange, then select Arrange from the pop-up toolbar. Select Apply assisted layout and voila! You now have a polished, easy-to-follow visual. Curious to know how it works? I love nerding out over this stuff, so if you have any questions about auto line routing or the other assisted layout capabilities, please feel free to ask in the comments below!

Agentic AI has incredible transformative power, but building agents is only half the battle. You’ll need context in order to effectively integrate those agents into your business. In our upcoming webinar, we’ll show you how to use Lucid to create the context needed at every stage of AI transformation, from documenting processes to planning and executing AI implementation strategies.Join us for real-world examples and templates to get started!Beyond the hype: How Lucid supports AI transformationNovember 6, 2025  at 11 a.m. MT (1 p.m. ET)👉 Register now

Having a thorough understanding of your organization’s structure is a critical tool for an organization of any size. With org charts in Lucidchart you can quickly see who reports to whom and get clarity during the hiring process by easily identifying gaps within your organization. But many modern organizations aren’t always captured with the typical top-down hierarchical model. In particular hierarchical org charts can fall short when you need to visualize the cross-functional ways team members work. For example at Lucid our product developers work in SCRUM teams. Each SCRUM team consists of a product manager two or three software developers one or two quality assurance specialists and a UX designer. This means individual members from four different departments are regularly collaborating on a project but this collaboration isn’t easily represented by the traditional top-down org chart. That’s why we created Group View which allows you to separate your org chart data by any unique valu

Color is a powerful, often subconscious tool that significantly improves comprehension (up to 73%!).Think about your most recent Lucid document you created; you likely used color without even realizing it. From sticky notes to frames to shapes, color is all around. To help you effectively leverage color,  here are some quick tips for how to use color in your Lucid boards. Red: Highlight prioritiesOrange: Use in icebreakers and brainstormsYellow: Draw attention to items that need more inputGreen: Show progress updates and highlight project statusBlue: Gain consensus, give feedbackPurple: Inspire  imaginative thinkingBlack: Signal completionGet the full rundown in our color theory framework article so that you can leverage the power of color for maximum impact. And, check out our color-optimized collaboration template to use in your next team session.

Have you ever sat down at your desk in the morning, ready for the day, only to wonder what you’re actually supposed to be working on? It’s probably safe to say we’ve all been there. I know I have. One highly effective way to mitigate confusion and boost clarity is with a team huddle meeting. These quick, daily meetings are the ultimate pulse check for team alignment and productivity. Even a 10-minute huddle can:⚡ Boost accountability. 📩 Reduce unnecessary communication. 🤝 Promote better collaboration.I recently wrote an article all about team huddles, as well as included some templates that you and your teams can use to make checking in a breeze. My personal favorite template is the team huddle board. It’s got everything you need to prioritize projects, raise questions, and gain visibility into what your team is working on.Check out the templates in the article and let me know which one you’re most excited to try!

Tired of projects getting bogged down by delays? You’re not alone. Lags in stakeholder approval can cost organizations a lot of time and money. Luckily, there are a few smart tips I have to share with you that will help significantly speed up this process! Use a template to map stakeholder involvement from the get-go. Visualize the process you want approval on and share it with stakeholders. Keep documentation in a central location. Communicate the process’s value. Leverage Lucid’s Process Accelerator to standardize processes, facilitate feedback, and more.Explore our full article to learn more about how to eliminate approval bottlenecks and get work done faster. 

Grab your latte* and don’t be late! Be the first to see new Lucid capabilities to accelerate your work.The agenda for this 90-minute virtual event will include a keynote and three breakout sessions that will help you:🧠 Take advantage of AI and intelligent features across the Lucid Suite.🔨 Build the right products—faster.➡️ Scale process management.Join us and learn how Lucid can help drive your business forward! Lately @ Lucid: Accelerating transformation through intelligenceEMEA: October 1, 2025 at 3:00 p.m. CESTAmericas: October 1, 2025 at 11:00 a.m. MDTAPAC: October 2, 2025 at 10:00 a.m. AEST👉 Save your spot *It doesn’t have to be a latte. If coffee’s not your thing, fuel up with your fave fall beverage, and then take a seat in the virtual front row.

Did you know that Lucid isn’t just for work? You can use Lucid to plan family trips, visualize your home renovation, and even world build for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. In this blog post, Lucidites share over ten unique ways that they’ve used Lucid for personal projects. Check it out to discover fun use cases such as:  Ranking nearby chicken restaurants  Mapping out wedding venues  Using Visual Activities to prioritize attractions at Disney World Comparing products before making a purchase Synthesizing trip ideas with Lucid’s AI capabilities And so much more! Have you used Lucid for your own hobbies or for event planning? Which features are the most helpful for personal projects? Let us know in the comments! 

Collaboration is the key to a happy and productive team. Did you know that teams that prioritize collaboration are 30% more satisfied with their jobs than those that don’t?More effective collaboration directly leads to more productivity. 🔑Whether your team is remote, in-person, or hybrid, Lucidspark makes collaboration a breeze. Here are some of our favorite features to set up your team for success: Collaborator colors: Quickly see who’s working where. Show authors: Know who contributed each idea. Visual Activities: Quickly and accurately gather feedback. Facilitator Tools: Guide your team through any activity. Loom and Zight integrations: Bring video content right onto the board. Explore the full list of Lucidspark features and how to access them in our recent article. 🔍Share with me: Which Lucidspark features do you use to elevate team collaboration?

Lucidchart supports a variety of diagram types when using Mermaid for diagramming as code. This post outlines the basic syntax for creating supported diagrams with Mermaid in Lucidchart. FlowchartCreate clear and easy-to-understand flowcharts to represent complex systems and processes. The following code provides a framework for implementing a flowchart using Mermaid syntax in Lucidchart. Code: ---title: Chart Title---flowchart LRA[Start] --> B[Step 1]B --> C[Step 2]C --> D{Decision Point}D -- Option 1 --> E[Step 3A]D -- Option 2 --> F[Step 3B]E --> G[Step 4A]F --> H[Step 4B]G --> I[Next Step or End]H --> IThis code represents a basic flowchart structure where each step or decision point is clearly defined. Use ‘LR’ for left-to-right flowcharts. Use ‘TD’ for top-to-bottom flowcharts. For more advanced flowchart styling options, check out Mermaid’s Flowchart Basic Syntax guide.  The example below utilizes Mermaid code to visualize the scientific method through

Org charts are essential for understanding reporting structures, team roles, and workloads—but creating and updating them is a pain, right?Join me for an interactive training, where I’ll show you how Lucidchart takes the hassle out of org charts by doing the heavy lifting for you! Follow along and learn how to generate an org chart from imported employee data.Hands-on workshop: Creating intelligent org chartsAugust 21, 202511 a.m. MT (1 p.m. ET)Register nowSee for yourself why Lucid is ranked #1 for org chart software on G2

There are a lot of reasons to move your content from another solution into Lucid, and our Professional Services team is here to help! Curious how the migration process works? Stuck on what type of content to move over in the first place?Join our upcoming webinar to get best practices on identifying critical content, get expert advice on cleaning up your documents, and even see a demo of Lucid’s import tool, all so you can keep working without missing a beat. There’ll be plenty of time for a Q&A at the end, so come with all of your questions! Office hours: Migrating content to LucidAugust 7, 2025 at 11 a.m. MT (1 p.m. ET)  Register here

Hey, IT pros. 👋🏼 Have you ever felt challenged by one of these issues?📌Maintaining documentation: The real challenge isn’t merely creating documentation, but maintaining it and making it widely available to teams. 🤝🏼Change management: For IT change management, institutional knowledge silos make it nearly impossible to align multiple teams and train new employees.📋Incident reporting: Without a proper incident reporting framework, mistakes can repeat, and software and systems aren’t properly protected.🗂Managing workload: Without an organized system of record and project management protocols in place, tasks get forgotten and projects get delayed. You’re not alone. And luckily, Lucidchart can help with every single one of these (very common) challenges that IT professionals face.In our new article, we’re breaking down each of these problems and sharing how Lucidchart can help. We even include resources and templates to save you time and kickstart your work, like our IT documentation

Hey fellow engineering leaders! We all strive for top-notch teams, right? But the path to get there isn’t always a walk in the park. It takes trust, autonomy, and effective collaboration.I recently had the opportunity to chat with Andy Hurd, Senior Director of Engineering at Lucid. He shared some wisdom on how to build high-performing teams:Hire intentionally Set clear expectations Foster individual ownership Prioritize alignment Coordinate work Centralize communicationWhat are your go-to strategies for building and maintaining high-performing engineering teams? Share your tips with the community in the comments below!

Do you use Google Workspace in your workflows? If so, our upcoming webinar is perfect for you! Lucid and Google Workspace pros will be sharing:An example workflow using Lucid and Google Workspace together  Information about Lucid’s Google Chat integration  Tips for enhancing efficiency in your day-to-day workHere are the details:Date: July 10, 2025Time: 11 a.m. MST (1 p.m. ET)Register here

Collaboration is critical in any organization, and everyone knows that their collaboration can be improved. But how do you know where to start?  That’s where Lucid’s here to help. Our team has developed a collaboration evaluation that you can use to identify exactly where you excel and where you need to focus on improvement. We’ve established five key areas that you should be secure in for successful collaboration, which form what you can consider as your collaboration North Star. These key areas are: Clarity  Impact  Environment Conflict  Autonomy Check out our collaboration assessment template, which will walk you through the five areas and lead you in your evaluation of your collaboration strengths and weaknesses. Use the template with your team and dig into the automatically aggregated results!  The great thing about Lucid’s collaboration assessment tool is that it provides a way for you to identify exactly what needs to be changed on your journey to improve collaboration. Keep in

Thank you for joining us for our hands-on workshop: “Mapping technical systems in Lucid”! (If you didn’t have the chance to join, you can access the webinar on demand here.)Check out these additional resources for step-by-step instructions on the features shown:Enabling shape libraries and creating custom shape libraries Adding layers Adding actions and links Adding notes to shapes Adding comments Linking data Setting up conditional formatting Using ERD import Creating UML sequence diagrams from markup Generate a diagram with AIPlus, check out our template gallery if you need a starting point for your technical diagrams.Leave any follow-up questions you have from the webinar in the comments below so that a Lucid team member can help answer them.

If you’ve ever tried to document a process, then you know that it can sometimes be a messy operation. But good documentation is the key to smooth operations and mutual alignment within a team or organization.We recently posted an article about our top eight Lucid features to make business process documentation a breeze.Here’s a sneak peek:Actions: Quickly perform certain actions with shapes on your board. Conditional Formatting: Set up specific rules to automatically highlight elements in your documentation that need your attention. Dynamic shapes: Bring your data to life to visually represent statistics or percentages, making your documentation more engaging. Layers: Organize your documentation with Layers to show different phases or details without overwhelming viewers. Be sure to read the full article to explore all the ways to improve business process documentation. Have you tried any of these features? Let me know in the comments below! 

Hey, Lucid Community! If you’re an engineer or IT professional, you likely understand the challenge of mapping technical systems. If you find yourself lost on where to begin or want to minimize friction when mapping intricate concepts, then I’ve got a great opportunity for you.I’m hosting an interactive workshop where I’ll walk you through exactly how to build and optimize network architecture diagrams, ERDs, and other technical diagrams.I hope you’ll join me next week!Here are the details:Hands-on workshop: Mapping technical systems in Lucid Date: June 26, 2025Time: 11 a.m. MT (1 p.m. ET)Register now

Not sure if you saw my last post on Lucidspark templates, but I also wanted to highlight our new Lucidchart templates from last quarter! ✅ Smart flowchart: Leverage the power of Lucid’s AI and flowchart shape banks to document your systems and processes. ✅ Similarly, our Smart flowchart with swimlanes adds more clarity to your diagram.✅ Smart algorithm flowchart example: Easily visualize the flow of your algorithms with your team to enhance clarity and alignment. Access the curated flowchart shape library to make your diagram dynamic. This template is great for engineers, developers, and more.✅ Nonprofit Cloud & Education Cloud Fundraising: If you’re a Salesforce user, this template will help you document and visualize how entities relate within your Nonprofit and Education Cloud Fundraising model.Which template interests you most? 

Has anyone used Lucid in the same fashion as Excel dashboards for business partner coaching and reviews? I work for a marketing organization that helps financial advisory firms grow their business. Consider these firms as business partners or “clients” rather than internal teams or departments. I would like to use Lucid with our business coaching calls/presentations. Our support is very vast for our business partners which allows for very customized business coaching. The 3 main categories our services and support fall under are Marketing, Sales and Operations. I’m thinking of this being a tool to help these firms with end of the year planning as well as a mid-year review to keep them on track for hitting their goals. Initially this would remain more high level in each of areas tracked but could eventually expand on each area using the breakout boards or other features. This dashboard would include:setting and tracking the firms goals and initiatives illustrating past, YTD and pacing p

For me, summertime has always been about adventure, playing outside, and simply enjoying life. 🍉🌵But even while working, there are still some fun and festive ways to capture the spirit of summer with your team!In fact, I recently compiled a list of nine activity ideas for team building that I wanted to share with you!Here are a few of my personal favorites: Favorite things party: Share your all-time favorite items with your team. How it works: Assign everyone a team member to mail a few small items to. Think about your summer favorites: like sunscreens, hats, sunglasses, and anything else you use and love. Get crafty: Whether in-person or virtual, there are so many fun crafts you can do with your team. For example, my team has done:Succulent terrarium Soap making Chocolate makingSummer book club: For the bookworms, pick a fun book to read with your team this summer. Bonus points if it takes place in a sunny location!Be sure to check out all the activities that you can do with your te

Did you know that using Lucid can make planning sessions 83% faster? That’s the success that one of our customers has found with Lucid—and we want you to hear his story!Join our upcoming webinar to learn how Agile coaches at Mercury, New Zealand’s largest utility company, use Lucid to facilitate Agile sessions, align on project timelines, and boost efficiency. One of our solutions engineers will also share tips and features you can use to make your own Agile practices more efficient.How Mercury uses Lucid to transform Agile practicesJune 12, 2025 at 11 a.m. MT (1 p.m. ET)   Register here