We have a motto that guides our work here at MailChimp: Listen hard and change fast. We’ve been doing a lot of both in the past few months. Last year some curious patterns emerged in feedback from our customers. There was so much feedback relating to the mobile experience. Let’s be honest—mobile devices aren’t just an industry trend; they’re a revolution changing our culture. We get that, but we wanted to find out how broader industry trends were shaping our customers’ day-to-day work.

We did a lot of traveling to meet with customers, and spent hours in interviews learning how people use MailChimp. We compiled hundreds of pieces of feedback from customers and our support team, and conducted surveys with thousands of users. All of this helped us see some places where MailChimp was falling short, but more importantly, it helped us see bigger trends. We realized people are still doing the same kind of work they always have, but there’s been a shift in how they get that work done. Most people are trying to do more with less. They have a ton of responsibilities to address by the end of the day, many are accountable to a boss who tracks their work, and there are still just 24 hours in the day. They’re using mobile devices to get stuff done during what would otherwise be idle time. 9-5 just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore.

With limited time and resources, teamwork is more important than ever. 35% of our customers are working collaboratively today, and we see this statistic increasing steadily. People are passing the baton to colleagues when they’re unable to complete a task. They’re collaborating in order to do better work and get it done quickly.

So the requests for a mobile experience were just symptomatic of a bigger change. We’re all feeling extra pressure to get more things done these days, and because we can’t work any harder, we have to start working smarter. That’s why we’ve created a brand-new MailChimp that will hopefully help you do just that.

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For a lot of our customers, MailChimp campaigns are a team effort. They collaborate about content, send tests, gather feedback, and then request approval and sign-off. So in v8.2, launching today, we’re adding some collaboration tools to MailChimp to make all that easier. Here’s a preview of what’s coming.

Let’s start with the new “Comments” tab in the drag-and-drop editor:

Amazing things happen under that little tab.

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On Monday, February 18, we’re launching MailChimp v8. Now, eight is pretty significant as far as version numbers go, so we figured we better give our customers a pretty big feature to match: multi-user accounts (yes, finally). This means you’ll be able to set up a MailChimp account as an “Admin,” then grant permission to “Authors” who are allowed to design templates and create campaigns, or invite people in your organizations who can only view reports, and so on.

This upgrade made us change a lot of code in a lot of places, and is forcing us to kill a feature you may be using right now (Account Keys), so we should discuss v8 in detail.

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Every month, we launch new features. This one is a relatively light release because of last month’s holiday break. Still, we’ve got some nice improvements to talk about here. Keep in mind it’ll take until Wednesday for these new features to propagate to all 2.5 million user accounts.

1. My Campaigns and Favorites

In our new drag and drop editor, whenever you create a new campaign, you’ll now begin with these options:

Basic Templates gives you the basic layout options that were there before. “My Campaigns” will show you past campaigns you’ve sent, so that you can easily replicate them and build new campaigns (essentially, use a sent campaign as a “template” for a new one).

Within “My Campaigns” you’ll notice these cute little heart icons:

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We just added a subscriber search box to the Dashboard:

Sounds kinda simple, but it was a pretty serious undertaking behind the scenes. See, before making search so easily accessible, we wanted to really beef up our underlying search service to make it faster.  And that’s not an easy task when you consider the fact that we have a ton of small users with small subscriber lists (in the hundreds), and a bunch of large users with ginormous lists (in the millions). The fact that we built MailChimp to scale along with customers as they grow from startup to gigantic corporations has always been our most difficult challenge, but also our best differentiator. Would’ve been a lot easier to choose a database architecture if we just focused on small business or enterprise. Building the app to serve both (plus everything in between) makes things more–interesting. Anyway, in the end we had to build an entirely new search service, and then move 500GB of raw text data, 2 billion records, and 1TB of clustered, indexed search data.

So what can you do with all that power? Well let’s say I want to find all the people named “Ben” across all my lists, because I want to tell them about BenConf, a tech event for people named Ben (I’m serious).

I can just type “ben” in the Dashboard, and BAM:

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