Dapulse’s Product Vision
A vision for how the next generation of tools should be like. Intuitive, self adopting & fast.
Dapulse’s Mission
become the last tool you’ll ever need to organize your entire team’s operation.
Stats:
Currently we have over 3900 paying companies — we double that number every 5 months with a growing fan base that range from billion dollar companies with hundreds of employees to two people teams working on their projects. Among our customers you’ll find, WeWork, Uber, Wix, Fiverr, Adidas & AT&T.
Drive A Good Product Design
The most important thing we have at dapulse is our product, it’s our main focus and we built the entire company around our product. Some seemingly business decisions we’ve made are actually product decisions. We insisted not to have a sales driven product, because we didn’t want to create a good sellable product — we wanted to create a great product! a product that people try for themselves and decide whether to use or not. On the other hand, we don’t have a freemium tier, because we don’t think getting feedback from people with a problem that they are not willing to pay for will help us build a great product or a sustainable company.
From this initial conviction we set out to make a killer tool that will lift burdens from teams and managers around the world.
We knew it’s a difficult task and we knew that although there are many solutions out there, non of them felt good. They all looked almost the same and non of them made us feel they where helping us manage teams.
From hundreds of talks with managers and companies we found one fundamental truth, people felt that they are working for the tools they use and not the other way around, they where slaves working for a master they didn’t like. In turn that master gave them some reports and organisation of their work, but they needed to work for it, and it was just a small part of what they needed.
How do we fix that?
How can we create a tool that people would love, that they feel worked for them and lift their burden — not increase it.
The answer we found is that it had to be Intuitive, Non-imposing and fast
Intuitive = Physical Product Design
When a tool is intuitive you can just start using it without training, it’s natural (a good example for this is the IPhone, no matter how easy and simple Nokia phones where, when you touched an IPhone it was simpler, it was human friendly). Another aspect of “intuitive” is that no matter how complex your software needs are, it should be super simple for the basic stuff and grows with you as your needs and complexity grows (this is a fundamental flaw in all project management tools, either they start simple and allow you to do only simple things, or start complex and burdens you all the way to managing complexity).
From this “intuitive” guideline we eventually arrived to what we call today Physical Product Design. Physical product design is the best way we found to make products that are very intuitive and simple.
Read more about Physical Product Design Here
Non-Imposing
Non imposing means that a product does not force the users to adapt themselves to the technology, it is working for them — not the other way around. To achieve a non-imposing product we have one simple rule: we will never-ever-ever ask you to add meta data that the software needs for it’s internal operation, just information you needed anyway (a gantt chart is a good example for a bad software, you add dependancies, times and resources to get a resulting report, you then become a slave of managing those dependancies just to keep up with the same report). In contrast we aim that every information you would naturally input by conversation or email will be better done with dapulse, if you need to tell someone something — dapulse will be the best place for it. If you want to let someone know you have a task — dapulse will be the fastest most natural way for it. If you want to plan ahead dapulse will be the easiest fun and most rewarding place for it.
The information dapulse needs is what users have in their minds anyway. To gain the value it offers, they don’t need to understand what the software needs. For this reason users feel dapulse if working for them.
I’ll try to elaborate more on how we make a non imposing product in future posts.
Fast = Boom Performance
When a tool is slow nothing else matters. Speed is its own value and it impacts the overall design of your software UI and experience.
Slow: When a product is slow, overtime the product’s UX team and customers will start asking to duplicate functionality in many different places, they will ask to have the same button on many screens so they won’t need to navigate a lot (because navigating is slow). Duplicating functionality will make the UI bloated and the tool more complex. It rarely happens that UX teams know to ask the R&D to make the product faster so they don’t need to duplicate functions.
Fast: When software is fast it can be designed to to have each function only in one place (no duplications). In such a tool users need to click more — but they don’t mind because it’s fast. Because there are less buttons and functions it’s simpler. When a product is fast, users will start using it for many other things other than what it was initially intended for (Using google search as a spell checker is a good example).
At dapulse we define fast by the term Boom Performance. It’s only fast enough if it happens in the time it takes you to say BOOM! or under 100 milliseconds.
To understand more about achieving boom speed I suggest you watch this brilliant presentation made by dapulse’s co-founder Eran Zinman (it blew my mind :)
Summary
To make a great product, so great people will try it out and pay without sales people convincing them, requires a lot of dedication. The tools and teams that rise to that challenge are going to dominate the market in the coming years. dapulse’s team is committed to that path as we believe this is how products should be — human friendly and empowering.
Read more about
Physical product design — the path to intuitive products
