Internal Tools at Detour

By Andrew Mason

I’m obsessive (to fault) about trying new business productivity apps. In an effort to convince myself that this affliction has value, I thought I’d share my findings with the world. In addition to my favorite apps by category, I’ve listed the ones that I tried and decided against.

Project Management / Todo Lists: Asana

Plenty has been written in praise of Asana, and we love it too. Below are a few notes about our usage.

Asana has an organizational learning curve. Your company has to establish some conventions to use projects/tags/tasks/subtasks/due dates, and until you do, it can be overwhelming. Once I got the hang of it, I held a lunch demo the whole team, and things started to click after that.

Before Asana, I used a highly customized Omnifocus setup. There are still a few features I’d like to see in Asana (e.g. task start dates, task dependencies), Asana is now the only system I use to manage tasks.

We use Asana even for many projects where popular purpose-built alternatives (like Pivotal Tracker) exist. Everyone in the company is comfortable using Asana. In my experience, Tracker quickly becomes inscrutable to everyone except the engineers and product managers working on a specific project. By using Asana, a task can start in one project as a customer feature suggestion, then evolve into a design task, then evolve into a development task, with anyone from the company who’s interested easily following its evolution.

Also, getting data into Asana is super fast, especially once you learn the keyboard shortcuts. It’s one of those apps, like Gmail, that’s nimble and intuitive enough that the speed bottleneck becomes your brain’s processing power instead of anything in the app itself.

Asana tries to make it seem like you should use Asana to do absolutely everything, from making toast to causing humanity to thrive). The presence of other apps on this list should be a hint that I’m not all the way sold. But it’s definitely one of those tools that makes it hard to remember how you got by without it.

Chosen over: Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Jira, Basecamp, and pretty much every Mac todo list app ever made (Omnifocus, The Hit List, Things, etc.)

CRM & Applicant Tracking System: Streak

I’ve probably tried a dozen CRM systems, and Streak is the first that I can use for more than five minutes without becoming visibly upset. Streak crossed my radar a few times over the years, and I always quickly dismissed it; building a CRM into Gmail struck me as a gimmick, and I assumed that other functionality would suffer as a result.

I was dead wrong. After trying and being annoyed by the latest generation of CRM apps, I tried Streak out of half-desperation, and was blown away. For most purposes, it’s as flexible and powerful and way faster to use than competing products that are >2X the cost.

Right now we’re using streak to manage our hiring pipelines, business development opportunities, and submissions from Detour creators.

Chosen over: Salesforce, RelateIQ, Highrise, Recruiterbox, Jobvite, Lever, Greenhouse

Customer Service: Front

At Groupon we used Zendesk and loved it — it was leaps and bounds above the competition. Zendesk is still a great tool for larger companies, but for startups, Front is to Zendesk what Zendesk is to the competitors it disrupted. It’s just fast as hell. It’s not as powerful as Zendesk, but it doesn’t need to be for most companies — what’s most important is getting through your tickets as quickly as possible and I don’t think anyone does at as well as Front.

Chosen Over: Zendesk

Social Media: Buffer

Buffer does one thing really well: scheduling posts to your company’s Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn pages. There are other social media management tools that also handle monitoring and customer interaction, but for now I’m happy to use the browser for that stuff.

Chosen over: Tweetdeck, Hootsuite

Chat / Whatever: Slack

Slack, like Asana, is widely-loved, so I’ll just add a few observations about our usage.

We have an open floor plan, and people who are sitting right next to each other often use Slack’s private messaging to minimize disturbing other people. Once you become desensitized to how odd this behavior is, it’s a nice way to minimize the main negative of an open seating arrangement.

Our virtual communications happen through one of three channels: Email, Asana, or Slack. If there’s a downside of Slack, it’s that we probably have a tendency to overuse it and underuse Asana. I wouldn’t be surprised if many organizations have the same challenge. Slack caters to people’s natural impulsiveness and desire for an instant response, and as a result, stuff happens in Slack that would be better in Asana, which is non-interruptive, and allows progress against tasks to easily be tracked and prioritized. I recommend setting clear conventions for the types of conversations that should take place over each communication channel.

Chosen over: Campfire, Hipchat

Email: Gmail (native) With Asana and Slack, we don’t send a ton of internal email. We tend to use it for announcements that we want to be sure everyone sees. You can do this sort of thing with Slack or Asana, but email works so well for it. The important thing is that we rarely have internal conversations over email — I think that’s the main thing that makes people hate email.

I use a modified version of Inbox Zero through the native interface with keyboard shortcuts. I used to use Boomerang to enable email Snooze, now I use Streak. I’ve tried every new mail client that’s been released, but it’s hard for me to imagine something much better than Gmail in the browser.

Still Seeking

Here are few areas where I have yet to find an app I really love.

Internal Wiki / Blog / Intranet

We used Jive for Groupon’s intranet (after a long selection process) and people generally hated it. With tools like Asana and Slack, my guess is that heavyweight Intranets like that become less important over time.

That said, the one thing we do need is an internal wiki, and we haven’t found anything great yet. We’re using Google Sites, which is OK, but text editing is slow and prone to formatting errors. Github wikis are cool, but limited (e.g. you can’t embed video), and 75% of our employees have no other need for a Github account. If Hackpad had the ability to add a navigation sidebar, it’d be close to perfect for me.

Filemaker in the cloud

If well executed, I think this could be huge — a tool that allows non-developers to build applications. Fieldbook is maybe the closest thing I’ve seen, but still quite different.

In conclusion, here are a few patterns I’ve noticed about the tools I love:

• The developers have prioritized speed, i.e. getting people in and out of the app as quickly as possible.
• They’re affordable. The cost of Streak or Asana isn’t going to get in the way of you trying it.
• They don’t require a demo from a sales person. In my experience, this a dead giveaway of mediocre software. In fact, many of the products I love don’t even employ salespeople.

Originally published at blog.detour.com on September 2, 2014.