The most important tools you need to run a startup
As we build Poetica, we’re sharing what we learn, as we learn it. Our last post was all about how we get things done in our team.
This week’s ‘Making Of’ post focuses on the tools we use to help us with the two most important things we do as a startup: work together as a team and talk to our users.
Working together as a team
In a small team — in any team — we believe that communicating openly and regularly about what we’re working on is really important; it gives every member of the team more agency and improves the efficiency and effectiveness of how we work.
We’ve also found you have to put effort into being open. Humans are secretive by default — unless you’re capable of mind-reading! So we choose software that helps us share.
Slack
What we use it for:
Talking amongst the team all day, every day.
What’s great about it:
For us, the most important feature of Slack is that all communication is open to everyone by default. That means it’s much easier to choose to be open, rather than closed. If you ever want to talk in private, Slack forces you to make an active decision to do that, which you then have to justify. Whilst we instinctively think some topics should be discussed behind closed doors, we realised that that instinct is often wrong: there’s very little we need to talk about privately in silos within the team. Open is almost always better.
Trello
What we use it for:
A giant prioritised to-do list that’s shared across the team and that forms the basis of our sprints. Here’s how we organise it:
Trello backlog board: where ideas go to die
Backlog: This board has loads of tasks we know we need to do but aren’t working on right away. They’re organised into columns: ‘ideas’; ‘admin’; ‘technical debt’ etc — but if we were being honest with ourselves, we only really use ‘stories to prioritise’. This is where we put all of the ideas we have for what we should work on next — everything else in the backlog is too often just a dumping ground for ‘we really should do this some day’ and having somewhere to put those ideas makes us feel like we won’t forget them!
This is where stories live
Current sprint story board: This is where we store the stories we’re working on right now. There’s more on how we use stories here.
What we’re working on *right* now
Current sprint: Stories are broken down into tasks and kept in here. This is what we use as our team to-do list. Tasks move from left to right across the board as they make progress from “to do”; “in progress”; “work done” and “done done”. Stuff on gets into “done done” if it’s in the hands of users.
What’s great about it:
Trello does something we aspire to in our own product design: it’s flexible enough for you to do what you want with it and doesn’t prescribe your behaviour. If you could organise cards horizontally as well as vertically, that’d help us manage multiple stories at once more easily, but other than that, its design allows us to hack it for whatever our process needs.
Poetica
The best way to get feedback
What we use it for:
Blog posts (just like this one); sense-checking important emails; website copy; sharing ideas; planning things; investor updates; applications — anything where we’re looking for feedback on text.
What’s great about it:
This post isn’t a sales pitch so we’ll keep it brief ;) We’re building Poetica to scratch our own itch. There are many writing tools and a host of choices for sharing or publishing your writing. But there’s nothing that’s purely focused on making that writing better. We’re trying to do that at Poetica by helping you get feedback and iterating on your work.
Talking to our users
We spend a lot of time talking to our users. At the moment, much of that is face-to-face or directly via email, but there are instances where we need to do that at scale too. It’s something the entire team gets involved in.
Apo.io
What we use it for:
Support.
What’s great about it:
All the support tools we looked at were too complicated. All we wanted was a single mailbox where every team member received the support email, but it was hard to see when a support request had been replied to. Apo.io does that. Great support is really important to us: if you’re using Poetica and you get in touch, it’s a team priority to solve your problem as fast as we can — sometimes that involves building and releasing an entire feature. It’s also the responsibility of every single team member. We each take turns to manage the support inbox in week-long rotations.
Typeform
What we use it for:
User surveys. We’ve surveyed our entire user base shortly after big releases. We also use Typeform to survey smaller sections — often users who’ve agreed to be alpha/beta testers.
What’s great about it:
Surveys are a great way of asking users what they think anonymously. We like unfiltered opinions. It’s also a good way of keeping you honest about the quantity of feedback: it’s really easy to think that you’re hearing X feature request repeatedly. Until you can say “we’ve heard about X feature request Y times”, you’re just relying on hunches. Surveys have helped us quantify our qualitative feedback.
Metrics
Metrics are a whole other story. Setting up great metrics for your startup is hard for a bunch of reasons, but that’s for another post. We’ve gone for a less is more approach for the time being. At the stage we’re at, we only track a handful of stats. Well actually, that’s not technically true: we use Graphite to log everything (almost!) but we only look at a few things week-on-week. We use Grafana to create graphical user interfaces for our graphite data, alongside Google Analytics and Mixpanel to give us a clear picture of what our users are doing.
Why tools matter
The importance of the tools you use goes beyond whether one allows you to be more productive than another: they reinforce (or can help to set) culture and team practices. That’s why they shouldn’t dictate what a team does, but rather support them to do their thing better. Not only is that important in the tools we use as a team to make Poetica, but it’s a core principle in how we design and develop our own product.
We’d love to hear what your favourite tools are and why too!
Thanks to James Adam, Ian Drysdale, Kath Hibbert, Katee Hui, Oo Nwoye, Nicklas Persson and Emily Webber for their feedback on Poetica drafts of this blog post.
Originally published at blog.poetica.com on October 23, 2014.
