We Have Totally Redesigned Azendoo Tasks From The Ground Up
Here’s Why
This is the inside story of why we decided to redevelop, totally, our core feature.
Being brutally honest with what we had achieved.
It’s always a challenge to make changes to an app when you reach 300.000 users who rely on it to get things done everyday. But rebuilding an app is a big deal, a tough decision… One we’ve made and finally executed, for a reason.
2 years after launch, Azendoo had nice partnerships…
… received cool awards, had our sales growing, managed to secure loyal — even fan — users, but…
- App performance was going to be a liability. While the technical stack was OK, the way we handled the complexity of managing personal and team tasks, potentially on multiple timezones, was becoming an issue. Performance was decreasing and would soon damage responsiveness that is key to your experience. That issue was increasing fast as we got more users on-board and each of them using our app more intensively.
- (Lack of) UX design was slowing down adoption. Azendoo had simply not invested enough time nor found the right product designer for our previous version. Consequence: our app was good enough, but not game-changing and definitely not the level of experience we wanted to provide for our users to stick with it.
- Not fit for next stage enhancements. Very often, the former app technical design slowed us in our road-map delivery. Even worse, at some point it prevented us from developing new features or new integrations. It became obvious that we had to rip-off and replace our ground app to drive value in a lot of other ways in the future.
Moving on, slowly but firmly
It took us a few month to a) realize the depth of the issue, b) decide to rebuild it, c) Unhide from the true priority and d) do it.
Yeah, I know, it may look too cautious for a startup, but remember that we had a nicely growing user base, premium business customers, habits around our app, and no other external factor to push us quicker.
So March, April and May were intense months for the Azendoo team, with Task Pilot being a key big milestone for us as a company. And much more than we anticipated:
We grew as a team along the way at the same time as we were crafting a better product.
- We learnt to commit to releasing on time,
- We learnt to make smaller, yet 100% delivered product features,
- We learnt to think “experience-first” and raised our level of UX design, thanks to Luc who joined the team.
Sticking & Executing on our Vision
The collaboration market has seen one of the most impressive unicorn in the history of Startups. Chat app Slack showed that teamwork is a key topic to take care of in the B2B environment.
Azendoo seeks to redefine the rules of team organization (not only communication), the next big thing in B2B SaaS. Teamwork management encompasses team tasks, time management, knowledge sharing, remote working, personal commitment and team priority sharing.
To make it to the next million users, we had to think differently and build a radically app. One that makes a difference. One that scales. And by scaling, we mean:
- grow global, making it easier to use by all cultures and countries;
- deliver value-driven design to all of you, not just early-adopting startups;
- building for the future, behind the scenes, by improving the unseen.
So we interviewed our users, a lot of them. Talking to them not only revealed whether Azendoo succeeded in solving their problem, but also helped define the boundaries of the market we address.
Releasing and explaining
Overall, you have been thrilled by Azendoo Task Pilot. Of course, We also had to handle change management for others, usually premium, that complained about our radical shift.
A few days after release, we are committed to talk to them all and get feedback to polish Task Pilot and prepare for the coming new stuff that’s already almost ready to release:
- Task Enlargement, to focus your app 100% on a single task;
- Sections, to divide your team tasks into groups, for better sync;
- Multi-selection, to allow for bulk edits and work faster;
- Unassigned tasks, to prepare an action plan and assign later;
- Dashboards, to compare what’s done against the objective;
- Calendar view, to let you identify team bottlenecks over time;
- A 1:1 integrated chat.
So here it is. Azendoo Task Pilot is the building block of a new Azendoo, designed to change and improve the way people work in teams.
I hope you enjoy it!
