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Question: What's one thing that's commonly re-invented across businesses, in your opinion?

Perhaps it's an opportunity that SaaS builders miss, or it could be something that already exists, but could be better. Perhaps it's a process that's hard to be automated, or it's automated but lacks customizability (so part of it is re-invented over and over). Perhaps it's an industry we pay little attention to (agriculture, waste management, galleries, welfare/charity, very rich people's needs, housing development, insurance, logistics, etc).

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    In my experience, there's a missed opportunity in the world of Project Management.

    There are dozens of tools to help MANAGE projects, but I've seen very few that help inexperienced project managers (or project teams) PLAN projects.

    It doesn't matter what PM tool an organization uses, if the inputs aren't good, the project often fails.

    Unfortunately, most of the inputs a PM tool requires come from the project planning process, which at many organizations, is ad hoc or broken.

    I'd love to create a tool that walks a PM through a repeatable project planning process. It would help them ask the right questions and develop a document that aligns everyone working on the project before it gets started.

    It would help the team develop a basic scope statement, project charter, simple work breakdown structure, etc.

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      Sounds like you have a lot to say about project planning process! I don't know much (I fall into the ad hoc category, I suppose), so I'm all ears. What is this planning process like, at a high level, if you were to break it down?

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    The easiest examples are:

    1. CRUD UI to some underlying data (fulfilled to some extent by Coda and Airtable, but plenty of businesses either still rely on paper/spreadsheets, or exercise their own engineering muscles)
    2. Business Intelligence query/graph builders (Tableau is a prime example, but there are also folks who still use good old SQL queries to generate data table and render them with d3js or what have you)
    3. Various aspects of project management (Monday, Asana, Trello, etc. Unsure if this is saturated yet, but I think there's room for improvement. People sometimes fall back to spreadsheets perhaps for cost reasons or they can't get those management tools to adapt to their organizational needs)

    What I think are essentially solved for good:

    1. Direct-to-consumer e-commerce sites: Shopify.
    2. Payment systems: Stripe et al and specialized derivative systems that are built atop them
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    Business wikis / Confluence / Notion / Internal Documentation is still somehow a nightmare. I dislike all of those products.

    Same with "task management" tools like JIRA or Trello. Despite so much work being put into these apps, they all somehow feel like crap, and there are new ones popping up all the time.

    Finally, "finding good people" is re-invented all the time. There are SO MANY job boards and recruiting apps...

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      Never used Notion before, but when it was new all I ever heard was good things about it. What do you dislike about that class of products?

      Same thing with Trello and JIRA. Is it just a matter of your needs outpacing their customizability? Or are they forcing a certain workflow on you (kinda like SAP...).

      I suspect finding good people is an issue that can't be addressed by better automation or a bigger job board. Maybe Key Values by Lynne is on to something.

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        Notion isn't bad, but it was heavily marketed by a group of popular VCs on Twitter. It's a fine tool, it really is, but the hype around it was silly.

        Perhaps my dislike of JIRA was how it was forced upon me at a previous job despite it not being the right tool for us, but I also failed to find any alternatives that helped my team do work better. The combo of Slack + Company Wiki + Kanban board never felt right. Perhaps it's my own brain, perhaps not.

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          I notice you write about ADHD, a condition you said you have. Is that what you refer to when you said it's your own brain?
          What was your workaround?

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            I am not neuro-typical, however I don't want to use that for contextualizing everything. But it does give me some better insight, and perhaps adds a useful increase in my sensitivity to bad UX. Unfortunately I never got a chance to find a better solution at work before I left to go independent.

            The idea of having a communal information store is great, same for kanban, and a company messaging service. If I were to start over, I would have all of these things again, but I would try and find software that makes them as easy as possible. JIRA in particular felt like it was created to make managers happy, rather than developers.

            Slack is also too distracting, but I see why it's addicting. I'm not sure how to solve that one, but 99% of the features and bloat of JIRA and Confluence (and their competitors) could be removed.

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