Shaping the Future of Agile Project Management – Seeking Feedback on Landing Pages and Idea!
Hey Indie Hackers,
I'm Mark, founder of Methodshift and I’m super excited to share with you an innovative project I’ve been passionately working on - "Mission Control". This cloud-based tool aims to revolutionize the software delivery space by providing a powerful analytics suite for agile teams, with a focus on eliminating vendor lock-in and reducing cost.
Here's the catch: We are transforming the way project managers view their data, promoting a proactive approach rather than reactive, and creating a unified toolset that automates many manual activities currently burdening PMs.
The purpose of my post here is two-fold:
- I've recently updated the landing pages for Mission Control, and I'm keen to get your valuable feedback on both the design and the content.
- Mission Control landing page: https://www.methodshift.co.uk/mission-control/
- Mission Control for Teams tier landing page: https://www.methodshift.co.uk/for-teams/
- Mission Control for Teams Live demo: https://mission-control.methodshift.co.uk/44/overview
- Mission Control for Organisations (holding page): https://www.methodshift.co.uk/for-enterprise/
- As we move into the next phase of our project, I’m eager to hear your thoughts on the product idea in general. We're targeting a vast market space which includes the $7 billion global Project Management software market and the fast-growing DevOps market.
In a nutshell, if you were a project manager, a team leader, or even a CTO, how appealing would you find this product? What aspects resonate with you the most, and what parts would you improve?
Looking forward to your thoughts, insights, and constructive criticism. Thanks in advance, everyone!
Hey Mark,
Here're a few thoughts from me.
TLDR: slow load time, unclear problem/solution definition, no video demo, shorten the text, pricing unclear, everything could be fit into a single page.
Regarding the site:
It might be because I'm in the US, and you're apparently in the UK, but the site pages load quite slowly. Slow sites lose users. Some pictures took me 3—4 seconds to load https://share.cleanshot.com/b25KNnkbZ7Sp7GhhDzJ7. I noticed they're also PNGs and not jpegs or webps. Unless you strongly need transparency in an image, I'd suggest formatting and compressing them using something like cloudconvert.com or I'm sure you know that Google Page Insights can do it for you when you analyze it.
Speaking of the hero. The main title is a little too generic to explain what the product is about. However, I think you do it well right below the fold. Consider rephrasing these into a one-two liner and highlighting this in the hero instead https://share.cleanshot.com/YZFbdf9SdqgX6t0hFJ0b.
“Book a demo today”. Nobody has time for this. I know it's somewhat of a pattern to offer scheduled demos in b2b/b2e, but even in those sectors—there're still humans. If you can save time with a 1-minute demo right in the hero section, they'd be much more inclined to talk to you and you'll get a higher quality lead. Awesome that you have the “Live demo” in the top right! That's a great addition, but it would be awesome to be a fly on the wall and observe how MissionControl is used by an actual delivery manager in a short video demo. https://basecamp.com/ is a good example.
Feature and benefits section. Again, vague, talking about what could happen if they start using the product. But what is the product? Why should I care?
I think what's missing on the site is the story of solving a problem. There're lots of screenshots that look like PowerPoint graphs that PMs adore, but what challenges does it help with? Maybe there's a way of starting with an issue, like hey, this is Jef and Jef has no idea what the hell his team is working on. Now Jef connects his Jira to MissionControl and gains all these insights like how quickly can we ship new Checkout or if our quality of work has been trending down (though I'd not correlate this with the number of bugs found, personally).
Look at your landing page as a human story, read your copy, and imagine a live human saying this while talking to a friend about the product.
Speaking of Pricing. Again, not sure if this has to be a separate page. Why aren't you using the same verbiage from the hero, Teams, and Organizations? Are they billed differently? Can the Organization stay on the Free plan? Should the Team buy the ”Standard plan” that has a ”For a large team” caption?
There're lots of pages. Are you sure you need all that much? I'd recommend cutting all of them down and trying to fit everything on a single page. I can see you wanted to focus on Teams and Organizations, but you can try working around this by showing the Pricing and Feature difference.
Regarding the idea itself. I've never led big teams' scrum processes to properly evaluate the idea. But so to me this looks like an expensive Jira addon. You'll probably need to focus more on the problem/use cases aspects of it so that there's a clear value. Possibly niche down to a specific issue so that you don't have to built a gigantic product before validation?
Also, allowed myself to play around with your hero section, focusing on the what-product-does aspect https://share.cleanshot.com/1zVd0p5YfRktZGbv97pd.
I hope this is useful! Good luck.
Hi Igor,
Thanks for the amazing and detailed feedback. A lot of it has hit the nail on the head.
I'll be working on resolving those performance & cookie issues and making it all a bit clearer going forward. A bit more info, we currently have 4 people in private beta guiding the development of Teams. We started here because the Organisational tier needs to be built on the solid foundations of a working and useful Teams tier.
I think you are right that ultimately it probably needs a single page & a demo video. The evolution of the product to have multiple tiers has lead to two distinct pages, but I think my primary (paying) customer will be big enterprise organisations and not individual team leaders. This is the feedback I've recently been receiving since the start of private beta. So I should simplify the messaging and focus on that. I've already had quite a bit of interest at the Organisation tier; one consultancy I demo'ed an early version to offered to buy the product and for me to join them to further developer it.
The idea is that Mission Control is the tool for visualising your development ecosystem and tracking the execution phase of big projects. Currently to get this big picture view you need to use Jira Advanced Roadmaps or Jira Align which are ridiculously expensive (£6-7000 a month at least) + both are restricted behind Jira Premium. They also tie you into using Atlassian products which also goes against the idea of self organising teams who can pick and chose the tooling that works for them.
Most companies build this view with inefficient steering/alignment meetings with 20+ people, a Program manager who collates all the data and the builds a gantt chart, probabilistic forecasts or burnup charts.
In the fullness of time Mission Control will connect into many different PM tools (Jira, Trello, Monday etc) and many different instances of each tool to give the big picture overview. A lot of large orgs have multiple PM tools and struggle to see the big picture given the fragmented ecosystem.
Ultimately it will give insights into the strategic initiatives in a company, their teams and the work they are doing predict delivery and guide teams in best practice to allow that big picture view to be created.
-Mark
P. S. Noticed the site sets cookies, but there wasn't a cookie banner or a policy about that. Not that I'm disappointed in this (quite the opposite, lol), but just keep in mind this might become a legal issue at some point.