Which tools do you use to track product development?
Heya brilliant makers! Happy Sunday! Pls, help a fellow maker from an information overflow:)
I am doing my weekly processing ritual of all product-related inbound information. I thought I would get clarity so I could set the weekly objectives for the team. Instead, I feel like I am opening doors to new doors in an endless maze.
Need your beautiful minds:)
How do you collect, store and analyze product-related information? In particular:
- Your own thoughts/notes on future growth/product features
- Inspirational material you get from the web (via Tweeter, podcasts, etc)
- The feedback you collect from your users
- Ideas from the team
I use Notion, where I have set up pages for:
- Leap of faith assumptions I set and test
- Functionality ideas
- Feature roadmap
But I feel that I am missing something. Which other useful habits/tips do you do to stay on top of product development?
PS: if you are active on Twitter, and you are keen to know how a non techie is transitioning from building brick and mortar businesses into the digital realm -please follow! Your support will be a game-changer for me.
PS2: if you have a bootstrapped business, that you would consider offloading on a fellow maker (for a fair and quick consideration), I would be keen to look into your project!
I have been using Trello. Did use Monday.com and admire it for ease of use.
Slowly shifting our focus towards GitHub issues and Actions.
These above tools are a game-changer.
I would suggest listening to podcasts such as:
Syntax.fm
Mixergy
The Saas Podcast by Omer Khan
and of course - Indie Hackers too
In the above podcasts, you can gain insights, trends, and techniques to develop your projects.
Hope this is helpful.
Thank you very much! Curious to listen to the SaaS podcast!
Didn't get which tool for you is a game changer: GitHub Issues and Actions?
It is GitHub Issues. It helps the team members to post their issues on the application being built and at the same time creates a platform to see what issues can be fixed or have been fixed. It according to me is a game-changer.
Actions are something, I haven't had a chance to test much. It has been recently introduced I believe. It is more towards DevOps (If I am not wrong)
Hey there - huge fan of https://roamresearch.com/ - I use it for everything, including product ideas and organisation. It has a relatively steep learning curve but after a few hours it clicks, and after that there's no going back. :)
Thanks! Did hear about Roamresearch.
2 questions:
(1) Why do you prefer it over Notion?
(2) How do you organize your workflow for product development?
Good questions. The main reason is that you don't need to know where to put a bit of information before writing it in Roam. Everything you write starts at the same place, and with bi-directional links/reference the knowledge around a topic expands organically.. That's the biggest success of Roam to me - removing any notion of hierarchy to categorise content - but focus on links between things even if they are across different hierarchies.
For your second question, the workflow I have isn't too rigid. I use Roam for everything, including reading notes of books or article. Since Roam enables you to create connections between concepts, it helps me find ideas or different perspective on problems.
I have wondered this question for a while and have had my fare share with notion, JIRA, Asana, Tuleap, evernote etc. Essentially it was more like wherever I went to work, everyone has their own wizardry. I did find one such product which definitely is my choice but I would still like to share and is purely for product management need which is craft.io, if you are looking for something that will help keep tech team in sync then this may not be the answer. It is very use case based.
Craft.io works best when you need a product that focuses on research, low fidelity wireframes, planning releases, delivering roadmaps etc. It brings teams like marketing, design and tech together. Maybe you should check it out. Product plan is another such product which I like but will not prefer over Craft
I use Asana for tasks and progress tracking and Evernote for collecting information. I will consider using Notion when it has added a timeline feature.
You don't use Jira?
No need yet. Just 1 developer, and not that many bugs, so Asana works fine for now:-)
When would you switch?
I think both Jira and Asana do the same thing. It really depends on your preference, features, UI, and pricing.
Asana =$14/person/monthly
Jira = $10/person/month
I need timeline which both offers.
I don't have many team members (3-4). I need a tool more for project/task management (timeline/tasks/subtasks/dates/status) than project process management (board/Kanban/Agile).
My partner and I both like list format more than board format. Asana offers both format, but Jira doesn't offer list format. We like to scan through the list and expand item to see sub-items easy and fast. We are high level/overview type of people, so timeline + list (with easy sub-tasks) are our preference:-) We can't do that with Jira. That is a deal breaker.
If you have a lot of items to keep track and need the process to help you out and don't need list format, then Jira is cheaper and can do more, I think, when the team gets bigger. Just my opinion.
I have a designer + developer => do you think I should invest time into setting up Jira or use Asana for now?
I'm hesitant to suggest Scrum + Issue tracking software (JIRA / Linear.app)
I'm not sure if by product development you mean the actual development of the product (writing the software) or the ideas that will lead to them.
Thanks, Oscar. Actually the entire workflow. From idea to development.
I am using Notion to store all ideas. But I feel it's not for development.
Now I am switching to jira for product development with my team.
What do you think?
You can still use Notion for development, check this template:
https://www.notion.so/To-do-22ea4a5722cf49ad83718b10f4ff14f9 (should've mention this along with JIRA / Linear above)
And keep the product documents still with Notion
What I meant was to use scrum methodology with a scrum board (or any other agile methodology like Kanban).
So Scrum workflow is summarized here
Sprint: Do a bunch of work (all disciplines) for a boxed period of time ( on my 9-5 work we currently use 3 weeks)
Sprint planning: Agree what to work on during the sprint.
Daily standup: What you did yesterday, what are you going to do today and do you have any problems (this is a knowledge sharing among team members rather than a report to your boss kind of meeting, keep it under 15 minutes)
Sprint review At the end of the sprint, show what you finished to your stakeholders, only complete work goes here (ideally that's already in production)
Some sprints (specially at first) there wont be much.
Sprint retrospective Meeting with the whole team to reflect on What went well, what went wrong, what can be changed.
Backlog grooming: Here's where you grab all these ideas / feedback / notes and inspirations and turn them into TODO items that the team will transform into a product.
There's of course a lot more on this, some of your team members might already know this. You can also hire a scrum master to help implement it and / or take a 2 days workshop on it. It's not particularly hard and it's very flexible.
Feel free to reach out if you need clarification on any of these steps.
Thanks Oscar! Any highly recommended books?
Hm none that I can think of, but there are plenty of resources Scrum and Agile software development methodologies .
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Same here. Fell in love with Notion at day 1. Even though I have spent years building a mega Evernote system.
But now, as I am getting into tech -> thinking of adding Jira as a tool. What are your thoughts?
I want to use Notion. But it has no timeilne feature yet. So I will keep using Asana until the feature is out:-)
True.