LaserDesk

Now that users can create their account and organization, it is time to attack the heart of the project: issues.

I've spent some time figuring out the scope of this project. It needs to fit in two weeks since I don't want long projects which could impact my motivation, I'd rather have short-term successes to boost my morale ! 💪🏻

Issues are a tricky matter, as everything evolves around them. A User can create issues, edit them, people can comment on issues, mark them as resolved (or close them). I can assigns issues to someone, or tag issues. This could easily end up in weeks, I had to downsize the project whilst delivering something impactful at the end.

Here's the result

We will deal here with the core of the issue system, which is creating, editing and resolving issues. We'll set collaboration features aside for the moment as the risk to overflow is too big on two weeks.

As a product creator, I love working with the [Shape up methodology(https://basecamp.com/shapeup). It is a hands-on methodology about shipping impactful projects, developed by the great guys at Basecamp. In essence, the methodology invites to ship well thought-out projects within a fixed timeframe. It gives the developer a lot of room for developing the project, yet it insures he will not end up blocked by an unforeseen "rabbit-hole" which would put the project at risk.

I am using this method building LaserDesk, with 2-weeks cycles, and I have shipped the first project successfully ! You can find the pitch for this first project here.

This first project was about User onboarding, allowing them to create an account, login, and create an organization, which will be the home of their team. This project was also the occasion of testing the design of the platform, which you'll see a few glimpses on the attached pictures!

This is it, I've created the first code commit of my new project: LaserDesk. I am building it as a side project which I intend to use at work.

The main reason I am building LaserDesk is because I need it. As a professional developer, part of my job consists in answering tickets from customers forwarded to us by our beloved Customer Support Managers. We call those 911s 🔥.

We answer all sorts of requests: bugs, questions about the product, manually trigger actions for yet-to-build features.. You name it. We use todos in Basecamp to track opened issues and mark them as resolved. we used JIRA and Trello before. After answering dozens of those, though, I realized I was not happy by the tools available to us and thought about the "ideal" tool, and the features I'd need:

• Context: Tickets coming from support often lack context. Intermediaries are a pain and we would often benefit from the raw unaltered customer message. An ideal tool would allow one to forward tickets or conversations from Custom Support Software such as Intercom, Helpscout, Zendesk or directly by forwarding an email. No more running after Slack messages, emails or meetings.

• Knowldege: Too much time is spent answering already-asked questions. The ideal tool would allow one to search existing tickets to find answers.

• Collaboration: The ideal tool would help collaborate on ticket resolution as well as give the requester visibility on who's workingn on what.

• Fair pricing: Customer support softwares have expensive per-seat pricing, which prevents the onboarding of developers on these tools to find context. The ideal tool would have a flat unlimited-seats monthly price.

LaserDesk's objective is to be this tool. I intend to build it in public and share you insights along the way right here. I am looking forward to building it with this community and answering any questions you might have !