Standup & Prosper
Async Team Standups
Your tools should encourage collaboration. While Slack, Teams, etc work well when everyone is at the keyboard, that isn't always the case. We created a frictionless companion tool to do just that.
There was a lot that has gone into building this bot that started out simple. Like all great projects there is always a huge Total Cost of Ownership, and tacked on to that are all the unforseen problems we ran into.
We've written up our story, so that others can benefit from understanding what it takes: Our story:
We started to get user messages to the bot which have nothing to with stand ups at all. It is quite an achievement. The most recent one was from user UFL1FGD1V: I Love You.
That makes our team feel so appreciated when our users reach out to us. It really is such a great feeling.
We've recently improved our internal data collection, and I have some interesting statistics to share. We are on track for:
- 50,000 Standup Reports in total by all our teams
- 400 daily standups by teams reporting over Standup & Prosper
- 572 Total Installations in different workspaces
While the exact number of teams is always influx our users come from 200 different companies. Each of those companies have their own unique strategy for communication, and have requested tons of new features.
We've tried to stay on top of them all, it was tough, but I think we've done a great job so far. I have to hand it to our team.
We've created and expanded our tool to fit our early adopters needs. And even more importantly it has still remained a staple for communication within our own team. We created this to be effective for us, and it has been.
We've also learned some interesting lessons, such as:
- Rotating questions are really important so that team members stay interested in sharing.
- Most teams like our standard questions, but others have done a great job coming up with unique ways to use standups. They can be really innovate and think of so many interesting usages we never considered like using Slack icons.
Our success in part is from how we "dog-food" Standup & Prosper. We want to make sure that we share all the improvements with our users, so that others can benefit. It wasn't always easy, but we've managed to stay up to date with changing integrations such as Slack Workspace Apps.
What better time to share using as async tool for collaboration than during December.
Our team is traveling everywhere. Standup & Prosper finally reached enough functionality that we are want to start to get feedback from others. It was good timing too, because our current standup tool promised to start charging us $5/per person/per month.
We figured out that we could support S&P by reusing all our architecture and framework from Teaminator without much additional work. Because of this, we're making the community edition of S&P to be forever free. It isn't a the full feature set nor everything you could possible dream about. However we think it will get most team's exactly what they want. (If you notice something out of place though, just let us know).
After trying out many Slack apps, my team finally gives up and decides none of the current ones had what we needed. It should be easy to have a standup or daily without your tool getting in the way, but that apparently isn't the case.
Some of the tools touted the possibility, but for some reason have a ridiculous price point. After much deliberation we decide that we could create something that would work for us, and hopefully for others. We'll share it when it is ready. :)