At Solid, our goal is to make it easy to run productive meetings. There are many types of meetings, and in this piece, we’re focusing on one: product management meetings.
Ask any project manager about the tools they use. You’ll be hard pressed to find one who’s fully satisfied with them. Asana, Jira, Trello, Podio, LiquidPlanner, Basecamp, Azendoo, OneNote, daPulse … The list is almost as long as there are features to offer. So how do you choose?
The Quest for the Perfect Project Management Tool
As we crystalized the product development process here at Wisembly/Solid, both our team and tools went through a series of cascading changes. Scaling the product development team meant having more developers and more designers, and it also meant hiring someone to oversee all these steps. Enters the product owner, enter the maelstrom of habit-changing tools. Having joined the team roughly a year after that, and seeing our PO still looking for the perfect set of tools that would stick with everyone, I sat down with him to understand where his beefs were.
As it turns out, most of it boils down to three uses:
- To be able to show the Product vision and roadmap to the team
- Short term
- Long term
- What will be pushed
- Short term
- Long term
- Collaboration
- During the conception phase
- During the development phase
Right there is the issue as two needs oppose: collaborating means having exchanges that constantly evolve. Showing the project status should be anchored in time to some level. While product vision and “near future” roadmap can be shown in much similar ways, we’ve never quite found the tool that would allow for conversations to happen at the same time.
Many tools, no ideal solution found
You consider one tool for product roadmap, one tool for conversations (you’ll have more), one tool for task management and personal tracking goals… Soon enough, it’ll become a mess.
No matter how hard we try to remove meetings from our lives, they claw themselves back into our schedules. Perhaps there’s a good reason for it. While in a perfect world, we’d be able to advance as well with asynchronous, text exchanges inside our project management app, we still haven’t found how to do it. Besides, meetings often help us surface dormant ideas and outstanding issues that got buried under new discussions and tasks. So it looks like we’re in for the long run with meetings.
Yet we still have conversations outside of meetings. A lot of these discussions happen on Slack, and we undoubtedly make progress thanks to them. But how do we make sure these conversations cement into real decisions, and that these decisions translate into real actions? In our case, the cement is the meeting. If an idea got traction on Slack, or raised controverses, we bring it up in a meeting. Only then will we truly put it to rest or decide to act on it.
Making the most of what we have
It soon looked like the closest we could do was pick Trello -> Github -> Solid. From there, integrating with other services that we use for general purposes came naturally. Slack and Email are the two most obvious ones. But anyone is free to link their personal task management system on the side. At Wisembly, Todoist and Wunderlist have a lot of fans. Here’s why we need the three tools:
- Trello for conception, defining the roadmap and sharing it with the team
- Github for development processes as well as discussions around tech choices, obviously
- Solid for the operational part: Who does what, then who did what, what’s left to do
We’ve found that allowing for flexibility, as mentioned before, with the tools and apps each team member uses, is what ultimately helped us succeed.
But the quest is never over. We’re currently testing out DaPulse for its ability to show snapshots of development at all time. Since I’m the one to market all the new features we launch, I like to have this global vision of the next features to come.
So there you have how our product management tool stack looks like. We know a lot of Solid users are product managers too, or part of a product team. In the coming months, we’ll look to develop this use case with concrete examples from teams using Solid.
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