Got as far as the sign-up. I'm already skeptical because of all the other options available and I'm already pretty happy with what I'm using. When I saw that I had to enter a credit card during signup just to try the free period, I closed the browser tab.
Getting even just an email address from someone is very valuable. Why turn anyone away by requiring all this other stuff? Why not have the person simply enter an email address and then send a password via email or something? That's a 5 second sign-up process. Then you can have the user fill out the rest of the info during some sort of "getting started" process. Let the user fill in this info on his own interest in using the application (within the actual application.) Filling out a sign-up form is not interesting. It's more like a leap of faith that the application will be interesting enough for me when I get into it that it will reward me for the effort of going through the sign-up process.
Do you really have such a high volume of sign-ups that you have to do beta invites? I wonder if there is a better way to handle these things. Perhaps you could have a system where the feature gets auto-enabled as needed? My problem with beta invites is that for most services, by the time I receive the invite, I have forgotten what the invite was for and I ignore the email.
ETA: Look how scrumy.com does their process of getting a user from using the app to sign-up. Maybe not perfect, but far better than most I have seen.
All great feedback. The primary reason to limit signups right now is twofold: 1. There are only two of us and the holidays are upon us, so we wanted to keep support load as low as possible for now, 2. Our on-boarding process/funnel, as you've pointed out, is really lacking. Two nerds with full-time jobs don't make great copy editors unfortunately.
We're working on all of these things. I'll check out scrumy.com as well. Thanks for the tip.
Looks nice, but it still leaves me with the same feeling as most other tools like this: any co-located team is better off with just whiteboards, cards and sticky notes.
Plus most of these tools are geared towards the structured initial development phase, and become considerably less usable once a product is live and goes into maintenance mode. This is odd, since the major part of a projects lifespan consists of maintenance, not development.
The one great missing online tool IMO is one that both integrates and separates the way the user experiences issues (like via Zendesk) and the way those issues are split up, prioritized and handled by developers (any known issue tracking system like Redmine etc).
Right now, every team I know either uses two systems in which the relationship is handled manually (and thus labor intensive and prone to errors) or one system that is only geared towards either audience.
Tender was built with that exact situation in mind. You can attach any number of support issues to one Lighthouse ticket and get bi-directional notification. This is a nice way to notify n support requests that the problem has been fixed once it's shipped. Alas, it only works with Lighthouse still.
But I do wish more support systems worked this way.
I definitely agree on the physical whiteboard + cards. Having used a large Kanban board and then changing to a project using the full suite of Jira tools, I am dying to get back to the board.
WIP limits and ordered backlogs are missing. There is no need to make 'custom views' for a whiteboard - with Jira they are like 5 different ways to get to a list of items that need to be worked on and I'm never quite sure I'm looking at the right list.
Co-located teams are better off with sticky notes and whiteboards as long as the client is also in the same room :)
Either way, I work from South America for clients in the US, so I like having these tools around. Specially when they innovate in any way. That means better tooling for communicating with my clients, which is the #1 problem of distributed teams :)
I didn't watch the whole video because it completely fails to describe the workflow. What I'm really interested in: how would Sprint.ly solve/represent this workflow:
1. Customer reports a defect
2. Programmer figures out there are two tasks that needs to be done by different people (in different places). One task depend on the other.
3. The first task is solved. How does the other person know to start?
4. The second task is re-assigned and then solved.
Actually, it doesn't have to be this complex. But at least have that in mind when showing your product; all todo-applications can tackle the easy stuff, it's when the more complex use-cases appear that most of them fall apart.
And when you say "make it possible for everyone to participate" I hear "no way to figure out what you need to do". Although it's good to have a place to see everything, I'm more often interested in only what I need to participate in. Show us that please!
I just took the time to watch through the whole video, and it does seem you provide quite a lot of features to handle these complex cases. I still miss the focus on "this is how you solve your problems" versus "this is the features of sprint.ly".
As for #3 in your list, we offer a feature where coder A can say, "Hey, coder B, you're item X is blocking my item Y!" When coder B finishes item X, coder A is alerted via email that coder B has unblocked them.
The original comment is correct though in that the video just talks about features, it doesn't tell a story or focus on how it would be used to build a product.
Even though I'm familiar with pivotal/ticketing systems, I still wanted to be sold on what it does not just on how it does it.
I know it sounds crazy, but I'd love a free option. A 1 person project doesn't make a lot of sense in any case other than as a test for the product. From that view, a free option doesn't seem like a big deal. I think of it like having a racing bike I can't take out of the house. I can see all that it does, try it out, but to really use it I'll get a paid account.
It's beautiful, the video is great, but I don't see myself using this instead of the other thousands of project management tools. What does it do differently? In what will it make my life easier? Is it for developers or managers (or everyone..?) Basically, why should I use this instead of trello or asana? (To name only 2 out of 1000 project management tools).
The site itself is light on details, but the video provides an excellent overview of the product. I especially like the minimap and the mad lib-style issue reporting.
No, seriously, for something as integral to what I do so many hours every day, I don't mind people continuing to innovate. Getting an editor or a management tool to fit you perfectly is pretty hard, and I, for one, haven't found a process or tool I'm 100% happy with
When Pivotal first launched they had a free version for a while before started to switching pricing. Now, I understand there is a big no-no about raising the price later. However, I think there is a world where they can offer:
A - personal free accounts. Or free account for team of < 2.
B - announce the price but provide a 6-9 mont grace period just so they can get a nice momentum.
Now, they might be charging from the get go for fundraising reasons. Basically so they can go to investors and say: look we got X number of real paying customers in Y months. Which makes a real good case for getting investors.
That said, I love the UI. But I wont invest anytime on it yet, unless I know I can use it for free for a few months, or if there is strong social value that proves it can really help projects and requirement gathering process.
Sorry, we just have the video right now, but we hear you loud and clear. Lots of people asking for this. Nerds aren't great at putting together marketing materials. Who knew? Thanks!
I often joke (with myself since I'm sad that way) that everyone must at some point make a productivity web-app. It's nice that Joe has made one that fixes a few things that annoy me about most.
Most are targeted at engineers first (Pivotal), at visually oriented organizers (Trello) or adapted for the specific team that wrote it's methods (like Thoughtbot's).
Luckily I'm at the "tool choice" stage of a new venture so I won't give my team whiplash by trying this one out. If it integrates with Campfire it'd be perfect.
Chat hooks! I want hipchat (or campfire, w/e) to say "Joe commented on…" etc. Specially new items, comments and status changes.
Then I could configure github to notify sprintly and sprintly to notify the chat, instead of getting all the pushes in the chat, which is too noisy IMO.
I got a bit distracted after I realized I recognized the voice in the video, but it looks like a nice project management tool. I wish there was more information about estimation though.
Right now, we use Pivotal and the lack of estimation on tasks makes it an incomplete offering. We estimate feature, but that is a fairly rough estimate used for longer-term prediction. It isn't until we break things down into tasks that people really understand how long it is going to take. Just having to estimate hours gets people to really think things through.
Given that half of project management is about predicting completion dates and judging risk of slippage, I'd say estimation is absolutely required.
We have estimation; it's just not featured in the video. Whoops! The estimates are the bubbles next to the item cards. We use S, M, L, XL for all item types.
We've recently tried apptrajectory.com but they are iterating in a different direction from what we want (e.g. Stories are finished then delivered then accepted)
sprint.ly looks like it is a lot closer to our workflow.
I bailed halfway through the intro video. There was nothing wrong. It looks great. I'm just so very jaded about anything purported to manage... anything. Especially in a web app.
Haha! We feel you. Your response was pretty much exactly what my developer friends said to me. "I'd like to use the product management app that doesn't exist." ... That's why we worked so hard on the GitHub integration. It's basically a CLI interface to sprint.ly for developers. We also have pretty deep email integration for managers.
Vimeo doesn't allow one to skip ahead -- it should be hosted on youtube. (I have this problem with any vimeo vs youtube video.) Also, it looks like some of those popup boxes don't open when clicked until a delay happens. Looks slow. Ug.
We use Python/Django and MySQL. Pretty boring to be honest, which I'm digging after spending nearly five years working on crazy ass big infrastructure.
That being said, I'm eyeing Redis, Node.js, Memcached (of course), and some AWS services for future upgrades, services, and features.
Getting even just an email address from someone is very valuable. Why turn anyone away by requiring all this other stuff? Why not have the person simply enter an email address and then send a password via email or something? That's a 5 second sign-up process. Then you can have the user fill out the rest of the info during some sort of "getting started" process. Let the user fill in this info on his own interest in using the application (within the actual application.) Filling out a sign-up form is not interesting. It's more like a leap of faith that the application will be interesting enough for me when I get into it that it will reward me for the effort of going through the sign-up process.
Do you really have such a high volume of sign-ups that you have to do beta invites? I wonder if there is a better way to handle these things. Perhaps you could have a system where the feature gets auto-enabled as needed? My problem with beta invites is that for most services, by the time I receive the invite, I have forgotten what the invite was for and I ignore the email.
ETA: Look how scrumy.com does their process of getting a user from using the app to sign-up. Maybe not perfect, but far better than most I have seen.