Quools.io
At Sendtask, we are a fully distributed team, meaning there’s no office and no two people in the same place. To keep everyone in sync, we use a variety of tools. These are the five tools we use the most often:
#1: Sendtask
We use our own tool for sprint planning, roadmap, prioritization, call agendas, bug reports, feature requests, etc. We believe that dogfooding is crucial to building a good user experience and thus use Sendtask whenever and wherever we see fit. In general, everything that can be organized in a list goes into Sendtask.
#2: Google App Suite
We use all Google tools – from Gmail to Drive – to organize and share information and communication. With our email integration, we create tasks in Sendtask projects directly from Gmail. One Google Document is particularly helpful: While the team is still small, we use a Google Doc titled «Sendtask Bootcamp» as our wiki. We store all information needed for new team members to join the team in that one document.
#3: Slack
We’re all on Slack at least twice a day. We use a set of integrations to get real time updates about our system. And, of course, for 1-to-1 and group chat. We used to discuss bugs and features in Sendtask but then realized that sometimes these messages were forgotten because no one had put them on Sendtask as tasks. That’s why we built our Slack integration. With a very simple command (e.g. /sendtask @joe please prepare the report until Monday #sendtask) we are now able to create tasks directly from Slack.
#4: Appear.in
We hold one video call every week when the whole team gets together to update each other and discuss next steps. We use appear.in for these calls as it provides a very simple setup (no accounts, just like Sendtask) and great quality so far.
#5: Intercom
We use Intercom to talk to our users. Via the blue button in the bottom right corner, they have a very quick and easy way to talk to us and vice-versa – either while they use the app or via email when they’re not online.
Conclusions
I did not cover the tools we use for analytics and will cover those in another post. The five apps mentioned are in use almost every day, if not every hour and have been crucial in how we are able to build a distributed company.
What tools does your company use that might be helpful for us?
