What tools best enable your remote team to collaborate and do great work?
Brenden Mulligan
27 replies
Remote has been on the rise for years, but Covid has forced all companies to adjust to it over the past few months. I'm curious to know:
1. What tools are indispensable for your team to get work done? Which do you love the most and why?
2. What tools/rituals help your team still feel a sense of togetherness / build culture?
3. What are the biggest missing pieces to your remote team toolkit, or things that cause the biggest pain points?
I'm compiling all the results and will share that publicly (and on PH of course). The more data and opinions, the better!
Replies
Alex@alexyoungkwon
Hi Brenden, Long time! I’m working on something you might be interested in. I was gonna email you the testflight, but I don’t have your latest email - does the one with getcluster or launchkit still work? If not, drop your email here, I’ll set you up! https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
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@alexyoungkwon just signed up!
"What tools/rituals help your team still feel a sense of togetherness / build culture?"
Branch is built for this exact purpose. See https://branch.gg
@daytonmills this is neat. Is it designed to enable watercooler moments at a remote HQ?
We just launched Papyrs a few days ago to help (partially) remote teams with this.
We're a 100% remote team ourselves, and we initially built this to collaborate online by keeping all information and discussions in one place. We wrote a little bit more about some routines that work for our team while working remotely on our blog, at https://about.papyrs.com/@blog/H...
@abhineetsays Thanks! Although it's definitely possible to use Papyrs as a personal knowledge base of sorts, from what I gather one difference is that our focus is more on teams and companies. In some ways we were initially positioned more as a modern SharePoint or Confluence alternative, but of course there's also overlap with Notion.
In terms of functionality, that means sites with Papyrs are more structured and it's easy to manage permissions. Next to writing docs, our widget-based page editor also allows you to do things like make dashboards, forms, or internal news posts, something (larger) companies need often on typical intranet sites. From running the app for a while, we also know many companies find integration important (like G Suite, Google Calendar, Slack, etc.), so that's all built-in along with things like Custom Domains, an API, and Single Sign On.
1) I believe that covid might forced us to use new tools, but the key is the right process for remote cooperation. None of the tools to track tasks e.g.: Jira, trello, asana won't help if our team isn't engaged in the process.
I would rather focus on workflow than changing the tools.
2) There are plenty of meetings that are quite funny (all remote): pub-quiz, question friday (everybody open the same question not related to business) & remote lunch!
3) Reactive behavior - not everyone is easily engaged with all remote process and it takes time
@pawellubiarz what are you doing to solve #3? Getting a buy in from everyone is a huge challenge Pawel
1. Slack and Jira are at the core of our work. I love slack channels to organize conversations and information in the company.
2. We use https://www.wombo.io to run virtual group yoga sessions with the team. It's a great way to connect and have human interaction outside of work. It also feels great to stretch ;)
3. After moving to remote I noticed loneliness/isolation was a real problem. There were no conversations/interactions happening outside of slack/jira which was a little bit life sucking? draining? Anyway, those virtual group yoga sessions helped with that
@abhineetsays channels for teams, departments, questions, feedback, knowledge sharing, announcements, and also fun stuff like food, random, etc. Zoom doesn't let you share screen (yoga youtube video) and camera at the same time. Wombo has a side by side view so that you can see everyone and follow along with the yoga class at the same time. Its more fun and social. Have you used zoom for social events with your team?
Knowledge management is the key those days to share information. As you've said, Covid has been a hard time for all companies and they need to find the best solutions to work better on projects. I know WikiValley it is an online platform which can be use in this way. Users can contribute on the wiki and all is published on the site and registered. https://wiki-valley.com/wiki/Cre...
We're building Opul to automate stakeholder wrangling so you can spend your time creating, not tracking people down.
Remote work is adding an extra wrench into the process - in the words of a senior PM “I think everyone is more inundated with slacks now so it’s harder to filter signal / actual to-do’s vs. noise / chatter. Also you lose a key item in the wrangling toolkit which is the in-person driveby!”.
Opul is integrated into the tools you already use - Slack, G Suite, Teams, and more. We're in a limited pilot right now but you can sign up for our waitlist at www.getopul.com.
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Some features that people are excited about in Opul:
- Automatic Follow Ups: No need to keep nagging your stakeholders. Let Opul follow up with them until their feedback is in.
- Suggested Stakeholders: Opul suggests a list of stakeholders based on your work - so you don't have to worry about forgetting anyone.
- See All Open Feedback Requests: With all your feedback requests in one place, it's easy for you to stay on top of everything.
slack, telegram, funnelytics, clickfunnels, frame.io, google drive, dropbox, zoom, zelle, venmo, google docs, gmail
These are great questions...
1. What tools are indispensable for your team to get work done? Which do you love the most and why?
> Figma, Github, Slack, Boards (Jira/Trello/Github).
Figma & Github are indispensable because they provide the tools to create, store & communicate what you are working on with the remote team. Both are super fast & in browser, which is kept open for the duration of the day. I am a big fan of Github Project Boards, they are just like Jira/Trello boards but without the slow loading; feature bloat.
2. What tools/rituals help your team still feel a sense of togetherness / build culture?
> Slack, Discord, Zoom, but unfortunately each of these tools come with real usage fatigue. I think that allowing time for remote teams to engage with your product's community can help build culture; togetherness faster than hanging out or doing some sort of Zoom Team Exercise (No Escape Rooms Please!).
3. What are the biggest missing pieces to your remote team toolkit, or things that cause the biggest pain points?
> The biggest pain point right now for me is that designers & engineers do not have an asynchronous space to work on projects together. We are expected to make magic happen with 'so-so' handoff tools & separate Slack channels. The current project tool environment was made for Project Management; while the UX of these tools are loathed by remote teams who make.
The sensation of togetherness was really what was missing the most during the COVID crisis. That's why we started Work Adventure (https://workadventu.re/) The idea is to reproduce a virtual office and let anyone walk around and talk to anyone (without having first to schedule a Google Meet via Slack.... which took us an awful amount of time).
This is clearly work in progress, any comments appreciated! I feel a big need for a platform that will make it easy to reproduce the simplicity of walking to someone office and asking a question.
So far these are great! FYI, I'm a lot less interested in people pitching products they made, and more interested in talking *all the products* your team is using (in addition to the one you made, if that's the case)
Remo virtual conferences https://www.producthunt.com/post...
I've been working on https://slideswithfriends.com for a few months as a way to help my team feel closer together.
My goal has been to make a slide builder (easy interface) with tons of interactivity options so you can create custom games, interactive presentations, and other fun/unique culture-builders. I've so far used it to create quiplash-style games (customized to our company zeitgeist and jokes), have hosted a bunch of trivia nights, and have done one or two live photo sharing events. I even made a special birthday game/photo slideshow for my dad.
Everything is still really early and we're not supposed to be launching for a few weeks, but the builder works pretty well and you can signup and try it whenever (just please excuse the rough edges =D).
RISE - Ultimate Project Manager has all essential features to collaborate with team.
It's easy to use. So, team members don't have to give much time to get ready with it.
https://codecanyon.net/item/rise...
We founded Stafftimerapp.com to help remote teams automate their payroll attendance and task tracking and we are doing it with fully remote team.
For those experienced at and new to WFH there are a number of things that would help remote teams be more effective.
One is a way to plan and prioritize their work.
Another is staying on track amid the many distractions at home.
A third is tracking time -- for those companies that are into that kind of thing.
The fourth is the missing context of who is busy and when. With everyone remote, people get interrupted more than ever.
These are all things that we addressed in https://www.producthunt.com/post...
We would not survive without MS Teams, Jira and BitBucket for my day job. On my side project the same goes for GitHub and Slack. We do a mandatory daily check in every morning (similar to a scrum standup).
I know that https://slite.com/ is doing really well!
I could introduce you to the team actually I know a developer there :)
PS: would love your expert feedback on our launch (Plezi One, #3 today)
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