Make your own tools

Like most small teams, we have tested our fair share of collaboration apps. Some of them looked amazing (basecamp), while others were less pretty, although still quite useful (redmine). All of them got close to what we wanted, but there were daily reminders of where they fell short when it came to integrating into our business.

Happens to the best of us

Overtime, you may realize that there are parts of your business that are so important, only a custom solution will fit your needs. Sometimes a 95 percent fit just isn’t good enough. We made that decision earlier this year when it came to team management. Without the magic bullet to hit all of our wants, we knew we had to build the solution ourselves. And so we did.

Enter hashboard

Hashboard was a simple system we put together after we analyzed the features we loved in other system. We wanted to leaves notes for one another, to create tasks for ourselves and other team members, and keep track of our time. Keep in mind, our custom solution would ultimately do less than most other project management apps available, but it would do a hundred percent of what we wanted it do.

We started with only a little task list, a work timer area, and a twitter like chat feed. From there, we slowly added on, discovering what we needed and implementing it as we went along. Learn why iterating works.

Through multiple iterations of small editions, we have completely migrated away from 3rd party services and reply only on Hashboard. Hashboard now has the ability to taken written statement in our ‘magic box’ at the top of the page and convert them into actions. When I want to mark a task complete, I simply write ‘#237 complete’, and the task is zapped! If I want to leave a comment for someone else I might simply put in ’post Hey Roberto, I need some help over here #dev #bug.’

Custom Fit

Custom solutions have the benefit of not only addressing the known issues you have on launch, but also of growing as your understanding of your goals grows too.

You can go custom too. Find out how.