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Startup Productivity Tools

We've recently been working for a startup that has 4 teams from different companies all working on the product. Some of the teams are not used to using collaboration software so we had to pick services that were simple to use and worked with very little explanation. We also didn't want to sign up to spending lots of money on tools until we knew everyone would use them.

  • Video conferencing - Google Meet
  • Documentation - Confluence for 10 team members we thought would use the service
  • Planning - Asana - this worked very well for 2 weeks and then most people who were not developing stopped looking at it
  • Planning for Devs - Jira for 10 team members we thought would use the service
  • Chat - Slack
  • Code repository - GitHub
  • Whiteboarding and brainstorming - Miro or Mural
  • Design / UX - Figma
  • Timesheets - Google docs
The following were incredibly successful, even with the non technical team members:

  • Google Meet
  • Confluence
  • Slack
  • Figma
  • Miro
The following were less successful for everyone, but we are still using them:
  • Asana - only used for very high level tasks and milestones. Jira seems to have taken over
  • Jira - used every day, but only by devs
  • GitHub - used every day, but only by devs
So far we have got away with not spending a penny on tools, even though there are probably 20+ stakeholders and many of the services have free limits of 10 editors.

3 Months Later
After 3 months we are using the following everyday:
  • Jira
  • GitHub
  • Google Meet
  • Confluence
  • Slack
  • Figma
  • Google docs
The non tech audience got bored of using Asana and Jira is used exclusively for planning. We also stopped using Miro and Mural and now use Figma instead, so designs and plans are all in one place.

We have also started paying for Figma for a few editors, but most people are still on the free version as they just want to comment on designs.



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