Any founders willing to have a quick convo this week? I’m looking to gain some perspective from other founders on collaboration tools and task management. Would only be ~10/15 min of your time and we would really appreciate it! DM me or reply in the thread if you’d be willing to share 😁

I’d be keen to respond here in text so that the community gets to learn along as well. Feel free to ask any questions

Thanks Alex! Here’s what I want to ask (generally): • What kind of brainstorming and task management solutions do you use individually and with your team? ◦ What are the associated pain points? • We’re building a shared online whiteboard & task management tool - does that flow resonate at all with you? ◦ Why does/doesn’t it? • What would you pay (per month) for unlimited access & accounts on a tool like this?

I'd be to hop into a call with you. share your calendly link!

Brainstorming - Whiteboard - then into a Google sheet - then everyone can update / rank / weight / explain - iOS Reminders - sometimes when you have a walk and talk, nothing else around - Video/voice record - transcribe it later or forward to someone to take notes Task Management - Trello (still being used after all these years) - Jira (for software development) - Asana - Google Sheets (it’s just convenient to have everything in one link for some projects) Online Whiteboard - There’s been a few but unless team is all remote and on the call at the same time, hard to keep track of who made what note - most recent tool attempted a few times is Miro - A real whiteboard is still in a few rooms/offices - it’s the ease of walking by, erasing parts for illustrations, add some post-its, and hand waving in front, not sure how those offline whiteboard benefits can be translated online? Online Task management - Most of the ones listed above are online Some projects in the past/current have paid Asana / Jira, Trello sometimes, Miro (paid by enterprise client, not us) - so, their pricing there would help give a guide? Enterprise clients generally want the SSO feature so that user management can be handled when people leave projects/etc.

Hey @Alex - it sounds like you definitely see some value in a tool that combines task management and online whiteboarding, but an online whiteboard hasn’t stuck with you yet. Are there any reasons it hasn’t? Or was it just not convenient enough at the time.

Whiteboarding when it’s most beneficial, is a productive social experience. It’s like how at Amazon, no slides at meetings. The experience of online collaboration thus far, usually when there are more than 3-4 people in the room, it’s hard to elicit engagement (ie. ask for a show of hands), the latency of “scanning the room” introduces more latency and the moment is kind of lost. The other part of having room/meeting rooms with whiteboard, is that, say, after lunch or a meeting break, you walk by a whiteboard that’s not erased, conversations can hover and the words there can trigger thoughts. I built a data science team and many of our ideas came from looking at the team’s whiteboards in the room as they were mapping out fields. If you’ve ever read about Steve Jobs designing toilet location at Pixar’s HQ, whiteboards for some reason has that social element, which, after many attempts to bring it online, just doesn’t seem to do it. The best so far is Miro, though there are some team members who utilise it better than others. Maybe if development resources, you can attempt this - if you watch TV series that has multiple seasons and are complex story arcs, at the beginning of episodes later in the season, the good ones tend to have “previously on”. I do that for sales meetings when pitching to large enterprises. Some of my product managers started adopting that for brainstorming sessions, though its due to them having more updates on Miro after the previous meeting. When run this way, it gets most folks into the meeting back into the context (the larger boards can still run into issues of some folks zoomed in on some other place) In writing that, I’ve also remembered another thing. In attempting to get everyone on the same page, its also quite common for a speaker to zoom in on the area that they are talking about, which means, other stuff are “off screen”. In a real room whiteboard, everyone in the room sees the whole whiteboard. The discussion can lead into focusing on an area, but online, when you zoom out, there’s a disorientation of trying to fit things in. That extra cognitive load might be the threshold. Maybe online works better in smaller groups (2-4) and when the gear are all similar? I work with stakeholders across the board and the various setups from computers with various screen sizes, phones, tablets and sometimes folks who just dial-in (no VR yet, but there is one remote investor who has all the setup and has more than 5,000 hours logged into VR games). Maybe you’ve cracked it, finding the perfect cases and team member background in harnessing its use case. What have you observed?

@Alex I’ve found that people mainly have an issue with onboarding - using the tool isn’t crazy hard, but it’s hard for it to meet their expectations of what it should do. You’re right that the social element is hard to replicate, even with many neat tools and features. I think that unless the use case is super specific and targeted (which I’m yet to find) people usually just have more friction with using the tool than without.

I'm happy tom connect Paul. Text me if you want to talk. I have a fully remote team of 15.