This is how we do it
We have spent much time building different business and carrying various projects together as well as separately. In some cases the teams were in-house, while in others – remote. Bearing the experience in mind, we want to share our knowledge regarding the best tools to manage remote teams and get stuff done.
The Basics
First of all, as a fundamental principle to structure our activities we decided to divide them by functions like product development, marketing, sales and etc. Most importantly we assign numbers to each of them. So whatever tools we use afterwards, the structure is always the same and is always numerated, which helps to quickly navigate, communicate things and integrate among the tools.
Communication
Slack. Skype. Google Hangouts. Rapportive. Hubspot. Yesware.
Let’t not reinvent the wheel here. The most popular tools are the best as they open opportunities to connect with masses of people. So for internal communication we use the rapidly raising Slack. It’s a fantastic tool removing the communicational clutter. Its magic comes from UX – usually you have to force yourself to use the tool, however in this case, the whole team didn’t even want to try the alternatives. We also use Skype, which is unfortunately deteriorating. It’s purpose is to connect with external stakeholders like clients, providers and investors. Don’t forget Google Hangouts as it’s also sometimes handy. We also tried GotoMeetings, yet it somehow didn’t click for us.
For emailing we use traditional Gmail with some apps like Rapportive and HubSpot (extension of the major web app). The first one gives immediate Linkedin info of the person you are emailing with. The second one gives snippets, useful information and includes the contact data into the CRM directly. Before discovering Hubspot, we also used Yesware for the email templates.
Task allocation and agile management
For us Asana is still the King. We actually used it as a task management tool as well as a CRM till we found HubSpot for CRM. Asana is smooth, functional and actually wide spread, so it helps to ease the introduction to new members as well as integrations with other tools. We make separate functions as projects (i.e. 1. product development) and develop headers for agile sprint phases. The “Backlog” is in the end, while “To-do”, “Doing”, “Waiting for” and “Done” headers are above. We do have a morning standup as well as meetups in the beginning and the end of the week to discuss the sprint.
We were also seriously considering Glip, especially as we know one of the co-founders personally. It has this nice fundamental principle of forming the task management around communication. However, for us it got stuck between Slack and Asana. Also the free version was quite limited.
Analysis
For analyzing our performance, the results and time allocated we use Everhour. That’s an amazing free tool, which has a great web app, Chrome pluggin and even an integration with Asana. You can use different tags, projects and other views to analyze yourself from different angles. It encompasses the whole team.
File Sharing & CRM
Guys, no surprises here – Google Drive is the answer. It’s one of the world’s standards and better than Dropbox just because it gives 15GB of free space as opposed to 5GB. For the CRM service we use the already mentioned Hubspot. It’s a really fantastic and powerful tool helping you to really enjoy the process of selling. It also integrates with your Gmail to automate info acquisition as much as possible.
Development tools
Trackduck. Asana. Github. Bitbucket.
Trackduck is a fantastic tool, helping to get quality feedback from users and your team as well as communicate it efficiently. Unfortunately, it’s not for free, yet you can still test some stuff with a trial version. Our developers also use a combination of Asana, Github and Bitbucket to coordinate the development activities.
The conclusion
We truly believe that we live in the mighty days of Freemium and the free apps can definitely satisfy your basic needs. That’s not to say you don’t need other (paid) apps. On the contrary, the highly specialized and powerful tools allow to elevate your performance to the peak level. The bottom line for us is that, please, never have achievement excuses for not having the tools. The basic ones already can drive you far.
What tools do you use? Feel free to express your thoughts!
