During our most recent webinar, Rahul Singh covered a few of our favorite tools for team collaboration: Slack, Airtable, and Trello. The first two tools are both relatively new to our company whereas the latter one has come to the forefront of our company’s processes after a bit of time in the dark. All three of these tools are integral parts of our “business platform“.
Slack
Slack was initially a tool that we tested out in our company to improve our internal communication. At the time, we turned away from it because we were afraid that it would become a major time suck that would slowly but surely decrease the efficiency of our team. We stuck with Google Hangouts / Chat for a bit but decided to give Slack a more solid go about a year and a half ago. Our experience thus far has been nothing but positive. The standard tier of Slack is more than enough for a small business to operate on, and the maximum amount of integrations allowed in the free tier is optimal for a company of our size. We use Slack with a variety of integrations, some of which are:
- Sending automated weekly reports to our managers from Metabase, an awesome open-source BI tool, to seamlessly get critical data in the hands of leadership.
- Receiving instantaneous updates on commits and deployments across our different set of software development tools in our #_devops channel:
- Sending tasks to either of our project management tools through our #_chief channel:
Trello
We have most often used Trello as our “Master Backlog” project management system, there are many tasks we are often unable to complete in the current time window but nonetheless would like to keep in the backlog for when there are future opportunities to address them. Recently, we have started relying more heavily on Trello to assist us with Agile Scrum Planning for some of our external projects (clients) and internal initiatives (Research & Development, Sales & Marketing…etc).
The clean interface, the ease with which a user can move cards around, the overall ability to get a bird’s eye view of the project at any time, and the ability to add burndown charts and estimates to cards via plugins such as Scrum for Trello and Burndown for Trello make this tool an indispensable part of our workflow.
Below you can find a screenshot of a template for Agile Scrum Planning in Trello. Additionally, here is the link to it.
Airtable
Airtable is what you would get if you mixed Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft Excel, Trello, and a lightweight online database. We’ve covered this particular software tool more extensively in a blog post you can find here. We’ve used airtable for a good amount of things ranging from job applicant tracking to sales territory planning. Below you can find a screenshot of the “Advertising Campaigns” Airtable template found here.
Additionally, some of our favorite features of all three of these tools are:
- Their ability to work with other systems in our process
- The fact that they are SaaS products
- Their focus on team collaboration and activity tracking
- The speed at which they operate
- Good native mobile applications for iOS and Android
At the end of the day all of these tools can work in conjunction with one another and help your team get a boost, but nonetheless, it is important that your process is ironed out and clear for everyone to understand. No amount of stellar software tools will fix issues that stem from faulty processes…and well most issues stem from faulty processes.
If you’re interested in finding out more you can access the slides and a recording of the webinar below!
