Tools

I was cruising around Reddit the other day when I came across this question:

Please suggest a tool that can help in tracking a product development process on high level features while the high level features are also mapped to specific tasks on a platform like Asana, so that at any given day I can get hold of where we stand on a given feature and what’s pending.

I also need the high level thing to be separate in a sense that it can be shared to all stakeholders whereas the task level thing remains private to my core team.

I love this question. It shows the product manager (PM) is thinking about how to help the team in shipping the right product to their users, AND is thinking about stakeholder management (an area where PMs often spend the majority of their time).

The other great thing about this is that hidden behind the question is the sense that the PM is thinking about how to keep everyone involved connected to the context as it shifts. Developers need to know what they’re working on, what’s next, and why.

I’ve gone down this rabbit hole myself many times with various teams, and understand the PM’s desire to have everyone involved in the project understand what they’re working on and why. Each developer or designer should be able to see how their work rolls up and fits into the bigger picture. The PM should be able to start from the abstract level and drill down to see what specific work is underway, and how it all connects.

However you set it up, you need to connect three things:

1. The major efforts / building blocks to realize those goals
2. The task-level work advancing those efforts
3. Bonus level: the overall goals

This can be done manually with e.g. a whiteboard, or it can be digital. Each has its pros and cons. There are many possible ways to implement this.

My current approach uses just two tools: Trello, and ProductBoard.

Tracking the building blocks & features: ProductBoard

I really like ProductBoard for this. They have a simple but powerful tool for prioritizing, planning, communicating to stakeholders, and tracking task progress at a high level.

As of this writing, ProductBoard integrates natively with Trello, JIRA, GitHub issues, among others. They also integrate with Zapier, through which you can use Asana as well as many other tools.

I chose to pair ProductBoard with Trello because it will stay in sync automatically: as tasks are moved along the development pipeline in Trello, their status will automatically be updated in ProductBoard. The tool has options to let your stakeholders view roadmaps, etc.

If you don’t have budget for a tool like ProductBoard, you can create a more basic version of the same functionality with a separate Trello board for the high-level features/roadmap. I like the Hello Epics plugin to connect cards and do a similar work-status-linking within Trello. (You can also do this for free with Trello attachments, it’s just more manual work.)

Tracking task-level work: Trello

This is where Trello comes in. You can push work into the development pipeline directly from ProductBoard, and then as it’s updated in Trello the status will automatically update in ProductBoard. Trello is already one of the most popular project management and work-tracking tools online, so I won’t go into it here.

One important caveat: this has to be maintained. You can set up a great system, but without regular maintenance, it will wither.

The bonus level: overall goals

To really supercharge this, find a way to provide the overall context for the features and task-level work. In an ideal world, anyone looking at their Trello card could see the high-level goal it rolls up to. I like Hello Epics for this, but you can also just add it as a note on the card or as a keyword.

(For goal-setting, I use a goal-setting methodology called OKRs: Objectives & Key Results. OKRs are what most of the top tech companies use. They work. I recommend the approach laid out by Christina Wodtke in this article. Her book is also excellent.)

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Hopefully that shows you an example way to see how all the work being done connects to the features and high-level goals. This will help you keep your head around everything currently happening, and how it all connects.

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Over the last several months, I’d fallen off the wagon writing-wise due to very heavy client workloads. I’m finally getting back into it after wrapping up a project. Given the restart, I got to wondering about my writing workflow and which tools I use.

In whatever I do (coding, writing, etc) I’m always concerned with tools and establishing a good workflow and rhythm. For me, that means mobility and cross-platform access to what I’m working on. I want my data stored in the cloud so it isn’t tied to any one physical device or location, and so it’s properly backed up off-premises. This protects my work from accidents (or stupidity) well, and gives me flexibility about when, where and how I do my work. I appreciate that.

After a quick chat with Scott (he’s currently finishing a book on product design), I decided to use Scrivener as the main organizational hub for everything, with all my files stored in Dropbox. In case you’re unfamiliar with Scrivener, it’s a professional-grade writing suite used by many journalists, authors, researchers, et al. Basically, if you’re doing serious writing, Scrivener is a one-stop shop and damn useful. It is also complex.

I’m a huge fan of Scrivener for overall project organization and editing. But I don’t love it for actual writing. The layout is too distracting and its composition mode doesn’t feel focused enough for me. So I pair Scrivener with iA Writer, which is my favorite text editor to actually write in. I do this by using Scrivener’s external sync via Dropbox, and voila! I have a beautiful cross-platform environment to write in. I also like the idea that my writing is safely stored in Dropbox, and I’m able to work on it anywhere, anytime, from any device. (I wrote this paragraph on my phone while waiting in line at the grocery store, and when I got back to my desk I just synced from Scrivener and carried on writing where I left off on my phone.)

I got to wondering: could I somehow easily email ideas into my Scrivener project from wherever I am? I often send myself little notes on the go by emailing them into my Evernote account with one tap using the Captio app, which is probably the most useful $1.99 I’ve spent on software. (For Android, it looks like Mail Myself or Google Keep could be good options for similar use case.)

Idea strikes, fire off email to my Evernote in 5 seconds, move on. It works well.

So, can you quickly email in ideas to a Scrivener project? Absolutely. Here’s how.

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