We have a slightly different take on things we think (even though there's a certain amount of table stakes features you need to build to get people to use it at all, we've found).
First off, unlike most of our competitors, we don't push people to break down initiatives into little bit sized tasks, giving each one an assignee. Instead we take a more collaborative attitude. We think work items should be the "right size" [0] which is much bigger than a single task - instead it's some value delivered end to end to your users. As a result, our work items are rich documents and they'll only get richer and more collaborative. We see that our users write a lot, hash out things together, upload designs, etc. And they're only getting more rich and more collaborative.
Secondly, we have a lot of exciting things coming with our integrations. Our focus is really on cutting down the noise coming from a lot of the tools teams use and to link assets/activities in those tools directly to work items in Kitemaker, so you can get the info you need when you need it. Our users like to complain about tools like Figma being awful for discussions and tools like GitHub producing too many noisy emails. We want to fix that. The Slack, Discord, GitHub and Slack integrations are already pretty powerful.
Thirdly, it's fast. Super super fast with hot keys for everything. We're really inspired by Superhuman and our goal is to match their 100ms response times.
Lastly is who we're making it for. We want to enable product teams to succeed. Not in the generic sense of the term, but more in the Marty Cagan [1] sense. Teams that are autonomous, self-organizing, cross functional and totally focused on delivering value for their users. Teams that run top down, with managers doling out tasks to engineers and product managers deciding exactly what will be built in isolation probably won't find a home in Kitemaker.
We'd love to chat with any teams struggling to find the tool that works best for them. My email is in my profile.
0: https://medium.com/kitemaker-blog/right-sizing-elements-of-w...