kevsim

There are a lot of articles out there on this subject (as this article points out). I think it's increasingly rare to find companies that can't see that value in code reviews.

What I'd like to see instead is some surveys of companies doing reviews to find out what's hard. What parts go well, what parts to they struggle with.

For example, at my past employer, we tried to pull in a privacy expert on any privacy sensitive changes and a security expert on any security related change. But this was really hard for two reasons. First, it's often not obvious that what you're doing is security/privacy related and probably the worst f-ups will be the one where you didn't mean to do anything security/privacy related. Second, it was hard to scale these "experts" who were domain experts but not an expert in the codebase.

I'm sure there are many many other things teams find hard and I think that's really interesting to dig into.

Congrats on shipping!

I think being privacy first as a company is great, but I'd like to understand a bit what that actually means in terms of differentiation. My assumption is that many players in this space (particularly those targeting families) are not selling my data. Is that a false assumption? If so, say so on the landing page. If not, how are you different?

Not trying to be a party pooper, just know from my experience building my own company these days that not being crystal clear on differentiation when playing in crowded spaces gets you beat up.

I work in Scandinavia where "just fire them if they're not improving" is a lengthy process. So when I got a case like this on one of my teams, it was worth my time to try to help this person improve because with their long tenure, they were going to be very hard to give the boot. This person seemed to be a fairly competent programmer, but just didn't do much actual work. He spent all of his time butterflying around, joining meetings he didn't need to be in, digging into other teams' work that didn't need digging into. I give my teams a ton of autonomy, but he was clearly taking advantage of that in order to seem busy without delivering any value for our users.

The single best tool in handling this situation for me was peer feedback. We instituted a system where peer feedback came from a few peers he selected and a few I myself selected. The person in question was shocked when even the peers he selected came back saying that he simply failed to get stuff done.

This came as a wakeup call for him, and we were able to work on a very clear development plan that minimized distractions and maximized time for deep work. He ended up being a solid contributor.

We'll be making the todos within work items more rich as well, which usually satisfy those who like to break things way down. Best of both worlds.

Thanks for signing up! We're definitely going to be making a video for the landing page.

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...

1: https://svpg.com/product-vs-feature-teams/

For me it'll forever be the year my startup [0] launched, we got our first users, our first _paying_ users, and got into the accelerator we wanted. In what was otherwise a totally crappy blur, I'll always have some fondness for 2020. But it can end now. That'd be fine.

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.

Really excited to see what this offers! Anyone have any details on features?

We're working on a product management tool [0] that integrates to all of the other tools our own development team uses regularly (Slack, Github, Figma) and Notion feels a bit like a missing link. We've prioritized the tools we ourselves use, but in our discussions with a bunch of other teams, the tools we use are pretty common amongst small startups.

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.

I a big believer in the fact that splitting tasks into little micro bits that we work on in isolation is really holding teams back. Sizing work so that it's big enough to be of some value delivered to your users is a great way to actually getting your team thinking about the big picture and the impact they're having and to encourage your team members to work together on delivering that value.

You don't need to slice and dice stuff into tiny tasks. You don't need a manager handing these tasks out to team members. You can have teams that self organize and have a laser focus on the impact they deliver.

I'll admit I'm quite biased as I'm the founder of a startup [0] that builds a product management tool that encourages teams to have larger work items where they can capture a whole "unit" of value delivered to users. Teams use our work items to write a lot, attach designs, code snippets, etc. When they need to break down stuff, just add a todo list in the work item. We also don't have a notion of single assignees, but instead allow groups of users to be set as the team for a work item. My cofounder wrote a blog post on "right sizing" work items [1].

0: https://kitemaker.co

1: https://medium.com/kitemaker-blog/right-sizing-elements-of-w...

There was some effort to make it possible to use Qt without moc [0] and instead rely on some more modern C++ features. No clue where the effort is these days

0: https://woboq.com/blog/verdigris-qt-without-moc.html

Kind of annoying to have a review and not have a single picture of the phones, screenshots, etc. Yes, I can google them myself, but c'mon.

Also $1999 and the camera doesn't work yet? Yikes.

Not sure I think that's a big argument for microservices/atomic functions but rather just for decoupling things in general.

For me, the appeal of microservices is the organizational challenges it solves (allowing teams to move and deploy at their own pace).

My current codebase is a monolith because we're a tiny team, but the different parts are not tightly coupled more than they need to be and it doesn't feel slow to change things.

Looks great. Any plans for a Figma version?

This looks cool! We always struggle to find a simple editor for demo videos for our product. Will definitely try this out.

I might be alone in feeling this way, but when I see "team lead" and "a big part of my job is doing code reviews", it raises a red flag for me.

Is feels like "the boss" who is "approving" code before it gets merged in.

In any team I've been a part of, I want the tech lead contributing by writing code, doing design, etc. and I want everyone reviewing code, not everything piling onto one person.

Absolutely! And I personally find it much more motivating than just chasing a business idea that I don't personally care about.

Does, I think, raise the chance of falling in love with your solution though, which is also dangerous.

We're big Cagan fans at Kitemaker. In fact, most of our thinking around the product is tied into empowered product teams. Cross-functional, autonomous, self-organizing and impact-focused. We want Kitemaker to be the best tool out there for such teams.

One mistake I (and no doubt other founders) made was assuming you'd "get it right" because you were scratching your own itch. My cofounder and I started our company [0] literally based on the pain points we were feeling and still, when the first user tests on the first version of the product came around, users didn't get it. Or they didn't see the value. It was a tough lesson - we were building the thing we thought we wanted and others didn't want it. But we persevered, pivoted a little here, rewrote a lot there, and ended up with something that users not only liked a lot more, but also worked better for us too.

Moral of the story is scratching your own itch makes you qualified to talk about the problem, it doesn't make you an expert on a good solution.

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.

Hadn't really considered something like a forum TBH. We just want a place where people can come and give us feedback on our product, potentially in private so other teams can't see what they're saying. People often expose things they're working on or at the very least their way of working to us and that's not something they necessarily want open to the public.

Slack is free which is really appealing. But it is a barrier for some people because they don't want to open another slack workspace (slack fatigue).

We also integrate to Discord and like that a lot so that's one option for us for sure.

For my startup [0] we have a slack community where we ask people to come engage with us and give us feedback on the product and how it can work better for them. We love it. Teams usually want their own private channel so they can discuss things more openly with us, post screenshots that may have stuff they don't want spread around publicly (we're a product management tool/issue track so teams has sensitive stuff stored with us). The only issue we have is some people have a lot of slack workspaces already and don't want to add yet another (which is totally understandable coming from a guy with 10 or so Slack workspaces right now).

Does Everchat have ambitions to be this kind of private community where companies can interact with their users, etc or is the target something else?

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.

Had a few issues creating a new channel:

- filled in the new channel form

- had to sign up

- put in email. woops that was the login form. Clicked log in, email disappeared

- refilled form, got email. Email says "evechat" not "everchat"

- followed link. channel wasn't created, had to do it again

Took that one the wrong way - apologies.

I'm not sure we have something I'd call PMF yet. But again, that's all about your definition.

Since I said nothing of our growth I’d say you can’t make that assumption

You're missing what the parent comment said - they only have one company, so if Elon can run two companies, they should be able to run a company and a family

As a startup founder in Europe, who works what I think of as a lot, but also finds time to make dinner for my kids and read to them at night, this type of article always gives me anxiety and/or guilt. Am I hustling enough? Is it wrong to watch Netflix on Saturday night instead of coding? What about that walk/workout - was there time for that?

We have users for our service [0], they're happy and they're paying us but it always makes me wonder if the competition is doing more and out hustling us. I guess there's no way to know and at some point you need to draw your own line in the sand in terms of work/life balance.

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.

As part of an accelerator I did with my startup [0], I had the chance to check out a talk by Scott at https://salesqualia.com/. While we have less of an enterprise sales approach and more of a bottom-up distribution approach, I still found Scott's structured approach to thinking about sales really useful. I recommend people check it out.

0: 0: https://kitemaker.co - the product management and collaboration tool that's crazy fast, loaded with hotkeys, and has deep integrations to your favorite tools like GitHub, Figma, Slack and Discord.

Thanks! Try it out and let us know what you think. It's free to use up until you've created 250 work items (which takes most teams a while). We love having chats with teams that try it out, both to know what would make it work better for them, but also just to talk through how they work today and see if we can help them reach their aspirations for how they want to collaborate as a team.

> Unfortunately, this is only half the story

I'd go further - I'd say in many, many teams, quant KPIs like burndown rate and velocity are downright misleading and often harmful. It provides the wrong incentives for the team - it stresses output over outcomes. The main thing that should matter is how quickly you're improving things for your users - their metrics are the ones to track.

I'm a bit biased as I'm working on a startup [0] that is trying to click with teams that really value collaborating closely to provide impact for their users over being a feature factory that maximizes their velocity.

0: https://kitemaker.co - the product management and collaboration tool that's crazy fast and has deep integrations to your favorite tools like GitHub, Figma, Slack and Discord.

Here, you dropped this: /s

This advice applies equally to a startup taking some form of funding as well. Don't waste time on these things, just focus relentlessly on distribution and your product (what the user sees, not the plumbing).

Yeah, remoteness can be a challenge for any process if you don't adapt. We're finding our [0] users write more than ever, and have fewer stand ups and video meetings. I think it's a win for deep work, but a loss for creative collaboration. Very easy to turn into mindless feature factories this way. We're working hard to keep creative collaboration alive while maintaining the best bits of remote work.

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey driven product management tool that has deep integrations to the tools you use every day.