First off uxactly is a small agency specialized in web development and design. Despite the fact that the headcount of our company is just six we successfully worked together with fairly large companies. We are now taking our first steps in product development to bring our own solutions to the market. For this, we experiment with some concepts to evaluate our products. So this might be an ongoing series where I’ll write about our experiences.
The Product?
As more and more people were forced to work from home, we’ve seen that many companies struggled with establishing remote workflows. Many companies we know use some SCRUM implementation, and quite often, scrum/planning poker is used there, too.
The usual approach is screen sharing for the user stories and some chat or scrum poker app to enter the evaluation. Most of the time, this leads to a lot of open browser tabs and less fun. But since communication is crucial for the good use of SCRUM, it’s obvious that the communication should be fun and not annoying.
That’s the point where Scrumly comes into play. It aims to be a one-page fullscreen solution where all the steps of your poker session can take place. In addition, video chat, your user stories from (JIRA, Github, Gitlab, …), and last but not least, automated syncing of the story/complexity points will be possible with as few clicks as possible.
The approach
If you want to build products at almost zero cost, terms like bootstrapping or lean startup come to mind. That’s where we took the inspiration for our approach. Often bootstrapped/lean businesses are built by solo founders, and some of the most exciting products I use at least once per month were created that way.
In the beginning, there will be an unfinished product with corners and sharp edges. But with many small iterations based on user feedback, there will be a great product at the end.
The advantage of this approach is that you can measure the impact of each new feature and see if it is good or bad for the user experience and, therefore, for the product. If you build a huge product and push it out all at once, you’ve invested many resources, and if it fails, you won’t know exactly why (and as we all know, more product ideas will fail than survive). With the iterative approach, you have a small product at the beginning and iterate in small steps. If a step goes in the wrong direction, it’s easier to correct the mistake and learn from it.
The outlook
Scrumly is currently in its first stage. However, we feel that we can test the minimalistic design, video chat integration, and how stable our current implementation of the voting is and if we need to make more adjustments in terms of cross-browser compatibility and energy management. Until we have that feedback, we can focus on future features like the integration of the various ticket systems.
Thanks for reading!
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