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Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

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Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#1

Post by kernelsoe »

Hey guys, I'm a software engineer in a startup team where we have to use half a dozen tools for team collaboration and running the whole thing.

- Notion for Project management & Documentation (feels messy) - Google Sheets for client facing documents like project deliverables - Google Docs for random stuffs like meeting minutes (which should be inside notion?) - Google workspace email - Google drive for pdf files - Slack for chat (chaotic can't find information easily chat is bad ux for information, easy to bug others for info) - Zoom, Meet for meetings (zoom's video quality is very nice but aren't they all face video panels with subtitles instead of collaboration)

These tools are built by amazing teams and I respect them but they in total cause a lot of $$ubscriptions and still information is scattered in random places (partly because we need more information hygiene) and feeling overwhelm sometimes. I feel tools these days are disconnected (i know there are integrations) and slow and not happy to use.

The most recent joyful experience I'm having from trying out a tool is using Linear.app and Zed.dev. Love pure speed and ux.

What tools do you use in your startup except for product design and development and How do you manage team workflow?

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#5

Post by mannyv »

The current startup is using notion and GitHub. Github is a POS when it comes to bug tracking. Notion is pretty good. It's somehow different and more annoying than Confluence, but faster.

Jira/Confluence IMO is pretty good, but people have a love/hate relationship with it. If you actually use them they're great.

Notion becomes a disorganized pile of crap, just like Confluence. Confluence allows you to link stuff to Jira and back.

Excel is pretty much required for interacting with clients. You send them an Excel spreadsheet, they send it back. Sheets just sort of sucks in all kinds of small ways because it isn't Excel.

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#7

Post by akg_67 »

kernelsoe wrote: post #3
beanjuiceII wrote: post #2

excel, in one form or another (google sheets)

I had heavily used excel in my previous job from project management to heavy calculations. One of the most versatile tools! I love spreadsheets.

I am on the other end of the scale. I don't like excel and spreadsheets for anything non-data related information. I usually decline clients if they follow "spreadsheet driven software development" process specially if combined with frequent long meetings.

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#8

Post by cpach »

I like Confluence. So far it’s the best wiki software I have used. Mediawiki is also good, but I think it would probably require much more time and resources for customization before being on the level of Confluence.

Confluence can be run in the cloud or on-prem (very expensive to use on-prem though).

Re: Ask HN: What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

#10

Post by jamisonbryant »

My company just invested in Stack Overflow for Teams and we've found it fairly useful for maintaining a bank of institutional knowledge in the form of Q&A. I have noticed a significant slow down in contributions since the initial corpus of knowledge was added / new tool excitement wore off. But it is still useful reference for occasional lookups and it also excels in documenting very slim edge cases and their solutions in a way that a reference manual wouldn't IMO.
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