Like many others we grew frustrated with the constant upkeep in creating and organizing tickets in Jira and other PM tools. We routinely wasted as much as seven hours a week on repetitive PM chores like cleaning up the backlog or drafting changelog updates. At Zack’s previous company he even built a system to try to automate some of this work. In conversations with other founders and engineers we learned that he was far from the only person doing this.
We started Dart when we realized we could bring a new approach to this problem through techniques enabled by generative AI. There are of course a lot of project management tools out there, but none have the ability to automate most of the busywork without having to configure long sets of rules.
For example, one of the most helpful functions is summarizing work that was accomplished over some time interval, by automatically creating a changelog update for it that can be pasted into company blogs or elsewhere. Another highly used feature is giving Dart a large task or PRD and generating a recommendation for how to break it up into more manageable subtasks.
Over the last two years we’ve continued to build a broad set of PM functionality in Dart (task management, docs, roadmaps, etc.) along with what we hope is a neatly vertically integrated application of gen AI that adds value.
Dart is built with Vue on the frontend, Django on the backend, and uses various gen AI models such as GPT-4. We embed almost all of the content that goes into the app for later retrieval and search. Over time we build up context for users, workspaces, working patterns, etc. and are able to provide this context to do situation specific few-shot prompting or RAG, depending on the situation. For better or worse we’ve implemented most of our LLM infrastructure internally and are largely calling OpenAI APIs directly.
While Dart improves its recommendations as users work on more tasks, ultimately it’s not quite ready to replace your product manager. You’ll probably still need to evaluate if the recommendations make sense for your team, and make any adjustments before confirming them. By having a helpful companion offering suggestions as you go we’ve still found that this process ends up net saving time–about 12% of time spent in PM tools according to our users. You can think of it like a helpful tool for generating ideas as opposed to a product that will fully strategize and do all of your work for you (at least for now!).
Our current users come from a wide range of backgrounds including other founders, developers, writers, small business owners, consultants, researchers, etc.
You can try out Dart for free at https://app.itsdart.com/sign-up. We’d really appreciate any and all feedback or ideas in the comments!
