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A side comment: I think you don't stand a chance to have a substantial customer base in Scandinavia. Their decision making process is by iterative consensus. You hold the meetings on the topic until there is a collective agreement for unanimous decision. If there is not, you hold another meeting in a few days.
It is an interesting idea - you definitely have hit on a problem area. I don't think you have the correct solution. But that isn't a bad thing -- I think the process of launching this, and listening to feedback will allow you to find the correct solution. As long as you adapt to the feedback and don't come into it with ego, it should be an interesting journey.
Does it integrate into MS Teams? Or some other established enterprise platform? Otherwise it’s really hard to introduce it to a corporation, where it’s probably most needed.
Webhook integrations: Slack/Mattermost; Zulip; Zapier Platform ; GitHub Pull Requests Another issue/checkbox: Re: collaboration engineering, Thinklets: "No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20157064
Hi HN family I’m Linus, the other founder of TopAgree. We’re super excited to launch our beta today! Why we built TopAgree Like many of you, we had lots of daily meetings. But with us, there rarely was a clear meeting agenda, or it was not followed, or even if so, someone was not prepared to make a decision. It often was a mix of private chat followed by opinionated discussions, ending in bad last-minute compromise d…
Are you worried that you're trying to solve a process/people/culture problem with a technology solution?
A side comment: I think you don't stand a chance to have a substantial customer base in Scandinavia. Their decision making process is by iterative consensus. You hold the meetings on the topic until there is a collective agreement for unanimous decision. If there is not, you hold another meeting in a few days.
If there’s anything useful there feel free to scavenge, or if you’d like to talk about what I learned trying to build it let me know.
1. Usually, there is a larger context to decisions. Have you considered integrations around tying these decisions to frameworks like OKRs?
2. Usually, decisions require some form of execution. Execution also makes decision matter. People within an org should feel like not only they were heard, but when the final decision was taken by its owner, there was some form of action taken as a follow up. Sometimes the follow up would be merging some code in a git branch. Sometimes the follow up would be calling a lawyer and discussing long-term consequences. In any event, people should be able to see that something happened as a result of their input, within your UI. :)
It is an interesting idea - you definitely have hit on a problem area. I don't think you have the correct solution. But that isn't a bad thing -- I think the process of launching this, and listening to feedback will allow you to find the correct solution. As long as you adapt to the feedback and don't come into it with ego, it should be an interesting journey.
Hi codingdave, what feedback would you have? And how would you change our solution?
- Getting all the info and feedback and allowing time for all stakeholders to vote can drive a culture of decisions by committee - while this does allow for great collaboration and engagement, it also can be slower than desired, and does not allow a visionary leader to really drive his organization. It also can make people who truly are experts in a field feel dismissed because now everyone is held on equal footing and their expertise is devalued. At the end of the day, people lower in the org chart will love it, execs will not. And without exec support, it won't become integrated into the org.
Your idea of bringing asynch discussions and decision-making is on-target. But I think you have under-estimated what drives people at different levels of an organization, and this level of transparency and collaboration is not what everyone will want.
In all honesty, I don't know how I would change the solution. I know that you need to continue to feed the ego of leaders and experts, while allowing contributions from everyone else, too. You have to balance different audiences with divergent personalities, and let the leaders lead, without the app feeling like lip service to non-leaders. In short, I don't think your solution is bad - I just think you'll find that it will take a ton of effort, listening, and understanding to be sure all participants truly feel the benefit of the product and there is no way to hit that mark on the first try.
Hi HN family I’m Linus, the other founder of TopAgree. We’re super excited to launch our beta today! Why we built TopAgree Like many of you, we had lots of daily meetings. But with us, there rarely was a clear meeting agenda, or it was not followed, or even if so, someone was not prepared to make a decision. It often was a mix of private chat followed by opinionated discussions, ending in bad last-minute compromise d…
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A Show HN needs to be something users can try when it's posted:
Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead. [...]
Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.
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A side comment: I think you don't stand a chance to have a substantial customer base in Scandinavia. Their decision making process is by iterative consensus. You hold the meetings on the topic until there is a collective agreement for unanimous decision. If there is not, you hold another meeting in a few days.