Nodeta is a software development company that focuses on web software. We employ a highly agile and effective process. We have worked
both on light independent projects and in the environment of large global enterprises.
Teamwork needs work. With Flowdock, it’s as simple as having a chat.
Flowdock keeps your team organized and up-to-date with no effort. It is a powerful team messenger web app.
The biggest day so far is upon us. We Shipped! Right now anybody can march to www.flowdock.com, click the ‘Sign Up for Beta‘ button and start accelerating their team. The hordes of new users gave us some server trouble and signup is now temporarily disabled.
A total of 650 teams from all over the world took part in Private Beta, and we got tons of feedback. Here’s what some have said about Flowdock.
These days there’s about a zillion ways to manage TODOs online. With Flowdock, the unique
aspect is that you can handle them right in the middle of the conversation.
Teamwork needs work. Flowdock attempts to minimize the amount of that work. The promise is: Keep your team up-to-date with no effort.
That means Flowdock reduces the need for meetings. In a good team, members know what the others are doing at all times. A good team does not constantly feel the need to have meetings.
When done right, an efficient meeting can be useful. There are a couple of things in specific that are required for a good meeting. Flowdock can give you them.
The Agenda
With Flowdock, you can collect the agenda just like you collect any list on Flowdock. We use the #agenda tag to gather things we need to go through during our weekly “administrative” meeting. Just like I showed you in my last post about handling todo lists in Flowdock, the lists form naturally from the path of the conversation.
Flowser gives us the complete agenda. We just tick out the #agenda tag off the items as we go through them.
On meeting day, there are rarely many additions or other surprises from attendees who “haven’t seen the agenda”, since on any given moment
anybody can contribute to the agenda
the agenda is right there for everyone to see
Track and stay organized
The second most important thing in a great meeting is efficient tracking of action points (or todos) and when needed, separate note taking.
We track todos the same way in and outside of meetings. We often go through the todos in these meetings to make sure they are progressing and to address any potential problems.
We don’t keep separate notes about these meetings. We keep notes all the time by tagging things in Flowdock. A meeting isn’t a special opportunity to be organized for a half an hour. With Flowdock, staying organized all the time is as easy as chat.
A good way to start the work week is to go through some TODOs. These days there’s about a zillion ways to manage them online. With Flowdock, the unique aspect is that you can handle them right in the middle of the conversation. There is no gap.
Here’s an example from our own flow. If you come up with something, that needs doing you can just throw in a line with the #todo tag included.
But because this is a conversation, if someone else says something worth TODOing, you can just add the tag yourself if the other person didn’t realize to do so.
The todo list lives in Flowser as a search. You can use other tags to better categorize the todo items: milestones, project names etc. Whenever you complete a task, just tick the x on the todo tag to remove it.
This is a lightweight process, which you can work with in the privacy of your own team’s conversation.
As Flowdock enters public beta (opens on March 10th!) we’ve begun doing continuous deployment. As an agile software development shop, we also test extensively and practice continuous integration. At the same time we need to monitor that Flowdock is running smoothly and when problems occur, we can fix them right away. All this requires fast working channels of communication so in the center of it as the hub of our team, is naturally Flowdock. I’ll walk you through our development process from the developer’s point of view.
Committing changes
We use git for version control. Each time someone pushes commits to a branch, an email is sent to Flowdock with tagged information on
commits that were pushed (committer, commit message…)
component and branch, into which was pushed
This lets us do real-time code reviews. We habitually discuss individual commits inside Flowdock. We use a git post-receive hook to pipe the changes into Flowdock via email. The hook is available here as a gist on GitHub.
Continuous integration
Whenever someone pushes some changes into the master branch, our continuous integration server runs all the unit tests in the project and if they do not pass, an alerting email, such as the one above, is sent to our flow. The message comes with details on who to blame so others can target the correct amount of mocking towards the culprit.
Continuous Deployment
When the tests pass, the master branch is then deployed to our QA environment.
All deployments send properly tagged messages to our flow in Flowdock. I can always tell what was deployed:
component: front end, back end, specific service…
environment: production, qa…
changes: log of commits the deployment brings into the environment
The QA deployment runs acceptance tests, which make sure all the important use cases function properly in a production-like environment. For acceptance tests, we use a combination of Cucumber, Selenium and RSpec. Once everything passes in QA, the deployed version is tagged a suitable candidate for production deployment. Next we do some smoke testing in QA, and finally deploy to production.
Flowdock also gives me a deployment log. For example to see front end deployments in production, I just search #deploy #production #frontend in Flowser.
Exception notifications
Whenever something goes wrong in production, we get notifications to our flow. This way we can debug problems together, immediately when they occur.
We try to be as responsive and communicative as possible towards our users because they are our future customers (fingers crossed), and they provide incredibly valuable customer feedback.
We try to give our customers enough ways to give us feedback, so they don’t have to sweat it. They can use a feedback form inside Flowdock flows, use our Uservoice page or send us email directly to team@flowdock.com. Some users choose to use Twitter for feedback and they catch our attention by mentioning @flowdock. All this means we need to track different mediums. Luckily enough, Flowdock gives us everything we need, in real time.
Emails and Twitter
In this example from the Tour, you can see how we handle feedback from emails and tweets.
Responsiveness comes easily when the whole team can respond to the feedback
All feedback form emails have the tag #feedback in their subject, so they get correctly tagged
We have forwarded all the emails to team@flowdock.com to our development flow as well, so it’s easy to answer to them and track them in Influx
Live, face-to-face feedback we just type into the chat and tag it with the same #feedback tag
With these practices, all the feedback is easily accessible when we need it.
Uservoice
Uservoice is a great way of sourcing and managing ideas and suggestions from the user community. The team gets notified about all changes in Uservoice as well. It’s great to talk over new feature requests inside our flow right away when they’re suggested. Then we tag them further and they become part of our backlog. That is agile.
Flowdock has been designed to be the best group messenger in the world, but it can be so much more. We’ve previously covered using tags to abolish the barrier of reporting bugs, and now I’ll show how you can make your team act as a single unit in tracking, creating, molding, protecting and generally managing your brand.
Flowdock allows your team to react to everything with zero delay. You can pipe anything into Flowdock’s Influx as RSS feeds, tweets or emails. Here’s a couple of things we’ve found immensely useful in tracking our brands. You should try them out.
Add Twitter tracking for your brand
This is basic functionality of Influx in Flowdock.
1. Go to Influx and select sources from the top right
2. Choose the Twitter tab and add your brands as Twitter searches
3. React with zero delay
Add Google Alerts for your brand
1. Go to Google Alerts and add alerts (RSS) with your brand names as search terms
Choose “Feed” in the “Deliver to” selection.
2. Copy the alert’s feed address from Google Alerts
3. Add the feed to Influx through the sources dialog
4. See what the internet says about your brand, and discuss it in Flowdock
Flowdock is completely real-time, and so will your team be once you start using it.
Flowdock was built to be the best group messenger in the world. It must be true, because it says so right on the About page of our new web page! That’s right, we’ve launched our website at www.flowdock.com and in ten days on March 10th, we’ll launch Flowdock to open public beta.
The new version of Flowdock has just been deployed and the 500 companies participating in private beta are already using it.
Here are some highlights of new stuff.
All those flows
Up till now, we’ve wanted to fine tune and get all the customer feedback on the user interface of the flow user experience, so we didn’t even provide anything else in private beta. However, Flowdock is not about only the one flow. You need to use different workspaces for different projects. Here is the new view for that, which we’ve endearingly named “My Flows”
Tour
We’ve added a tour to the web page. There’s already a few use cases on it, and we’ll be adding more as we get closer to the public beta launch. Here’s one such case demonstrating how a law firm uses Flowdock to collect various kinds of information about their competitors and clientele.
It’s been a crazy busy winter as we’ve been developing our shiny new group collaboration web app, Flowdock. Up till now, we’ve had about 100 teams trying out Flowdock and today marks the moment when we ship out over 700 more invites to people who want to see how Flowdock could make their teams’ lives easier. Haven’t requested an invite yet? Add your email address at flowdock.com.
Here’s something brand new right off the presses: a Flowdock screencast, showing the most important and interesting parts of the app, briefly illustrates how Flowdock can make your teamwork immensely more efficient and simply flowing.
In the following days we’ll be posting about some new things we have in store for our users. So, stay tuned! Also, check out @flowdock on Twitter and our Facebook fan page.
Me, Otto and Karri spent last week in California around the Bay Area promoting Flowdock and making connections. With us we had veritable crème de la crème of young Finnish entrepreneurs, including the founders of Powerkiss, award winning independent iPhone app developer Elias Pietilä (now from Qvik), and the CEOs from GrowVC and Mysites amongst others.
We had a great time, met awesome people and owe big thanks to the organizers of the trip, Aalto Entrepreneurship Society plus ArcticStartup. We especially want to thank Kristo Ovaska, Krista Kauppinen, Riku Seppälä and everyone who made the trip possible and awesome.
Flowdock Press
We did a lot of press contacting to prepare for the public launch of Flowdock later this year and even gave an early video interview to ArcticStartup. Amongst tons of meetings we met with an insightful lady, Tanja Aitomurto, who blogs regularly to Helsingin Sanomat here (in Finnish) about what’s buzzing in the Silicon Valley and got to demo Flowdock to her and get her feedback.
We were also interviewed by Skype Journal in a bit of a controversial situation, where we ended up criticizing Skype as a collaboration tool for its lack of ability to make anything useful out of the information gathered with it.
From Silicon Valley we dove straight back into the slush of Finland’s beginning winter and Slush Helsinki 09, the aptly named startup event where we demoed Flowdock live to the public hordes for the first time ever. Here’s a video interview with Karri pitching Flowdock in Slush by FreejamTV.
Flowdock is a real-time collaboration web app directed to teams. It allows co-workers to work together closely and coexist in the same space within their browser. Right now it’s going through an alpha stage where some 10 companies are trying it out and giving feedback.
The public beta is to be expected later this year. Before that we want to share some of the ways of using Flowdock with you. Today I’ll show you some ways to use one of the coolest features in Flowdock, tagging.
Lowering the barrier
We’ve noticed that lots of useful content is generated in instant Messaging, e-mail, Twitter and other medias. In a couple of minutes it may be totally forgotten, because it’s in no-one’s interest to structure that data to a wiki page, or even worse, to a Word document.
Imagine if logging a simple bug would mean just writing a short description to your group chat and ending the line with a #bug hashtag? With Flowdock’s team chat, that’s exactly how it works.
Tags can be added as hashtags or afterwards with a separate UI by anyone in your team. This helps you to ensure that all relevant content is tagged properly.
Information always accessible
All tagged content, including chat, files, content from e-mails etc. can be found using Flowser, an app-in-app of Flowdock for information management. When a bug is closed, for example, the user can simply remove the #bug tag.
When I’m looking for a screenshot of Flowdock for a blog post, I’m going to open Flowser and search for #screenshot. If I wanted to find screenshots only about our future promo site, I could just search for #screenshot #promo.
All this has truly changed our way of working. Now I’ll never forget who’s managing contracts at one of our customers, because that information is tagged in our flow. And tagging that information didn’t cost me anything.
