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

16 points by kernelsoe ↗ HN
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?

19 comments

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beanjuiceII
excel, in one form or another (google sheets)
kernelsoe
I had heavily used excel in my previous job from project management to heavy calculations. One of the most versatile tools! I love spreadsheets.
akg_67
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.
nivertech
I experienced this in Scrum planning, daily standups, and other rituals were done with Excel shared via Zoom (or similar) meetings.

The Scrum Master would ask each team member a question (e.g. estimation, etc.) and then fill the Excel while online, wasting everyone's time.

Same with planning, there will be some basic template for a sprint, and it will be filled with the estimations/Jira tickets during the online meeting!

Given said that, there are some valid uses for shared spreadsheets in Product/SDLC.

One method I used is specific for data engineering projects: the product fills Excel/Google Spreadsheet with the example input, output shapes in the form of tables, and the developers asking question while they arriving to common spec.

Another is called Decision Matrix (almost as old as Periodic Table;), which was recently popularized by Rich Hickey in his talk Design in Practice[1,2].

Another valid usecase for shared spreadsheets is Use Cases table.

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[1] https://youtu.be/c5QF2HjHLSE?t=2351

[2] slide #31 https://download.clojure.org/presentations/DesignInPractice....

tren
We use Bookstack to organise most info - it's easy to setup in docker and easy to find and link articles
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.

kernelsoe
Linking issues and doc is pretty much nice feature. I don't have Atlassian experience but I feel Notion databases slow to interact and with unnecessary animations and transitions. Sure regular Notion pages are fast to load. Coming from extensive excel user teams, Sheets is really hard for me to navigate.
faraggi
To simplify, we _tried_ to centralize everything into a single service- and failed.

I thought we could use googles services to do everything.

meet, docs, drive, cal

but we obviously has to add GitHub, and then Jira (ugh), discord, etc...

kernelsoe
I think this is one of the core pain points. Google workspace is like being default for most startups tied to email but then GW don't have enough tools or high quality enough? I would rather use notion than writing in google doc for e.g.
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).

CedricTeyton
At Promyze, we use Slack for IM and Notion for non-tech documentation. For tech knowledge, we dogfood our own tool.
kernelsoe
Interesting! what kind of tools are you guys built and using for tech knowledge base?
CedricTeyton
Thanks!

We're building a collaborative platform to gather and share best coding practices.

In short, it helps us highlight code snippets from the IDE (JetBrains, Visual Studio, VS Code), discuss them in Slack (or MS Teams or Discord or Mattermost), and document them with contextual examples.

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.
user6723
Our sys admin put in the crontab on our systems a script that fetches and runs Ansible code if the code has an accompanying valid crypto signature.

Mostly it deploys Podman configs to run proxies that do "nat traversal" and provide various things on our machine most using Git as a backend.

Our internal docs are mostly a variant of Markdown or Scientific Markdown.

We use a private Jitsi server for meetings and our company policy is to never impose influence (no matter how light) on any employee to inadvertantly leak their likeness/biometrics to a third party org.

Our CIO is pretty legit I must say.

user6723
I see other comments mentioning IM. We have Matrix' Synapse on a private bare-metal K8s and outside clients can access our private Element Web from another K8s cluster when we need to collaborate more directly. Some clients or partner orgs have their own Matrix servers.
kaffeeringe
Nextcloud with all of its' apps is great. They work together very smoothly and you get to keep your data to yourself.
matt34
We use Notion for all Q&A's, Docs, How To's, Product Specs... . For short living information we just drop everything into Slack. As soon as we notice sth. originally intended to be short-lived takes on long term value, we go back to creating docs in Notion.