What are you working on next?

Around this time last year, I was sitting around the house and wondering what the future will hold. I am sure everyone on this planet was going through the same thoughts as me. Lockdowns were taking their toll on me, not seeing friends and family was hard, but most importantly, for me, a decision was looming.

My First Attempt

Prior to Covid, I spent a few months working on a strategy planner tool that I was calling TeamHQ. It was a side project that I had long dreamt of completing.

Based on the concepts of OKRs, I wanted to build a simple goal management app for teams. I built the OKR feature that I was proud of and thought about what to do next.

As all new projects go, features usually start to spring up like mushrooms. First, I added a meetings section, a slack like way to record meeting notes, agenda and action items. Then I added an ideas section, something similar to an internal tool Basecamp folks had built back in the early days of Rails. Then came the docs section, built as a place to keep all your team's docs in one place.

TeamHQ was fast becoming a full fledged enterprise solution for no one.

I've built all these great features, designed and redesigned the UI, but I had only shown it to a few people. I didn't spend any time trying to market it or sell it or even get feedback from others.

I was actually in the middle of a decision to abandon it, when Covid hit.

I those first few months, I had little time to focus on it. But in June of 2020, I was itching to build something, to use my pandemic time wisely.

After a long deliberation and a few discussions with my friend, I decided to rebuild TeamHQ.

What followed was almost 8 months of development, feedback, design, marketing efforts, sales campaigns and lots of sweat and tears.

All of it for a meagrely 50+ sign ups, a significant spend on the marketing and sales campaigns and hundreds of hours of development time.

TeamHQ was a failure by all sane measures. Or so I thought.

900 on board

In February of 2021, I decided to try out a concept that I developed while building TeamHQ. It was my new task board design.

TeamHQ's boards were based on the Scrum concept with sprints and tasks. But the actual board was laid out differently from other project management tools. I thought it was an innovative design.

To test if this new design was actually useful, I built a one feature project called Boardly. Boardly App, as it is known, is the simplest planning board.

The website took about a week to put together and I launched it at the end of February.

Most folks here might be wondering how I launched it. Well, it was a two step process. An ad campaign and a hacker news post.

The response was overwhelming, to say the least. While I struggled to get any signups for TeamHQ, Boardly was getting 10-15 signs up a day in the first month, sometimes more.

Not all of those users would return, I'd say about 90% tried it and left, but there were a few that stuck around. By time May came around, there were over 850 sign ups. Not bad for an app that was only two months old. But that wasn't the point.

The point was that the board concept I developed for TeamHQ had legs. It had at least 900 hundred pairs of legs by the time of this writing.

Decision

TeamHQ wasn't right somehow. I deemed it as a planning tool for teams, too broad, too confusing, too un-sellable.

I have to admit here that I was swayed by the big guys. Jira, Monday.com, Asana, Wrike, Basecamp, etc., all of those apps had this new idea they were selling, "the work management app". I tried to copy them.

That was a stupid move.

Even though I knew better, even though I was fully aware of how most companies started, I still got swept up by the desire to build something that would be everything to everyone. That is often the undoing of most startups and businesses.

I hope I've learned my lesson.

I spent the better part of the May wondering if I should continue with TeamHQ. I knew I had something with Boardly, the idea was there. But I needed it to be more focused for it to work.

A brief scan of Capterra categories on project management software led me into a deeper despair about my app. There were over 1000 active products in the "project management" space. Even my original to build an OKR/Goal management app had hundreds of competitors. I was close to calling it quits, but then I had stumbled on the one category that I should have been paying attention to from the beginning: Scrum Software.

It was tiny, some 46 apps listed, majority of them were cross-categorized in Agile and Project Management categories. Scrum was the open space.

This made me think about where I got the idea from my board design. It was from a Scrum book by the founder of Scrum Jeff Sutherland. After reading that book in August of last year, I had an "epiphany" for the board design. It was going to be based on Scrum.

Scrum was what helped me build a fully featured TeamHQ app in such a short amount of time. Scrum was the answer, to everything.

Well, maybe not quite that dramatic, but Scrum is what I wanted to build around. Scrum, I thought, was what teams needed to get more work done. I wanted to bring Scrum to the masses with TeamHQ.

But bringing Scrum to the masses won't work without first ensuring that the Scrum tool you are building is actually useful to the people who already use Scrum.

So I decided to strip TeamHQ of most of its features and rebuild it just as a Scrum planning tool. I called the new project HappyStack.

Welcome to HappyStack.

Before I decided to proceed with this pivot, I wanted to test the concept first. I quickly put together a website (a landing page only) with cut out screenshots from TeamHQ showing the board concept and what HappyStack would look like. To advertise it, I ran a small ad campaign and posted a link on hacker news. There were over 80 email signups in the first week, showing me there was interest in a Scrum project planning tool.

So I decided to go head re-factor the app into something smaller, leaner and better suited for developers.

Three weeks of evening and weekend work and HappyStack is now ready for anyone who wants to give it a go.

For those who want to check it out now, you can visit HappyStack and sign up here.

For those who want to learn a bit more about the concepts behind it, read on.

What are you working on next?

Scrum at its simplest form seeks to answer one question, what are you working on next? You in this case could be one person or a team. Next is the next feature, goal, task, something of value that needs to be done.

Scrum works so well is because Scrum is based on how people actually work. We create a mini plan for the week, maybe write it down and go about doing work. Every day we reassess, reevaluate our progress and decide what to work on next. Scrum provides a bit of structure to that process.

That's what HappyStack is all about. It is based on projects withs sprint boards that are split up into two visible sections and one hidden.

The visible sections are Todo and Doing. Anything task/story/bug/etc that you or your team are working on is in the Doing section. This includes tasks that are in progress, in review, in QA or other any status that implies that someone working on it.

Any task/story/bug that is still to be done is in the Todo section. This includes, blocked, paused, todo and other types of tasks that have not been started yet. This section is further broken down into three areas for task priority: Urgent and Important, Important and Not Urgent. This setup can help scrum masters plan their tasks more accurately.

The hidden section is Done. You can see it by clicking on the done tasks button. It is hidden, because when we finish our work we don't need to see it all the time.

The board concept is based on a few dozen of interviews with people from various backgrounds and what I learned about people's thought processes and how they decide what to work on next.

Each project is split up into sprints and a backlog. By design, HappyStacks projects can only be planned up to four sprints in advance and any tasks that are not in a sprint are left in the Backlog.

On the whole, even though HappStack is an attempt at building a software solution for an existing project management framework, some of the concepts in it are new and are designed to make sprint planning and task management simpler.

I hope this brief explanation makes sense. In the near future, I will be working on the video to further illustrate how HappyStack works.

So this is what HappyStack is all about. Helping you and your team decide what to work on next. Maybe you can give it a try? I invite you to give it a spin, create test projects, tasks and provide feedback.

Get HappyStack at HappyStack App