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Blimp: project management for doers

77 pointsby flexterraover 12 years ago

15 comments

MattRogishover 12 years ago
My problem with project management tools is that they often become a brain dump of every possible little thing folks can think of - and over time, those things either happen to get done as a side effect of another story or become obsolete when market, product, or user needs change.<p>I like "high level" goals that can be prioritized ("User signup flow" is the most important thing we're working on this week, after that, it's probably "..."); the details for the high level stories can be done just-in-time.<p>My perfect PM feature for this is some sort of LRU expiry of stories. If someone hasn't opened a story (no views) or modified it within the last few months, move it to an archive. After a certain period of time in the archive, delete it.<p>Organizations and dev teams have a memory - if something is important, it'll be in the collective cache of the team. If something is relatively unimportant, it's waste (in the lean sense) to write it down until you have to (shortly before you need to prioritize and use it).<p>Bugs are the same thing. A bug is usually either worth fixing immediately (aka "next") or "never". Many bug trackers get clogged with stuff like "on IE7, the user dialog is 5 px to the right". It's either worth fixing right now or "never". Delete it, and if another user complains and it's recent enough that we remember the other story, then it bumps up the priority. But if it happens long after we all forgot it happened, it's still not important enough to fix.<p>This would go a long way to keeping the most important things at the top and avoiding the hell of "Did we have a story for that or something like 6 months ago?" associated searching. Both Pivotal and Trello have this sort of rosy picture of the world that folks will only be entering in "this is the most important thing we must do it this week" sort of stuff, which is unfortunately not how most project teams work. A more holistic PM tool would take into account user behavior and have a solution for this. Heck, something like HackerNews' front page algorithm would be pretty interesting applied to PM.
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debacleover 12 years ago
I'm tired of web-based project management tools. Give me something on the desktop, that has a UI I can understand and isn't integrated with my browser, or go away. Anyone with a few hours and a CRUD generator can make a web-based project management tool.
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TonyNibover 12 years ago
Very clean design - you've put a lot of thought into this and it shows.<p>I most appreciate the ToDo-&#62;Doing-&#62;Done implementation. However it does assume that all to-do comprise an equal proportion of the job. It doesn't allow for a list with 10 items, where number 2 is actually 50% of the work. But that's probably not something easily quantifiable to begin with.<p>One typo I noticed on the files tab (when empty): "Upload files to share with you team."<p>Also I couldn't get the photo upload to work on my settings page. The spinner would appear then go back to the default image, and saving didn't help.
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corryover 12 years ago
Kudos for the nice design. I think this minimalist, flat, spaced-out, subtle-palette approach is great for for tools that people spend their whole day in.
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robterrellover 12 years ago
I love the way this looks. This might be outside your area of interest or might be too laser-focused on developer's needs, but I'd suggest integrating some kind of post-commit hook support, so a developer can check code in via svn or git and change the state of a to-do item. That's one thing we used extensively when tracking projects in Unfuddle tickets that I really miss.
metatationover 12 years ago
"we have plans for companies of all sizes starting at $12 a month"...couldn't find a link to more information on pricing.
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ollysbover 12 years ago
Global file uploads seems a bit off, could work in fixed length projects but for ongoing projects it makes more sense to associate uploads with goals. Thinking about it dropbox integration would be ideal i.e. when a goal is created a dropbox folder is added automatically at: dropbox/blimp/project_name/goal
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bmeltonover 12 years ago
The project <i>looks</i> great, but at least for myself, I either need to see a feature tour or a 7 day free trial or something.<p>This is probably 'good enough' (and certainly is beautiful) for people not currently using anything for project management, but probably most of the HN audience already has something that's working somewhat for what they're trying to do now, and you're trying to supplant that.<p>There's almost no amount of screenshots that are going to get me to give up on the devil I know, so at the very least a product tour that shows interactivity is needed. Better than that would be a free trial, where I can get in there and try out some scenarios and compare them to the pain points I already have with my existing tools.<p>Like I said though, it really does look great. Fantastic even. But without being able to click on anything, I don't know that it isn't just pretty.
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jgnatchover 12 years ago
The history section totally looks like Basecamp progress section!<p>Nice tool though!
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mikleover 12 years ago
So that's why I didn't get anything done today. My project management tool is not for doers!<p>All kidding aside, it looks pretty and well designed, but I don't see any value in yet another project management tool.
eduardordmover 12 years ago
Just gave it a try. It has the same use case as github issues, at least for programming projects. That said, I think you should focus on non-programmers.
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justinlillyover 12 years ago
Another great tool in this vein of "process, but not too much" is <a href="https://sprint.ly/" rel="nofollow">https://sprint.ly/</a>
mctxover 12 years ago
"You and I know, that when we started our businesses, we where hoping" - did an h sneak into your were?
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mrgreenfurover 12 years ago
Looks wonderful, will give it a go.
mattdeboardover 12 years ago
The "X" on the keyboard shortcut modal doesn't work. You have to press escape.