How We Use Asana to Build Products at Flatbook

This post first appeared on Flatbook’s Medium page  

Like all departments at Flatbook, our product and engineering teams rely heavily on Asana for task management and documentation. Though we fire up Google Docs often, Asana provides the center of gravity for our product development process. Over the past year of heavy usage, (Sprint 23 and counting), we’ve used Asana to support all major phases of our product cycle, from roadmapping and speccing to sprint planning and bug reporting. By centralizing our work within a single environment, we’ve managed to reduce complexity while maintaining structure. We’ve also found Asana’s features help us promote transparency and collaboration. While our product development processes are constantly evolving, we hope this snapshot of what we’ve built so far proves interesting, to other product teams using Asana, and to the larger conversation about the tools we use to build products.

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5 Meetings Your Startup Should Be Running

This post originally appeared on http://www.montrealintechnology.com

Love them or hate them, meetings play a crucial role in startup life. At a practical level, meetings are one of the main settings for problem solving, decision making and brainstorming. At a cultural level, meetings are a key tool for shaping norms for how people work together.

Running successful meetings is especially challenging for scaling startups. But startups that work hard on this transition vastly increase their chances of success.

Creating an effective meeting culture starts with choosing what meetings to run. By mastering a few key formats, startups can create a strong weekly rhythm while setting the tone for how all meetings will be run.

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Bringing Product Management to a Scaling Startup

This post first appeared on the Founder Fuel Blog

Early stage startups don’t generally need a discrete product management function, a point I’ve made here. As startups scale, however, most do add product managers to help them deal with increased complexity. Like any major organizational change, the process of adding product management to a scaling startup is at once transformative and full of challenges.

At Frank & Oak, a Montreal-based e-tailer, we’ve recently gone through this exact transition. As Head of Product Management, I’ve worked with our Founders and Head of Technology to manage the change, focusing on four key areas: defining the product manager (PM) role, setting a weekly rhythm, establishing key operations, and solidifying our tools. The results are a work in progress, but I hope nonetheless worth sharing here.

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