internal tool note
Barista — it’s a knowledge exchange platform that allows anyone in the organization to ask a question so that it gets routed to the right people who can respond easily over email.
“One of the big challenges you see inside any product organization is how do you keep the business and product teams communicating constantly?” says Brier. “Product changes are happening and the business side needs to stay on top of them. It’s a central problem for every growing company, and automating this keeps it top of mind for everyone.” -- a central repository of knowledge that would scale with the company and facilitate the interactions people used to have when they were sitting next to each other.
Another product called Phaser keeps the product and engineering teams stay aligned as they sprint on many different projects at once. “It supports our entire product development workflow, interacting with Github, HipChat and Asana, moving tasks through all their phases of development on every platform as things move forward.” This leaves little room for doubt about project status or what needs to be done next. “When code is ready for review, a request gets automatically opened in GitHub and Phaser associates it with the right Asana task, and it gets assigned to the right point person.” If you try to rush something through before the right people have looked at it the system barks at you (or, occasionally, makes a snarky comment).
Before you do anything, you should search to see if affordable tools already exist to solve your particular problem.
product engineers should be involved in providing feedback and fueling innovation in this area, but not actually building tools that aren't specifically for them.
They have to be their own designer and product manager as well as an engineer. They have to be able to work with a variety of people who are frustrated with something is particular, and figure out how to answer that need.
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