Why we created Zube
You know what’s one of the worst feelings to have when you’re working on a team?
“What the hell is everyone doing?”.
My cofounder, Jen Dewalt, and I felt this way a lot at our previous companies. Jen was hacking with the guys at Wit.ai, and I was doing web development and data science at 42Floors. We felt lost even though our teams were made up of great people who spent a good deal of time trying to keep everyone in the loop. We had weekly engineering meetings and we used GitHub issues to keep track of bugs and features. But come mid-week, we really couldn’t tell you what anyone else was working on.
We had no project management. To be fair, we didn’t really want project management. It takes work to organize and prioritize all of your issues and we tended to favor cranking out code. We tried to use various tools to help get us organized. We’d be able to keep things up to date for a while, but then we’d just stop. The cost of constantly updating the project management tool as well as maintaining GitHub issues was just too high. We weren’t willing to give up GitHub issues so we would ditch the project management tool instead.
Not having any project management tool is bad. Things aren’t so bad when you’re just a couple of developers working in a room, but once your team is a size of 5 or more, communication becomes the primary factor that determines the rate of progress… and team happiness for that matter.
That’s why we created Zube. We were working with teams of around 10 developers and desperately needed to organize our Github issues. We didn’t want to waste a bunch of time bringing up some complicated process when all we needed was some structure. Zube was born from these notions – create a virtual board with just enough structure to keep everyone on the same page and make the process so seamless that the burden of project management disappears.