An insight on how we work at Azendoo
If you are wondering if the Azendoo team actually uses Azendoo, the answer is: absolutely.
Azendoo is our product, but first and foremost it is our most important work tool. Everything that happens in Azendoo goes onto our single workspace, named “Our Azendoo”.
Yes, we only use one workspace for all fifteen of us. We have a ridiculous number of subjects on this workspace: we currently have 692 active subjects, but that just shows how ambitious and hard working we are. The workspace was created in January 2012, right at the beginning of the start-up, and contains all the Azendoo history.
Each and every marketing campaign, event, partnership, feature development, big client or prospect, integration, and side-project is recorded in Our Azendoo, along with countless other things. When we welcome a new team member, we get them to look around the workspace at all the subjects that they are interested in participating on. They can read our past exchanges, and get a clearer idea of how we work, and about our culture.
Humeurs:
We have a subject dedicated to sharing anything that is not work-related, called “humeurs”, which translates roughly as “moods” in English. Here you can see amazing photomontages, the team’s plans for trips to the beach, their Mölkky game proposals, and other cool stuff.
We also have a “Competition” subject where we all share about what our competition is doing, how they are doing it, and why. We do this to stay on top in the industry. We at Azendoo do our best to offer a unique experience to our users, but at the same time, we need to keep within industry standards and market needs.
Design:
We have two separate design subjects, one for UX & UI, and the other for marketing purposes. In the UX & UI subject, we all share websites, blogs and apps that we find particularly beautiful or inspiring, and our design team shares their progress and asks for feedback. This enables our designers to get immediate feedback on small changes and tweaks, and allows the rest of the team to participate and make suggestions.
Our marketing design subject enables the marketing team to collaborate directly with the designers on all support, web pages, eBooks, and anything else we might need.
We also have many marketing-related subjects; the main ones are called “Marketing”, “SMO (Social Media)”, and “Buzz on Azendoo”.
In the Marketing subject we share everything related to marketing, from new campaign launches to details about our Twitter feed. This subjects works almost like a log; a repository or tag that we use in almost all marketing-related conversations and tasks, allowing us to view or review our progress in all our marketing actions, all in one single subject.
SMO (Social Media):
We use this subject in order to increase our team’s reactivity to social media. Since we all use the mobile application and its notifications, we are able to discuss whilst on the go, about how we should respond to a certain tweet, for example.
In the “Buzz on Azendoo” subject we inform the team about all Azendoo mentions throughout the web, whether it is a blog post from a user who enjoyed Azendoo, a comparison made to our competitors or in app-review websites and press coverage.
App bug:
We have subjects dedicated to bug tracking and extermination. In these subjects we share all the bugs that we find, or which users have reported to us. This enables our dev team to stay on top of bugs, to document each bug and to have a log to refer back to with details of past bugs, with info about why each specific bug happened and how we dealt with it.
We have a customer feedback subject, and this is one of the most important subjects on our workspace. Everyday the support team shares customer feedback with everyone else, from support, Tweets, our Azendoo Rockstar program, our sales team, and calls and face-to-face meetings we might have with prospects and current users. This fuels the whole team to provide the best app possible, taking into account each piece of feedback we receive. It helps us to broaden our vision of what the app should be in the coming months, and to prioritize according to user demands and needs.
iDoneThis:
Every evening at around 6pm we post a message on our iDoneThis subject, where everyone lists what they have accomplished that day. It takes about 30 seconds and enables us to review our own daily performance and to share our progress with everyone else. This is easy to track and to refer back to later if necessary.
We also use confidential subjects when sensitive information is involved, or when we want to plan surprise birthday gifts or parties. So, two weeks before an Azendoo team member’s birthday, we create a confidential subject called “Pierre’s Birthday” for example, and we invite everyone except Pierre! There we can discuss his present and the birthday party we’re going to organize. Once we settle on the present, we delegate the task to one of us, who’s then going to be responsible for buying it. After his birthday, we close the subject so that we can re-open it next year!
How we collaborate:
Since we are the first Azendoo users, we literally know the tool inside out. And we’ve developed habits around our usage as a team:
When we delegate tasks to others, we make sure to not spam our teammates with a bunch of useless notifications. So, we first prepare the task with all the necessary information before delegating it, and then use the in-task comments to exchange details of each query.
We’ve also made a good habit of posting messages to their appropriate subjects, and using some of them as tags for easier research later on.
Sometimes we comment on finished tasks to keep everyone up to date on what has been done, or to have conversations about what has been done.
- All team members do their own research for information before asking for something from someone else, as this might disrupt their productivity momentum.
- We use Direct Messages for non-work related chitchat and things that need quick back and forth (keeping task-related stuff for the task cards).
We do use Azendoo a lot! But we also interact a lot within our office. We are in an open office, so discussing things with everyone else is easy.
I hope you now have a better idea of how Azendoo is built, through this insider article. Please let us know what you think in the comments below :)