As we grew from 10 employees to over 80, our toolbox evolved for the better. Here’s a handful of free or low-cost tools that we used along the way:
Clubhouse: For managing, tracking, and communicating product priorities with Product & Engineering teams. We started out using Trello’s free membership, but moved to Clubhouse to make communication easier once our combined teams grew beyond 10 people. Clubhouse is more tailored for software development, making it easier for us to cross-create and collaborate on agile processes, bug reporting, and documentation. (Free)
Metabase: For creating dashboards w/o SQL. Metabase allows anyone to query and learn from data, and create visualizations using its ‘questions’ tools. It proves to be very powerful and empowering across the company! However, it required a lot of initial effort from our BI team, needing its own server and infrastructure maintenance. (Free)
Mode Analytics: For more advanced teams using SQL, Python and R to create data visualizations and dashboards. (Free)
Sketch: For wire framing. We hired our first in-house product designer in February of 2019, which means that we went a good 4+ years leaning on the support of design consultancies and our own photoshop ‘skills.’ So far, Sketch as been the easiest tool to use. It’s intuitive, quickly shareable, and efficient once we uploaded our own design kit. (Free – limited use)
Appcues: For user onboarding, product announcements, NPS, A/B testing, and feedback – without using Engineering resources. Appcues empowered us to communicate and understand our users (freelancers) significantly better. In turn, their performance and overall sentiment improved significantly. ($250-$1000/mo – not free, but worth it if you consider the cost of Eng time)
More to be added…
Cathy Huang 