More seriously though, thanks for the feedback. We're not sure what the best pricing is yet. $10/user/mo is in line with similar products and is a small price to pay for getting rid of unnecessary overhead and management. It might be too high though.
Probably not as interesting now that you can play with the actual tool, but we also wrote several blog posts describing our thinking and goals for solving this problem:
There's obviously a lot of different project management strategies.
Some companies seem to have project managers assign daily tasks to each developer. The PMs then spend a lot of time defining the tasks and moving the schedule around. They have weekly/daily meetings with other PMs to do cross-project planning.
On the other hand, Basecamp's Shape Up (https://basecamp.com/shapeup) process defines a desired outcome with some clear parameters and a six-week deadline and simply lets the team figure out the rest. There's not a lot of project management happening on a week-by-week basis.
So my question is, what do teams in the middle of those two extremes do? How do teams spend less time on minutia of planning projects and tasks and more time doing?
A lot depends on the size and nature of the work. if your project is big enough it needs multiple PMs then there's a lot of time needed for coordination and cross communication.
I do find that asking if a task is 50% done is kind of random and that task should be broken down into something that's more concrete and binary(is it done or not). so it's ok to report 8 of 10 tasks are complete but asking an individual 80% of X is complete is probably not helpful.
daily standups help because it uncovers blockers and helps people admit when their stuck. and can help with redistributing the work.
as for documentation, I feel if you can't commit to documenting what it is you want then it's probably not a priority.
document discovery is a big problem in a large project/org.
you wouldn't write a book without an editor so it's probably good to have a qa person be another set of eyes on what needs to be done.
having a BA/product owner on the business side helps the business own the product and takes alot of the prioritization off of the development side. Having a BA that's done the job using the software helps.
No problem! It's a weird question to ask. A lot of companies just hire a project manager and let them work it out. There seems like there should be a better way, or at least some partial alternatives. I'm hoping to find some answers.
Funny you should mention that. I've just been hired as a project manager to do just that. Figure it out. I see myself as infrastructure, my work is to build a structure to enable others to do what they do best. Then again, it's my job to develop the plan on how to do that within the given constraints.
Ha! I think project managers as infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Just seems like there should be ways to smooth out the process, especially with smaller teams/companies so less project management is required.
Does the PM ever bother you to get the status of something, or is it always clear from the kanban board? I've seen the "bug the developer for a status update" move a lot in the past.
Agreeing on the API contract seems like a fantastic way to streamline the process!
The PM breaks down the work and we talk about new items as a team weekly, I (or devs) break down purely engineering work. The board is the status - its in progress, code review or getting tested. There are discussions on things as people work them - that's the small "a" agile practice of "individuals and interactions over processes and tools". Let those minor details get figured out as you work it rather than have everything planned, documented, etc.
Admittedly, I have not seen any of Skypher besides their website.
That said, the biggest differentiator that I see is that we use a human in the loop model, while Skypher is a purely software solution.
In other industries, an AI that can answer even 90% of the questions well would be a fantastic result. On a security questionnaire, that's going to lead to more back and forth, more meetings, and more work for the vendor (in this case you). Our reviewers are there to make sure that every question is answered perfectly.
Overall, this is an underserved market, and saving smart people time on security questionnaires is a goal we both have.
Here's what I know about our product - we can ensure that the quality of the responses are exceptionally high - our customers tell us that they're at or better than the responses that their teams would be providing.
Ultimately, what I think that translates to is more time saved on our customers' end and less back-and-forth with their prospect's infosec team to get the deal closed.
Those things can be really difficult with the browser-based libraries because the browsers don't yet (and seemingly never will) support CSS Paged Media. That's why commercial engines like Prince and DocRaptor (which uses Prince) exist. These engines were designed for document generation and have much better support for headers/footers, table of contents, page numbers, etc, etc..
I'm a developer at https://docraptor.com. We're an official Prince partner with a SaaS pricing model, but we've got a separate JavaScript engine for that very reason.
More seriously though, thanks for the feedback. We're not sure what the best pricing is yet. $10/user/mo is in line with similar products and is a small price to pay for getting rid of unnecessary overhead and management. It might be too high though.