What team tools do you use in your startup to organize information?

Question

Hey guys, I'm a software engineer in a startup team where we have to use half a dozen tools for team collaboration and running the whole thing.- Notion for Project management & Documentation (feels messy) - Google Sheets for client facing documents like project deliverables - Google Docs for random stuffs like meeting minutes (which should be inside notion?) - Google workspace email - Google drive for pdf files - Slack for chat (chaotic can't find information easily chat is bad ux for information, easy to bug others for info) - Zoom, Meet for meetings (zoom's video quality is very nice but aren't they all face video panels with subtitles instead of collaboration)These tools are built by amazing teams and I respect them but they in total cause a lot of $$ubscriptions and still information is scattered in random places (partly because we need more information hygiene) and feeling overwhelm sometimes. I feel tools these days are disconnected (i know there are integrations) and slow and not happy to use.The most recent joyful experience I'm having from trying out a tool is using Linear.app and Zed.dev. Love pure speed and ux.What tools do you use in your startup except for product design and development and How do you manage team workflow?

jamisonbryant · Accepted Answer

My company just invested in Stack Overflow for Teams and we've found it fairly useful for maintaining a bank of institutional knowledge in the form of Q&A. I have noticed a significant slow down in contributions since the initial corpus of knowledge was added / new tool excitement wore off. But it is still useful reference for occasional lookups and it also excels in documenting very slim edge cases and their solutions in a way that a reference manual wouldn't IMO.

matt34 · Answer

We use Notion for all Q&A's, Docs, How To's, Product Specs... . For short living information we just drop everything into Slack. As soon as we notice sth. originally intended to be short-lived takes on long term value, we go back to creating docs in Notion.

cpach · Answer

I like Confluence. So far it&rsquo;s the best wiki software I have used. Mediawiki is also good, but I think it would probably require much more time and resources for customization before being on the level of Confluence.Confluence can be run in the cloud or on-prem (very expensive to use on-prem though).

mannyv · Answer

The current startup is using notion and GitHub. Github is a POS when it comes to bug tracking. Notion is pretty good. It's somehow different and more annoying than Confluence, but faster.
Jira/Confluence IMO is pretty good, but people have a love/hate relationship with it. If you actually use them they're great.
Notion becomes a disorganized pile of crap, just like Confluence. Confluence allows you to link stuff to Jira and back.
Excel is pretty much required for interacting with clients. You send them an Excel spreadsheet, they send it back. Sheets just sort of sucks in all kinds of small ways because it isn't Excel.

user6723 · Answer

Our sys admin put in the crontab on our systems a script that fetches and runs Ansible code if the code has an accompanying valid crypto signature.
Mostly it deploys Podman configs to run proxies that do "nat traversal" and provide various things on our machine most using Git as a backend.
Our internal docs are mostly a variant of Markdown or Scientific Markdown.
We use a private Jitsi server for meetings and our company policy is to never impose influence (no matter how light) on any employee to inadvertantly leak their likeness/biometrics to a third party org.
Our CIO is pretty legit I must say.

tren · Answer

We use Bookstack to organise most info - it's easy to setup in docker and easy to find and link articles

faraggi · Answer

To simplify, we _tried_ to centralize everything into a single service- and failed.
I thought we could use googles services to do everything.
meet, docs, drive, cal
but we obviously has to add GitHub, and then Jira (ugh), discord, etc...

kaffeeringe · Answer

Nextcloud with all of its' apps is great. They work together very smoothly and you get to keep your data to yourself.

CedricTeyton · Answer

At Promyze, we use Slack for IM and Notion for non-tech documentation. For tech knowledge, we dogfood our own tool.

beanjuiceII · Answer

excel, in one form or another (google sheets)