Blimp: project management for doers

http://elweb.co/stuff/blimp-project-management-for-doers/

by flexterra • 14 years ago

77 43 14 years ago

bmelton2• 14 years ago

The project looks great, but at least for myself, I either need to see a feature tour or a 7 day free trial or something.

This is probably 'good enough' (and certainly is beautiful) for people not currently using anything for project management, but probably most of the HN audience already has something that's working somewhat for what they're trying to do now, and you're trying to supplant that.

There's almost no amount of screenshots that are going to get me to give up on the devil I know, so at the very least a product tour that shows interactivity is needed. Better than that would be a free trial, where I can get in there and try out some scenarios and compare them to the pain points I already have with my existing tools.

Like I said though, it really does look great. Fantastic even. But without being able to click on anything, I don't know that it isn't just pretty.

flexterra8• 14 years ago

The app is free to sign up and use for as long as you want.

You can invite as many collaborators as you need. The only limitation is the number of projects that you can manage simultaneously, one for the free plan.

bmelton2• 14 years ago

Ack. I don't know how I overlooked that, I just saw the $12 for unlimited projects and went from there I guess.

Thanks!

vijaykiran• 14 years ago

Start with our free plan, which allows you to manage one project with as many team members as you need.

From - http://www.getblimp.com/

rgonzalez• 14 years ago

If you offer a free alternative you should highlight that, not hide it in plain sight. Perhaps you should go with `Signup for Free` rather than simply mentioning it on a small font which reduces relevancy. That would be a good AB test for your conversion rate.

mrgreenfur• 14 years ago

Looks wonderful, will give it a go.

MattRogish2• 14 years ago

My problem with project management tools is that they often become a brain dump of every possible little thing folks can think of - and over time, those things either happen to get done as a side effect of another story or become obsolete when market, product, or user needs change.

I like "high level" goals that can be prioritized ("User signup flow" is the most important thing we're working on this week, after that, it's probably "..."); the details for the high level stories can be done just-in-time.

My perfect PM feature for this is some sort of LRU expiry of stories. If someone hasn't opened a story (no views) or modified it within the last few months, move it to an archive. After a certain period of time in the archive, delete it.

Organizations and dev teams have a memory - if something is important, it'll be in the collective cache of the team. If something is relatively unimportant, it's waste (in the lean sense) to write it down until you have to (shortly before you need to prioritize and use it).

Bugs are the same thing. A bug is usually either worth fixing immediately (aka "next") or "never". Many bug trackers get clogged with stuff like "on IE7, the user dialog is 5 px to the right". It's either worth fixing right now or "never". Delete it, and if another user complains and it's recent enough that we remember the other story, then it bumps up the priority. But if it happens long after we all forgot it happened, it's still not important enough to fix.

This would go a long way to keeping the most important things at the top and avoiding the hell of "Did we have a story for that or something like 6 months ago?" associated searching. Both Pivotal and Trello have this sort of rosy picture of the world that folks will only be entering in "this is the most important thing we must do it this week" sort of stuff, which is unfortunately not how most project teams work. A more holistic PM tool would take into account user behavior and have a solution for this. Heck, something like HackerNews' front page algorithm would be pretty interesting applied to PM.

flexterra8• 14 years ago

We are on the same page here. One feature that we implement is the "non-sticky DOING state". Sorry for the name, we can't come up with anything for that one.

The feature works like this. When you mark a tasks as DOING that state will only last for 24hrs. After that the "worker" will be notified that the "Blimp robot" removed the DOING state. The idea is to approach the problem you are talking about. Many times projects become filled with stuff that nobody works on. I know this is a very simplistic approach but it's a start. We have a few cards up our sleeves.

MattRogish2• 14 years ago

Win x 1000! I will definitely give Blimp a try!

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

"temporarily in progress"? It does sound like a good idea.

Spearchucker4• 14 years ago

I've a similar requirement in a dissimilar scenario.

I'm an architect and work in an enterprise environment that's obsessed at the minute (to put it mildly) with Agile. A typical project will use Pivotal to capture requirements, track progress and manage changes.

Project plans are non-existent, and a vague project schedule is done in Excel to convince the project sponsor to authorize the work.

The result is big surprise all around when release one is unusable because the hipster tech doesn't integrate with Active Directory, the awesome server push engine doesn't resolve clients behind NAT, and a change to a business rule requires two weeks' refactoring.

The team has talent, but they lack direction. What I need is something that a). captures high level requirements, b). does some basic risk management (plan, track, control) and c). does some stakeholder management so that the team knows whom in the organisation to ask about things like hosting.

debacle4• 14 years ago

It sounds like you need a project manager.

rhizome• 14 years ago

I mean this in the most supportive way possible, but that place sounds like a nightmare. How's the turnover?

P.S. Curious handle.

mmanfrin• 14 years ago

  Bugs are the same thing. A bug is usually either worth fixing immediately (aka "next") or "never". Many bug trackers get clogged with stuff like "on IE7, the user dialog is 5 px to the right". It's either worth fixing right now or "never". Delete it, and if another user complains and it's recent enough that we remember the other story, then it bumps up the priority. But if it happens long after we all forgot it happened, it's still not important enough to fix.

I think this is only really acceptable if you are a very small team with very specific goals. I'm biased, as I work in QA, but these things are necessary because a lot of devs are pretty terrible at reading specs. QA will find scrolls of bugs, and having them all marked as 'next' is useless. You need things like priorities, you need things like Sprints.

TonyNib• 14 years ago

Very clean design - you've put a lot of thought into this and it shows.

I most appreciate the ToDo->Doing->Done implementation. However it does assume that all to-do comprise an equal proportion of the job. It doesn't allow for a list with 10 items, where number 2 is actually 50% of the work. But that's probably not something easily quantifiable to begin with.

One typo I noticed on the files tab (when empty): "Upload files to share with you team."

Also I couldn't get the photo upload to work on my settings page. The spinner would appear then go back to the default image, and saving didn't help.

flexterra8• 14 years ago

Thanks for the report, the issue with the photo upload seems to be the cache, being too agressive. We are fixing it right now.

mctx• 14 years ago

"You and I know, that when we started our businesses, we where hoping" - did an h sneak into your were?

flexterra8• 14 years ago

ups!

jgnatch• 14 years ago

The history section totally looks like Basecamp progress section!

Nice tool though!

flexterra8• 14 years ago

Yes it does look a lot like Basecamp's. We had start with something. We are trying hard to make project history useful. Right now is just kind of a log in most PM apps (Blimp included). We feel it has potential to do more but haven't found how to make it happen. We'll keep at it.

eduardordm• 14 years ago

Just gave it a try. It has the same use case as github issues, at least for programming projects. That said, I think you should focus on non-programmers.

flexterra8• 14 years ago

Initially, our target is digital agencies, design shops and small development teams. Blimp won't replace Pivotal Tracker for a team of experienced developers using scrum or other formal agile methodology. But we are OK with that.

We are trying to fix problems for folks that need help with their PM methodology. The idea is "trick" them into using a somewhat formal process.

metatation• 14 years ago

"we have plans for companies of all sizes starting at $12 a month"...couldn't find a link to more information on pricing.

flexterra8• 14 years ago

It slipped our minds. Here are the plans:

- Free: $0 / 1 project / unlimited users / 10MB of file storage - Beta testers: $12 month / unlimited projects / unlimited users / 100MB of file storage / access to new features including Dropbox support (coming later this week) which will not count against you file storage allowance.

We have other plans available but they are not relevant right now since the beta testers plan is the best deal. You can see all plans after you sign up at https://app.getblimp.com/company/billing/

corry• 14 years ago

Kudos for the nice design. I think this minimalist, flat, spaced-out, subtle-palette approach is great for for tools that people spend their whole day in.

jpdevereaux• 14 years ago

Indeed, it feels a lot less "boxed in" than tools like Asana.

debacle4• 14 years ago

I'm tired of web-based project management tools. Give me something on the desktop, that has a UI I can understand and isn't integrated with my browser, or go away. Anyone with a few hours and a CRUD generator can make a web-based project management tool.

flexterra8• 14 years ago

We hear you. I would also like some kind of native client like Evernote or at least better integration in the OS level.

SonicSoul• 14 years ago

care to explain why you dislike web based apps so much? latency is too annoying? we use Jira with GreenHopper and it's great. sluggishness is my only complaint.

it's definitely not easy to develop something like this right.

debacle4• 14 years ago

1. They tie my app to my browser, meaning if my browser crashes (I'm a developer, it happens), my app crashes.

2. If I want to tie myself to a particular version, I can't, meaning that if I don't like a $hot_new_feature, I'm SOL.

3. The browser is still very limited, and project management is very content intensive.

One single company willing to do actual applications programming could sell a ton of software.

bdunn• 14 years ago

Disclaimer: I run a web-based project management tool (Planscope)

I think a successful PM tool needs to be able to do two things well: track things that need to get done and organize communication. I love desktop software for the former, I still use Things.app — even though Flow is better for me — because it's a simple desktop app.

However, I think web apps are best for communication. I'm not dependent on any installed software, and I don't need to walk my clients through installing software.

Also, a take a bit of issue with "anyone with a few hours and a CRUD generator can make..." :-) While it's true that "projects has_many tasks" is the typical setup, intuitive workflows and easy-to-use interfaces take a lot of time and work.

ollysb2• 14 years ago

Global file uploads seems a bit off, could work in fixed length projects but for ongoing projects it makes more sense to associate uploads with goals. Thinking about it dropbox integration would be ideal i.e. when a goal is created a dropbox folder is added automatically at: dropbox/blimp/project_name/goal

ollysb2• 14 years ago

Ha, just found the "discuss" option. Was really wondering how you add more detail to a task, the whole product makes a lot more sense now.

robterrell• 14 years ago

I love the way this looks. This might be outside your area of interest or might be too laser-focused on developer's needs, but I'd suggest integrating some kind of post-commit hook support, so a developer can check code in via svn or git and change the state of a to-do item. That's one thing we used extensively when tracking projects in Unfuddle tickets that I really miss.

justinlilly• 14 years ago

Another great tool in this vein of "process, but not too much" is https://sprint.ly/

mikle• 14 years ago

So that's why I didn't get anything done today. My project management tool is not for doers!

All kidding aside, it looks pretty and well designed, but I don't see any value in yet another project management tool.

mattdeboard• 14 years ago

The "X" on the keyboard shortcut modal doesn't work. You have to press escape.

Blimp: project management for doers

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