Why Did We Develop Scrumie?

Scrumie was initially developed by us - by Webscope.io for the internal needs. We are a small company focusing on front-end development. As we grew bigger and bigger and new projects were coming up, we realized quickly that it has become challenging for us to keep the entire company in sync. We were missing (especially project managers and tech leads) information about what team members have done, what they plan to do, if they plan some vacation and more. Since we also opened a small branch in Dnipro, Ukraine, we also faced common problems with remote teams. Everything put together; we realized we needed to act as soon as possible to stay productive and up-to-date within the whole company. See the three main problems we were facing that lead us to develop Scrumie.

 

#1 Too Much Time Spent on Regular Sync-ups and Meetings

Many companies struggle with this problem. It's nothing new. Generally speaking, meetings take up too much time and in most cases are literally unproductive. Think of how many times you've attended a meeting where you were doing something else than paying attention to the discussion. Almost every other day, right?

Our project manager held umpteen meetings with team members to get projects' updates. Having a sync-up for every single project takes a tremendous amount of time every week. As a consequence, he didn't have much time for his work. Sometimes, it was just hard to schedule a meeting with the entire team working on the project because of some team member's unavailability, other meetings or just because of lack of time. All in all, we had to find a solution - a way how to reduce the number of regular sync-ups/meetings to the required minimum.

 

#2 Evident Non-transparency in the Company

It's also a very known fact that if team members/employees don't have information about what's happening in the company, they might get stressed, demotivated or dissatisfied. After some discussions with the team, we found out that members lack mainly information about:

• what their colleagues are working on,
• what they plan to do (and when you can expect their part of work to be done if it's crucial for your work to be done),
• what's the progress of other projects,
• when colleagues will be available, and more.

Lack of information led to some problems in internal communication. There were misunderstandings, discussions and eventually more sync-up meetings arising as a consequence. And we are again by the first problem - too many meetings.

 

#3 No Suitable Solutions for Our Needs on the Market 

We decided to tackle the problems mentioned above by finding a tool that would help us. Our goal was clear - find a simple tool, where we could see what's happening in the team (company). The desired solution should have included a few features: an overview of the work done, work plans for the following days and team members' availability.

Well, the disappointment came unexpectedly quickly. What we realized after testing a couple of tools that most of them were too complex with many unnecessary functionalities. Some of the software tools weren't user-friendly and too expensive for a small company like Webscope. They were also mainly focused on tasks to be done rather than on the overall overview. This is not basically wrong (surely needed for project management) but what we most lacked was a clear overview of what has been done in the team.

 

Long story short, we decided to develop our tool. Initially, we used Scrumie only as an internal tool. However, when our founder had some discussions with companies similar to ours, we realized that there might be enterprises having the same problems we faced. Therefore we decided to make Scrumie public. So far, we've introduced Scrumie's beta version at Web Summit, launched on Producthunt and continue adding features that will help you know what's happening in your team.

If you also would like to know, what's happening in your team, try Scrumie for free right now!