SmartyMeetis in the Enterprise Collaboration Industry

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Easily back up Smartsheet data to SQL Server using the SSIS components for Smartsheet. Using SQL Server as a backup for critical business data provides an essential safety net against loss. Backing up data to SQL Server enables business users to more easily connect that data with features like reporting, analytics, and more. This example demonstrates how to use the CData SSIS Tasks for Smartsheet inside of a SQL Server SSIS workflow to transfer Smartsheet data into a Microsoft SQL Server database. Add the Components To get started, add a new Smartsheet source and SQL Server ADO.NET destination to a new data flow task. Create a New Connection Manager Follow the steps below to save Smartsheet connection properties in a connection manager. In the Connection Manager window, right-click and then click New Connection. The Add SSIS Connection Manager dialog is displayed. In the Connection Manager type menu, select Smartsheet. The CData Smartsheet Connection Manager is displayed. Configure connection properties. Smartsheet uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to register an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties. However, for testing purposes you can instead use the Personal Access Token you get when you create an application; set this to the OAuthAccessToken connection property. Configure the Smartsheet Source Follow the steps below to specify the query to be used to extract Smartsheet data. Double-click the Smartsheet source to open the source component editor. In the Connection Manager menu, select the connection manager previously created. Specify the query to use for the data extraction. For example: SELECT TaskName, Progress FROM Sheet_Event_Plan_Budget view source Close the Smartsheet Source control and connect it to the ADO.NET Destination. Configure the SQL Server Destination Follow the steps below to specify the SQL server table to load the Smartsheet data into. Open the ADO.NET Destination and add a New Connection. Enter your server and database information here. In the Data access mode menu, select "table or view". In the Table Or View menu, select the table or view to populate. Configure any properties you wish to on the Mappings screen. Run the Project You can now run the project. After the SSIS Task has finished executing, your database will be populated with Smartsheet data. Also published on: https://www.cdata.com/kb/tech/smartsheet-ssis-task-import-2008.rst

A Guide to Importing Smartsheet Data into SQL Server using SSIS

Building Dependencies in Sheets, ClickUp, Monday, Wrike, SmartSheets

268 Stories To Learn About Project Management

232 Stories To Learn About Product

Companies are generating an ocean full of data, with marketing teams swimming in customer insights and finance departments navigating through intricate transactions. And let’s not even talk about how enormous spreadsheet files generated by cybersecurity teams are. Unfortunately, spreadsheet platforms like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets can’t handle big data spreadsheet files with millions or billions of rows. As of this writing, the . Whereas, Google Sheets has a . maximum row limit of Excel is 1,048,576 maximum cell limit of 10 million One of the best ways to smartly analyze big data spreadsheets without causing your browser to crash or your computer to run out of memory is using Gigasheet. Recently, I interviewed , the Co-founder of , a big data spreadsheet platform that allows its users to upload and analyze gigantic-sized spreadsheets packed with millions or billions or rows. Jason Hines Gigasheet What is your company in 2–5 words? The big data spreadsheet. Why is now the time for your company to exist? Spreadsheet platforms like Excel, Airtable, Smartsheet, and Google Sheets are not built for handling big data. These tools are incredibly powerful and offer tons of useful capabilities, but because of the limited capabilities that restrict users from working with huge datasets. That’s where Gigasheet is a game-changer. We have built this platform for users looking for something more powerful than Excel and Google Sheets. We want users to get insights from big data without having to write code or set up databases. You shouldn’t need a dedicated Data Science team or a Computer Science degree to get answers from really big datasets. And that’s what our sole focus is. Since spreadsheets are second-nature to most professionals, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel with a new product with the same functionality as a sheet. Instead, we decided to simplify spreadsheets for huge datasets. With Gigasheet, we offer data science capabilities in a lite platform with features like data enrichment, grouping, filtering, and much more. In a line, we combine the power of big data with the convenience of spreadsheets to work seamlessly with large datasets. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? I worked with cybersecurity analysts and revenue teams for a long time in my career. I realized that the volume of the data they handled was so large and complicated that they had to go through too much hassle to export and import it into a database. Besides, not everyone had database skills. So, they had to wait for other teams to support them in the research process, creating lengthy dependencies. That was the core problem statement we wanted to solve. My first-hand experience of working with these analysts and observing their problems in real-time helped me build Gigasheet as a powerful solution for working with large datasets, minus the hassle. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? Wow, that’s a good question. To be honest, since I committed to building Gigasheet, I haven’t even considered doing anything else. If I wasn’t doing this, I guess I’d probably be building another company or helping someone else do it. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics? I believe the goal of a venture-backed startup like ours is to fund our growth. So, we’re measuring success based on the platform’s utility for our end-users and our ability to go forward with our product roadmap as planned. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom? We offer a big data spreadsheet platform with several use cases and advanced capabilities. We serve users from multiple industries and roles, including eCommerce, cybersecurity, marketing, sales, analysts, and more. What’s most exciting about your traction to date? Just the sheer number of users and data we’re processing is kind of mindblowing. We recently processed our 5 trillionth data point and have more than 30,000 users on Gigasheet today. It’s wild to think about it, but we’re processing, on average, about 200,000 cells of data every second. Where do you think your growth will be next year? We've recently launched APIs to help users connect other systems to Gigasheet. This makes Gigasheet a powerful solution for enterprises, particularly heavy-duty applications like Snowflake or Salesforce. You can automate everything possible on the platform. So, whether you want to upload your data on a simpler interface, schedule import/export, or clean and inspect it, it's all possible with our enterprise API. We're also launching shared workspaces for teams. Multiple users from the same company use Gigasheet for collaboration on big files. That motivated us to expand beyond the single-user interface and add the shared workspace functionality to help teams work together seamlessly. Another cool thing on our radar is introducing more enrichments with our predefined partners. So, users can enrich massive data at scale without any coding skills. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year. Our first paying customer was an accountant in Canada. We never spoke to them, but it seems like they were successful. Each month we’ve been adding more customers, which is great, but our primary focus remains on building out more features in our product for 2023. What’s your biggest threat? As a startup, there are always 1,000 ways to die. The biggest threats are probably existential factors that are outside of our control - stability of financial markets and things like economic factors. As Paul Graham has said, “Startups rarely die in mid keystroke.” So, we keep building.

Beyond Excel and Google Sheets: Innovations in Handling Massive Spreadsheets Amidst the Big Data Rev

213 Stories To Learn About Sql

A comprehensive list of the 7 most important SaaS trends in 2023. Most of them inevitably continued ruling the industry from 2022 but some are fresh and are here to change the course of it, maybe, forever. Customer expectations keep on pushing businesses to provide cutting-edge solutions and staying on top of the market trends may be exactly what will set you apart from competitors.
Let’s jump to it. 1. Future of work Remember the first weeks of COVID when everyone was miserable—even about the thought of working from home? There were so many unanswered questions: how will it affect my personal life? My pay rate? Should I still wear a suit during office hours? How will I cooperate with my colleagues and know what’s going on with the tasks? But the chaos died down pretty quickly when everyone realized the fantastic advantages of working remotely, and how your work-life situation is finally balanced after so many years. Now it’s a totally different conversation. People are ready to quit jobs that don’t offer remote setups. The data shows that the importance of remote software solutions is growing significantly, and companies are allocating more funds to satisfy scattered teams. Therefore, there’s a huge spike in collaboration software options. Every week there are at least a couple more newcomers on Product Hunt alone, and the stream of them doesn’t seem to be dying down in the near future. Top picks: / - ready-to-use templates, intuitive UI, and simplicity make these the power duo. Notion Slack - the number  of integrations is amazing and allows remote teams to share pretty much any piece of information in any format Slite (acquired by ) - it’s time to move from Excel sheets and Google Docs to a way more innovative platform Pipeline saas.group 2. Niche micro-Saases Overcomplicating and adding dozens of features and control buttons don’t work anymore. People don’t want every aspect of their life/business optimized, they want focus and smaller niche products to do the job. If you want a landing page, it’s irrational to go and learn Bubble or Webflow. Although they are fantastic at doing what they do, when you want to open a little coffee subscription business, you need a landing page to be recognizable and serve its purpose. Better yet, if the builder provides specific nooks for coffee fans. Although there’s a never-ending debate about a smaller market for vertical SaaS, then again, the advantages are great. For one, there’s a lower price CAC and less marketing spending. In vertical SaaS, you don’t expect to win everybody in the space but you do need to develop a pool of ambassadors that love and nurture your product. These fans offer exclusive and very focused insights into their needs. On the other hand, the churn in these businesses is usually very minimal. Top picks: - allows restaurant staff to pick, release, and swap shifts with a single click\ HotSchedules – A CRM tool designed specifically for home care agencies ClearCare - a platform that brings together all feedback into a single place Upvoty 3. AI If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT by now, you probably live in a sealed barrel underground. It has taken every news and social media outlet by storm, leaving no one behind and disrupting every industry on the way. From the hysterics of whether or not it’ll take all our jobs away to a more conscious approach where the creative mind behind the AI capabilities is not overlooked,  we’ve seen it all in a matter of a couple of weeks. And it can only mean one thing: AI is no longer something people are trying in a lab—it’s coming into our lives and, inevitably, into pretty much every business.
Software development platforms, obviously, took it to a new level first. But SaaS is not far behind offering all kinds of outstanding advantages to its users. The capabilities of AI seem endless, from optimizing business processes to automating redundant tasks. However, the utilization of those capabilities is only starting, and it’s a fraction of what it could become. AI has been causing changes in the SaaS industry since 2017, taking baby steps, and now it’s ready for the big leap. Top picks: - with the AI-enabled text editor, it delivers real-time language and grammar recommendations to the user. Grammarly - or Twilio Autopilot to be exact, helps bridge the gap between bots and humans through conversational AI Twilio - that explains and generates code saving developers hours of work Replit’s Ghostwriter 4. Low-code Low-code is often confused with no-code and perceived as a drag-and-drop solution that doesn’t require any technical skills whatsoever. In this particular case, low code means “less code” and is a solution that gives immediate advantages to software developers, ridding them of redundant tasks and allowing them to focus on business logic. SMEs have picked up on the advantages and lower costs of low-code development becoming one of the fastest adopters of the technology. And since low-code development is progressing far beyond app development, the increase in demand for it is inevitable. Limited financing no longer means slower or less functional technology. And with the growing number of deployment and integration options, scalability is less and less of an issue. Top picks: - one of the most powerful low-code platforms so far, giving enormous opportunities to tech founders to experience its features, and to non-tech founders, to find collaboration opportunities with skilled developers Replit - a design-to-code platform that offers fantastic opportunities to designers and understands the importance of the UI Locofy.ai - an up-and-coming new low-code platform with an increased level of abstraction powered by micro-apps, ridding developers of the most mundane tasks once and for all MarsX Inc 5. Extreme transparency through content Launching a SaaS is easier than ever before. No-code, low-code, and cloud platforms give you a chance to successfully implement your solution in a fraction of the time. The hardest part, though, is yet on you. Getting people to know about your product is hard and often takes a lot more dedication than building a product itself. Spend all your marketing budget (if it even exists) on social media ads? Seems like a great idea, but can you picture people clicking on a no-name brand ad? The price for a campaign can drown your funds very quickly and be a total miss after all.
To add, blind outreach on LinkedIn is simply bad manners. Community is the new holy grail for the founders, and building in public is a trend that won’t go away in the nearest future. Building in public and sharing every step of your journey can build trust and generate the buzz you need to get the first customers. Having several tiers to this strategy can also add a feeling of ownership and value to your users. There’s no need to sugarcoat your journey, too. 2022 has proven that people are hungry for real stories, and want to see a person behind the business more than ever. Everyone wants proof that you’re not a robot shipping 100 features a week and living a full life while raising a family and saving turtles on tropical islands. Showing vulnerability makes you oh-so relatable and makes people want to support you and your work. There are a ton of different formats you can play with when implementing this: articles, screencasts, screenshots, tweets and threads, photos, and much more. Find the ones that work for you and be real. Top picks: - simplifying your copywriting process Copy.ai - combining your data sources and services into a unified graph with GraphQL or TypeScript WunderGraph - business management and collaboration platform for freelancers and small businesses Plutio - complete payments, tax, and subscriptions solution for SaaS Paddle 6. Integrations With the rise of remote job opportunities, one thing has become clear - we need a better solution to keep track of all the content and data we have on hand. It’s often scattered in 100 different places, and getting to the bottom of it is a task nobody wants to deal with.
Create a tool that allows you to monitor all the data movements, see who’s responsible for which document, and how to get access to it, and you’re golden. We no longer want to choose and have one or the other. If it’s a file-sharing tool, let it cover everything from sharing passwords to documents to entire folders and see what exactly has been changed and by whom.
Zapier took the integration game to a whole new level, and the SaaS task is to keep up. Top Picks: - a password manager, digital vault, form filler, and secure digital wallet 1Password - resource management platform. And if you want more niche products - and are for you monday.com airfocus Smartsheet Digital asset management solutions: and Wedia Canto - secure file sharing & transfer SmartFile - task and project tracker Asana 7. Customer brand + employer brand Employees are empowered more than ever. 2 years of working from home showed no drop in productivity and, actually, even increased it for some industries. Everyone now advocates for more flexibility, cutting time for commuting, and better work-life balance. And employers are recognizing these claims and using them as leverage for creating more employee-friendly brands. According to Bloomberg - “Remote job posts draw more than half of all applications”. (Source: ) https://snip.ly/7zfb8m But a great employer brand is much more than just offering a remote setup. It’s about culture, trust, a feeling of ownership, and leveraging employees' strengths to create truly powerful teams. The future of work is finally entering every workspace and virtually “planting” diversity ideas doesn’t cut it. People are looking for truly integrated and diverse setups where they can feel comfortable and thrive. It also means creative adaptability where management takes trends and development seriously trying new tools and exploring personalized development opportunities. CONCLUSION That was the glimpse into the 7 SaaS trends that are here to stay. And, although, the world of software is constantly in flux, knowing the scope of what’s coming can cover the gaps in your growth strategy. With the industry adopting AI and taking integrations to the next level, the opportunities for growth are endless. Hopefully, this gave you a better idea of where SaaS is going. Also published . here

7 SaaS Trends to watch out for in 2023

No-code development promises typing a line of code thanks to graphical tools that erase the complexity of programming languages. programming without What is no-code? The concept of no code refers to a software development method that hides the complexity of the application's source code. No code development tools combine different techniques: Pre-packaged graphical templates and widgets to assemble user interfaces, Drag and drop of application components to create the application's synoptic, and to combine the different steps of the processes: conversion tunnel, order tracking... Workflow automation to trigger actions based on events, such as the generation of alerts or countermeasures below a certain turnover or traffic threshold on a website. Guided in his work by a 100% graphic development environment in the logic of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), the user will be able to perform tests and proceed to several integrations until the application works as desired. Presented differently, no code defines the ability to create software without having to fill in a single line of code. What is the difference between No-code and Low-code? Globally, the applications listed in this article are part of a logic that aims to be as code-free as possible. The concept of low-code (which literally means "little code") consists in completing a no-code environment with the possibility to edit the application's source code in parallel. In the end, the simpler the no-code development tools are to use, the more limited they are. On the other hand, the more complex and low-code oriented they are, the richer they are and the more they leave the door open to so-called specific developments, off the beaten track, even innovative, and requiring coding. Specific developments that will obviously involve the intervention of programmers. The main low-code development platforms include Appian, Mendix, Microsoft (with its Power Platform), OutSystems, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. Why no-code? No code has multiple advantages. First of all, it allows business teams to create their own applications without having to rely on developers. This practice is realistic for the simplest no-code projects, for example creating an online survey with Google Forms or automated processes with Zapier and IFTTT. Two tools that capitalize on an equivalent logic: triggering actions in response to events, for example generating an alert following a software or web content update. Targeting small businesses and freelancers, the no-code platforms Strikingly, Weebly and Wix allow the creation of websites. Even if they go as far as creating online stores, they are still limited to very standard features. For example, it is impossible with this type of tool to create complex conversion tunnels involving the integration of third-party software coupled with specific management rules. How to do No-code? No code development tools allow you to create applications without having to touch the underlying code. You don't need to be a developer to use them. However, it will be necessary to have basic skills in navigation, ergonomics, and graphics. The advantage of no code? It gives business experts the possibility to automate routines, for example, to generate a response to a certain type of email or to integrate data from one software to another. It will also allow them to quickly create application mock-ups (or proofs of concept) in order to validate the development of a more substantial project that no code, due to its limitations, will not be able to address 100%. A project that will then involve the intervention of programmers. Which no-code tools? There are many no-code development tools. They can be classified into several categories: No code forms: Google Forms, Microsoft Forms... No code productivity management: ClickUp, Monday, Notion...No-code application development: Appy Pie, Builder.ai, ksaar, Quixy... No code website development: Bubble, Sitalacarte (french), Strikingly, Webflow, Weebly, Wix... No code database: Airtable, Smartsheet... Workflow automation no code: IFTTT, Microsoft Flow, Zapier... AI platform: Alteryx, C3.ai, Google Vertex, H2O.ai... What are the no-code open source tools? Faced with proprietary and paying no-code platforms and software, there is a whole series of open-source no-code development tools that can be used for free. In the same way as proprietary offers, they allow you to create applications without having to put your hands in the source code of the software. The logic is equivalent. The no-code open source development solutions are based on graphical environments allowing to visually model the interfaces, and the navigation, integrate pre-configured functionalities and assemble the associated processes. What are the low code tools? The low-code application platform (LCAP) market includes Mendix, Microsoft (with its Power Platform), OutSystems, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. These five technologies are among the leaders in Gartner's latest magic quadrant in this field. Forrester also ranks Mendix, Microsoft, OutSystems, and Salesforce as leaders in the low-code development platform segment.

No-code / Low-code: What is the Difference?

As a Developer Relations professional, I spend a pretty large amount of my time writing, organizing, and collecting content for publication to our blog. This is at a degree where it is necessary to have a solid project management system to keep everything in order. Having recently been a student as well, I know firsthand how important it is to allow for easy collaboration in drafting content, making edits, suggestions, and sharing simple to make it less of a chore to contribute. It all broke one day when I was getting fed up with the solution I was working on, thinking to myself, there must be something better. We live in an extremely innovative time of technology, surely there must be a startup that solves my needs. So I went on a hunt to try and test out a bunch of different content collaboration solutions I found from sources like Google, Quora, AlternativeTo, the DevRel community, and more to see if I could find that perfect solution, and maybe help some other people decide at the same time. The Requirements At we collect content from a variety of people in multiple different media, but at the end of the day we want to keep everything centralized and consistent when possible. is handled in the backend using , so when considering options for content management it was critical that it played well enough with Wordpress, to avoid as much manual intervention as possible. Because of this, there were a few "must haves" for the platforms to consider: Dolby.io Our blog Wordpress 1. Exceptional handling of code blocks and inline code This is a developer blog after all, so there needs to be proper ways to share code. Ideally this will contain proper syntax highlighting for languages used, and has good copy-paste ability. 2. Commenting and editing is simple As this is a collaboration platform, we want the collaboration tools to be robust. Being able to comment on sections of text or the whole document should be easy, with a bonus for tools like "Suggest Edits" for inline changes. 3. Intuitive project management tools With the scale of posts written over time and the large number of contributors, keeping track of the status and metadata of posts within the same system they are written in is a huge benefit. This helps managers figure out the status of the content, and see what is missing from a glance, and automatically populates based on the original edit. 4. Able to handle multiple users editing at the same time We don't want collisions to happen if two people are editing at the same time, as that can result in a lot of lost work and wasted time. Ideally this will be a living document that updates automatically. 5. Image and other media handling not tied to their servers As the content will all be copied into Wordpress, we want to ensure media doesn't copy the internal reference instead of the base file. Otherwise it can look fine for people connected to the company network, but not to the public, which is a tricky thing to troubleshoot when not anticipating it. 6. Cross-platform We have team members on multiple different platforms who should all be able to contribute. The best solution for this is a web app, where it can easily be connected to a SSO solution. Nice to Haves There are a few other bonus points that can help separate the good from the great that I considered: Low price or a free tier that fits our needs Version history management Markdown based editor as either a default or an option alongside a rich-text editor Have a free trial so I can test it without needing to pay Immediate Outs With these rules, some popular tools were immediately thrown out and will not be discussed in further length. , , and all do not have great code block handling, and were taken out of consideration. Google Docs Office 365 Box Notes Tools like are enticing for purely technical teams, especially with their feature, but we work with a mixture of backgrounds that make these products too high a barrier of entry. This doesn't stop GitHub of being a good part of the workflow for linking code samples and Gists. GitHub Projects Similarly, cloud based Markdown editors such as , , and among others are not great choices for those who don't have Markdown experience, plus are a bit more barebones than desired for project management. The same applies for LaTex collaboration software like . HedgeDoc StackEdit HackMD Draft Overleaf Apps like are MacOS only, which doesn't work for team members on Windows or other platforms. Slick Products I trialed In no particular order, here are the products I tried out, and my thoughts on how they worked for . Keep in mind that just because something might not be a good fit for our workflows doesn't mean it isn't perfect for yours. us 1. Confluence Confluence is a tool that a vast majority of people who have worked in tech in the last 15 years are familiar with, due to it being a part of the Atlassian ecosystem, where Jira has been a centerpiece of modern tech workflows. I've used Confluence in every single job I've worked at for this reason, and I tend to have a love/hate relationship with it. It's an extremely powerful tool that allows massive customization of the spaces it has, links very well with itself and Jira, and provides third-party extension support for workflows that it doesn't support out of the box. However, it feels dated with the implementation of a lot of these benefits, where just because the option is there doesn't mean that the option was elegantly designed. For example, code blocks are supported, but require you specifically use a code block macro that is its own container instead of living with the other in-line text. It also uses its own markup syntax, which makes taking existing Markdown that you may already have not as simple as copy-pasting it into the platform. Other small quirks like it needing to host every file you upload to it, having a functional, yet quirky way of dealing with simultaneous edits, and the typical Atlassian sentiments many tech workers know make it a compromise. We use Confluence already at , and I imagine many of you reading this are also using this tool right now, so the price is already right. The best way to sum up my feelings of Confluence are "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", which fits some team's philosophies better than others, make of that as you will. Dolby.io 2. Notion Notion is the relatively new big hitter coming to the block with a recent surge in users that has slowly started taking up the startup scene. Notion is what I would describe as the Atlassian suite if it was made with modern tech design, and it shows from the visual aesthetic to the technical decisions made. However, instead of separating the company into multiple products, it is all grouped in one workspace, where you can link tables, docs, kanban boards, and more together seamlessly and it frankly feels elegant. Notion uses Markdown as its text processor, though instead of keeping the raw text, it automatically interprets it to make the lives of writers a bit easier, though not as intuitive as a traditional rich-text editor. If text is highlighted, it brings up the command palette, though this isn't the most intuitive behavior for new users. I would say it is similar to Slack's editor, which makes sense due to the high user base. Overall I was a big fan of Notion, and its growth tends to support my sentiment, as I see more and more companies start using Notion as their main platform for nearly everything. There were issues in image copying to Wordpress, but this was unfortunately fairly standard across most platforms. I will note that I have had server issues in the past with Notion with issues like slowness to not being able to access my documents, though I have not experienced it in recent tests of the platform, and can likely attribute this to its growing pains. 3. Quip Quip is Salesforce's option in the content collaboration space with a heavy focus on live discussions, with chat, edits, and its integration with Salesforce being its key marketing points. I've used Quip outside of this test in reviewing content from third parties, and found it to be fine, but nothing out of the ordinary in terms of capabilities. While it was able to match these claims in experience, overall it really does seem like this is built for sales teams, not content creation, where a lot of the project management assumes heavy Salesforce use, whom I imagine are the target customers for this product. 4. Dropbox Paper Unlike its major competitors in Google Docs and Box Notes, Dropbox Paper has native support for code blocks, which was a huge boon in its usability for technical content. It's another Markdown-based editor with rich-text interpretation, not unlike Notion's offering. It still has commenting support and version history built-in (including comment history) which makes it great as a living document solution. This is where the benefits dwindle though, as its project management capabilities are virtually non-existent, being a cloud-storage solution first. Additionally, it played strangely with Wordpress, where linespaces were not kept and code blocks weren't recognized properly. If your team is already using Dropbox as the storage provider, this is an option for consideration, though I wouldn't suggest it except for the most basic of needs. 5. Coda Upon asking my fellow DevRel community which tools they enjoyed using, Coda was one that was brought up a few times, but with the caveat that it was "highly technical" and more like a Smartsheet or Airtable than a collaboration document solution. I agree with this take, where instead of the previous couple feeling more like a document-centric solution, this one felt like more of a project management solution, where content wasn't managed as well as Notion or Confluence. To be fair, this is not Coda's intent with the platform, instead directly making the statement , where they encourage you to use Coda as the publishing platform. Coda itself looks like a super promising and interesting tool for an alternative blogging process. Docs are the new blogs 6. Slab With Slab, we return back to the "content-first" sub-category of solutions where we have another Markdown-based editor with a few bells and whistles added for ease of use. Some of these include a content map that helps visualize the assortment of categories your documents live in, templating, and robust commenting solutions. Once again, project management is limited, though they have built-in integrations with Jira and Miro among others that imply that it isn't meant to be that and you should be using tools dedicated to that workflow for that purpose. 7. Walling Walling is another project management based solutions which takes advantage of a "grid-like" workspace for organizing content between "walls" while using Markdown as the editor. This makes keeping information like publishing metadata and checklists very pleasant to work with, as they have their own dedicated space instead of needing to format your document in a way that has them live inline with the actual content. Despite these features, there isn't a great tabling solution, and there isn't a great way to link to other posts in the workspace. It also didn't really feel like it was built for collaboration, as commenting isn't a super intuitive process at all. 8. Whimsical Whimsical is all about keeping all content in an organized, central place. They center around five main types of content: docs, flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps, and sticky notes that can all be embedded within another. However, it felt more catered towards a creative organization rather than a robust project management feature, as I couldn't find a distinct way to properly create a workflow that autopopulated content when a new document was made. The benefits of small things like live cursors and linking content within content were useful. It also had the added benefit of working well with Wordpress, where images were not directly copied, but an image upload object was created in its stead, ensuring that you uploaded a proper copy of the image. 9. ClickUp ClickUp have been advertising heavily lately, with banners all over San Francisco, and when I tried it there was a lot going for it. ClickUp has spaces dedicated for both "Spaces", or your tables of project management based content, and "Docs", which uses a Markdown based editor and organizes and shares your content. The spaces section reminded me a lot of Airtable with a bit more stuff going on, letting you expand each entry to see the editing history, to do list, attachments, and all, really solidifying itself as a proper "entry" of work to be done. The docs had useful tools like attributing authors and having ample version history. As a major bonus, content copied itself super well into Wordpress, which is a major time save in not needing to reformat every piece of content posted. Issues however started to appear once I tried mixing the spaces with the docs. Oddly, they didn't play super well together, where there was no great way to link a new doc as an entry into a specific space the same way you can with Notion and Confluence. You can paste the docs content into a space entry, or link a doc to an entry as an attachment that links to the doc, but I found no way to automate this process. This meant every single new doc I wanted to make also required me to make a new entry in the space I was recording the status on, and manually modify the metadata in the space each time the doc was updated. I was close to being satisfied with ClickUp as my "Goldilocks" solution for my issues, but it just barely missed the mark for being something worth migrating to. It feels like they were trying so hard to replace a large number of competitors that they missed some of the nuances that made their competitors stand out. I am optimistic that as they grow, some of these missing features are implemented into the platform. Final thoughts After my time trialing with all of these platforms (and unsubscribing from all of their mailing lists...), it helped me sort out what exactly was best for me in a content collaboration app, and where my biases landed. Clearly these solutions have their own strengths and weaknesses, and all have a very solid number of customers that use them daily. If I had to choose my favorite today (October 2021), was my overall winner, where if I was starting completely from scratch, Notion filled the majority of my needs and had a good user experience that I was excited to work in. It was easy to organize, edit, collaborate, and more in a way that facilitated as many automated processes as possible. Notion However, I am not starting from scratch, and there are tradeoffs to migrating interfaces. So for that reason, we have decided to stick with Confluence, as all of our content is already there, we already pay for it, and it doesn't require our team members to sign up for a new account anywhere. A bit anti-climactic, but none of the solutions we found offered enough more than Confluence to be worth the resource investment to migrate. As a reminder, these solutions were only tested on how well they played with Wordpress. While Wordpress is still extremely popular, there are so many other growing and out there like , , and that might play better with some of these applications than others. Especially given Wordpress' tendency to be a bit dated on how it plays with more modern content solutions. popular CMS solutions Sanity Strapi Contentful I suggest taking advantage of the free trials these platforms provide, though I hope this rundown provided some good context of what pros and cons each have to see if there is a good fit for your team. Remember that what my teams needs are might not be reflected in yours, and these products are all actively being worked on. Missing features can be added, and beloved features can be sunset. I'd love to hear what solutions you are using in the comments and see if there are any promising contenders I may have missed! Also published here.

The Best Content Collaboration Solutions for Content Production

Are you already in the SaaS space or just planning to launch your cloud service? Then you most probably want to know the latest metrics on how your peers are raising capital and where they are pouring their cash. If that’s the case, sit back and keep reading to find out: The number of SaaS companies & SaaS market size by region How SaaS companies are raising capital & SaaS funding amounts How much do SaaS companies spend on marketing & other channels How Many SaaS Companies Are There in the World: Core SaaS Statistics & Geographics Statista reports that , with a whopping 7,000 SaaS firms in the marketing space alone. with a projection to hit $307.3 billion by 2026 at an estimated 11.7% of industry growth rate. the number of SaaS companies in the world in 2021 stands at 25,000 The global SaaS market size is worth $272.49 billion (15,000 companies) and (2,000 companies), followed by Canada (1,000 companies), Germany (1,000 companies), France (939 companies), India (813 companies), and China (663 companies), as Statista states. The top SaaS markets are the US the UK size was valued at about in 2021. The most renowned SaaS moguls in the US are Microsoft, Adobe, Google, and others. The US SaaS market $145.5 billion The ultimate are and , with $3.5 billion and $8,5 billion market size respectively. Asian SaaS leaders India China SaaS Funding Amounts As the world shifts to the cloud, more and more entry points for startups are opening, placing SaaS funding amounts at a staggering $48.5 billion of total investment across 2,600+ firms in 2020 against the previous all-time high of $43.6 billion raised in 2019, says Pitchbook. To get a clear picture of how these record-breaking sums are distributed over the fresh industry players, we've looked into the key metrics from the core thought leaders and analysts, like , Statista, 500 Global, and others. saasindustry.com Here are our findings on the most recent capital raising activities among SaaS companies (Q1 of 2021). SaaS Pre-Seed Funding Amounts Q1 of the year 2021 was a fruitful time for SaaS startups to raise their Pre-Seed capital. On the whole, there were 40 SaaS companies accumulating pre-seed investments worth $8.8 million in total. The biggest Saas funding amounts at the pre-seed stage were distributed between the Germany-based Levity and Denmark-headquartered Oveo, attaining $1,7 and $1,2 million accordingly. SaaS Seed Funding Amounts There were 115 SaaS companies that raised capital at this investment stage. Each company attained no less than $1 million placing the total SaaS funding amount at a whopping $174 million. The ultimate leader on the list is the US-based Trace, whose $8,3 million investments were led by Greylock and Uncork Capital. SaaS Series A, B, C Funding Amounts This, by all means, was the most fruitful capital raising phase, with a total of $3,3 billion raised by 124 SaaS companies across the A, B, C funding rounds. Almost $1.5 billion came from round C alone, while $752 million was raised in Series A, and just over $1 billion in Series B. , the ultimate leader in raising capital for SaaS is the Northern America area, touching $7.8 billion (or 79% of the total investment!), only to be followed by Europe and Latin America, but funds raised in these regions were no more than 10$ each. Speaking geographically Saas Budget on Marketing & Sales and Research & Development To find out where SaaS companies pour their money and how much they spend on Marketing & Sales, Research & development, and other channels, we analyzed hundreds of SaaS companies (B2B) and a range of key benchmarks from SaaS Capital, SaaS Live, KBCM Technology Group, Gartner. In our research, we paid special attention to the following data: Company funding type (bootstrapped / equity-backed) Company growth Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). How Much Do SaaS Companies Spend on Marketing & Sales On the whole, rather than Research & Development. Moreover, whereas the global Marketing expenditure has shrunk to 6.4% in 2020 from 11% in 2019, the marketing spending in the SaaS space stays solid as never before – 10%. the lion’s part of SaaS companies’ budgets is poured into Marketing & Sales efforts (27% of ARR) The major reason behind the trend is that . Here are some illustrations of how much SaaS companies spend on marketing and sales: companies need to acquire recurring revenue and pay off the money spent on customer acquisition : spends close to 19% of its ARR on S&M efforts Zoom : spends close to 27% of its ARR on S&M efforts Twilio : spends close to 40% of its ARR on S&M efforts Wix : spends close to 19% of its ARR on S&M efforts Dropbox : spends close to 50% of its ARR on S&M efforts. Smartsheet As a rule, marketing & sales spending continuously grows over time and peaks when the company's ARR touches €1-€10 million (these numbers are true for the European market but may be approximate for The Northern American region). That said, marketing & sales channels budgets vary from company to company, but a safe estimate for SaaS business owners to keep in mind is somewhere between 10% and 40% of the company’s ARR. SaaS Research and Development Spend Historically, . The reason is straightforward: you should first invest in the quality of your product to guarantee its value and competitiveness in the market, according to the 2021 European SaaS Benchmark. the smaller and younger your SaaS business is, the more you should spend on Research and Development – from 30% all the way to 60% However, once your company hits €10 million in revenue R&D expenditures inevitably drop (European SaaS market). While this is true for the vast majority of SaaS players, your budget planning is subject to the strategy you align your company with. For example, Slack, whose revenue in 2016 hit 105M USD, spent 59% of revenue on Research & Development. Here is what they say: To remain competitive, we must continue to develop new features, integrations, capabilities, and enhancements to Slack… So, there is no one-fit-all strategy for all B2B SaaS marketing budgets. To allocate your funds wisely, you need to figure out the nature of your organization - product-driven and sales-driven. With this in mind, decide on your goals, resources, and product/service specifics to adjust your spending accordingly. Final Thoughts Running a successful SaaS company or any other type of business is not an easy task, as it is a matter of thoughtful budget planning, capital raising, and allocating your resources accordingly. So, keep an eye on the core software as a service statistics - like how your SaaS peers are raising capital, what are their funding amounts, and how they spend their money - and align this info with your own business strategy. First published here

Why you Should Consider Building a SaaS Company

Finally, you have devised a fantastic product or software idea and are eager to bring it to life. That or, perhaps, you’re planning on giving your company a complete digital overhaul. If you’re new to software development, realizing these plans --however inspiring they sound-- may give you butterflies. Suppose you decide to to bring your ideas to life. How do you assemble the right team? What is the perfect software development team structure? We understand your confusion and are here to give you a leg up. Below, we answer all of the essential questions related to setting up a product development team that would make your project a success. hire a dedicated development team Key Factors Behind a Software Development Team Structure Every product begins with the people. The way you map your business objectives to the roles in a software development team will likely determine your project’s success. Or failure. So, when designing a software development team structure, make sure you consider the requirements and level of complexity of your project. Before you step into the recruitment craze, you have to work out the scope of your project. If you’re about to build a product prototype, a team of four be enough to accomplish the task. may But if you’re planning on launching a brand-new application with multiple features and third-party integrations, the number of team members will certainly increase. Below are some ideas of how project scope and a software development team structure may correlate: Time is of the Essence The speed at which you need to complete your project will influence the team structure and size. Naturally, with fewer team members, it may take longer to complete the project. If you have an idea of a state-of-the-art product that needs to be developed from scratch and on a tight deadline, you might have to assemble an extended team of senior engineers or a group of full-stack engineers. They will likely be able to cover all needs and deliver results quickly and efficiently. The Budget Allocated to Development Being inextricably intertwined with the factors above, the available budget would certainly affect every decision you make — from how many team members you can hire, to the seniority of specialists you can bring in, to how feature-rich your product can be when turned around. To reduce project expenses without sacrificing quality at the initial stages of development, consider opting for any of the Agile project management methodologies. You could deliver updates in increments, focusing on high-priority features first, and have more cost flexibility. Approaches to Software Development Regardless of whether you opt for Waterfall or Agile, either would directly impact your workflows and a software development team structure. The project management methodology you choose to go with shapes the size of your team, the responsibilities of team members, and the relations within the team. Let’s catch up on the and see how their peculiarities are reflected in the development team composition. key facts about Waterfall and Agile So, how do these differences influence the software development team structure? A traditional Waterfall project team is built based on hierarchical relations between team members, so there are managers and subordinates with well-defined responsibilities. Such a team structure grants a project manager more control over the project workflows. They are, too, responsible for critical decisions. Agile teams, on the other hand, are self-organized and self-managed. Still, there are organizational leaders, like a Scrum Master in Scrum or a Service Delivery Manager in Kanban. Their responsibilities are quite different from the responsibilities of a traditional Waterfall project manager though as they are focused more on fostering relationships within the team and creating a working environment where each team member can be effective. Spanning a maximum of nine to ten people, Agile teams allow a certain degree of autonomy, so the team members have the freedom to prioritize their workloads and shape their workflows the way they want. The table below summarizes the key differences between the teams following sequential approaches and those adhering to Agile. Important Team Roles Business Analyst Understands the customer’s business processes. Translates customer business needs into requirements. A Business Analyst dives deep into a customer’s workflows and analyzes stakeholder feedback to help a client formulate what their wants look like. Further to that, they help to align a customer’s vision with what a development team is producing. A Business Analyst can translate an abstract product idea into a set of tangible requirements. A BA enriches a product development team with a profound understanding of business processes from various perspectives. As well as the ability to shape up a software product that creates maximum business value. A BA may even step in before a software development team structure is defined and continue to bridge the gap between the customer and the team during later stages of development. Product Owner Holds the responsibility for a product vision and evolution. Makes sure a final product meets customer requirements. Holding more responsibility for a product's success than any other app development team member, a product owner is a decision-maker. Balancing both business needs and market trends, they define a business strategy, shape up the product vision, make sure it satisfies customer needs, and manage a product backlog. Associated mainly with flexible Agile environments, a Product Owner must work well in scenarios where requirements and workflows frequently change. While the responsibilities of a BA and a PO sound quite similar there are differences between the two. Below offers a description of the differences and a rationale for why there need for both in one project? The critical difference is that a provides the vision of a product without diving deep into how it is technically implemented, while a bridges the gap between a customer and a team -- being a bit more on the technical side. Product Owner Business Analyst So, a PO is more customer-oriented, while a BA is often more focused on the project. Professional business analysts are usually qualified to take over some of a product owner’s tasks, like managing the product backlog, modeling workflows, and others. Project Manager Makes sure that a product or its part is delivered on time and within budget. Manages and motivates the software development team. In sequential models, a project manager is responsible for distributing tasks across team members, planning work activities, and updating project status. In Agile projects where the focus is on self-management, transparency, and shared ownership, a PM sets up the vision of a product, maintains transparency, fosters communication, searches for improvements in the development process, and makes sure a team delivers more value with each iteration. Some people believe that there’s no need for a PM in an Agile environment with similar roles, like a Service Delivery Manager or a Scrum Master, but this is not entirely true. However, if your company is running multiple Agile projects simultaneously, having dedicated PMs is vital. They would connect the dots between high-level stakeholder requirements and day-to-day task execution on a team level, while, say, a Scrum Master would manage things within the team. UX/UI Designer Transforms a product vision into user-friendly designs. Creates user journeys for the best user experience and highest conversion rates. There are two aspects to the product design process — user experience (UX) design and user interface (UI) design. The UX part stands for thinking out an entire journey of a user’s interaction with a product. A is, thus, involved in such activities as user research, persona development, information architecture design, wireframing, prototyping, and more. UX Designer A , in turn, devises intuitive, easy-to-use, and eye-pleasing interfaces for a product. A UI/UX designer would accompany you throughout the development lifecycle, helping you achieve business goals via functional and engaging user experiences, as well as analyzing, evaluating, and enhancing those experiences over time. UI Designer Software Architect Designs a high-level software architecture. Selects appropriate tools and platforms to realize the product vision. Sets up code quality standards and performs code reviews. An expert-level software engineer, an architect is the one who makes executive software design decisions in an app development team. You will need one if you deal with a software product with complex requirements or legacy software that calls for profound changes. A software architect decides which services and databases should communicate together, how integrations should work, and how to ensure that the product is secure and stable. Software Developer Engineers the product. Solves any technical problems emerging during the development lifecycle. A software developer does the actual job and codes an application. Just like an app features a front end and a back end, there are front-end and back-end developers. create the part of an application that users interact with, ensuring that an app offers an equally smooth experience to all — no matter the device, platform, or operational system. , in turn, implement the core of an app — its algorithms and business logic. Experienced back-end developers not only write code but also do the tasks of an architect — for example, devise an app architecture or design and implement the necessary integrations. There are full-stack developers as well. They can handle all the work at once — from clients to servers to databases, and all the needed integrations. Front-end developers Back-end developers Software Testing Engineer Makes sure an application performs according to requirements. Spots functional and non-functional defects. The job of a software tester is to verify whether an application meets the requirements — both functional and non-functional. Functional requirements define what an app should do, while non-functional requirements specify how the app should do that. To verify both, test engineers run various checks, followed by analyzing the test results and reporting on the app quality. They verify an app from different angles — be it functionality, usability, security, or performance (hence, many types of testing). To keep track of the executed checks and ensure that all of the requirements are covered with tests, QA specialists may create different kinds of testing documentation — from test scenarios to test protocols to test results reports. And design and implement quality assurance processes and procedures that help prevent defects at later stages of development. experienced QA engineers Test automation engineer Design a test automation ecosystem Write and maintain test scripts for automated testing A is there to help you test faster and better. To enable that, they develop test automation scripts — small programs that provide reliable and continuous feedback on app quality without any human involvement. A skilled test automation engineer would help you choose which parts of an app are and what’s better to be tested manually. They would also design a test automation ecosystem that is easy to maintain and update. Finally, they’ll make sure that your test automation initiative generates as much value as possible at a reasonable cost. test automation engineer good candidates for automation DevOps engineer Facilitates cooperation between development and operations teams Builds CI/CD pipelines for faster delivery Even in Agile environments, development, and operations teams can be siloed. serve as a link between the two teams, unifying and automating the software delivery process and helping strike a balance between introducing changes quickly and keeping an application stable. Working together with software developers, system administrators, and operational staff, DevOps engineers oversee and facilitate code releases on a CI/CD basis. DevOps engineers Why is setting the right team essential for project success? Setting up the right team is the crucial factor in a project’s success as it is the project team that is responsible for delivering value throughout the project. It’s a common scenario when a company hires a dedicated team but fails to balance roles and responsibilities. For instance, deciding to go without a product owner — the ultimate visioner responsible for crafting a product that meets customer needs — quite often leads to releasing software that fails to win the hearts of its potential users. At a daily operations level, too, one can miss opportunities due to poorly thought-out staffing decisions. A project manager may, for instance, overlook the need for a DevOps engineer, thus, preventing themselves from tapping into numerous benefits. For example, in one of our projects, introducing DevOps helped our customer reduce release cycles from ten to two weeks, implement 30+ new features quickly, and achieve a code coverage of 80%. Mistakes can happen when selecting developers with an appropriate level of expertise. Striving to save budgets, you may feel reluctant to hire senior engineers and opt for less experienced staff. However, to ensure the right proportion of expertise and new perspectives, we would advise staffing your team with both an expert-level developer and those with less experience; the former will ensure technical guidance or even act as a , while the latter would bring fresh ideas to the table. virtual CTO Four steps to take to assemble a winning software development team 1. Analyze the prerequisites and determine the team size. Evaluate your business goals, the complexity of your project, available budget, and deadlines to make up your mind about a suitable approach to project management. Based on that, estimate the size of your team. If you choose to go with Agile, the perfect team would span four to ten people. Waterfall teams, in turn, are usually quite large and may span up to 15 people. To avoid any management complexities, it may be worth dividing a large team into several sub-teams, each with a lead of its own. 2. Choose a team structure that fits your project. There are three types of team structures — specialists, generalists, and hybrid teams, and each has its pros and cons. When choosing an appropriate team structure, consider this: 3. Ensure you have all the necessary software development team roles covered. If you already have in-house resources, evaluate the skills gaps you need to fill in and search for targeted talent to extend your team. If you start anew, make sure your team is balanced and can cover different aspects of development. 4. Facilitate effective communication. Set up project management software to speed up daily operations and provide for more transparency of the project processes. The most popular project management tools include Jira, Trello, Hive, Smartsheet, and others. And to establish productive communication, encourage using messaging apps, like Slack or Microsoft Teams, as they are simpler and faster to use. Don’t forget about verbal communication, too. Video conferencing and regular project briefings may come in handy in resolving misunderstandings and boosting the quality of communication. Still unsure about what software development team structure is the right fit for your project? Tell ITRex the details — they’ll advise on the team structure and back you up with top-tier talent.

Exploring Team Structure Impacts on Software Projects

In this article, I define what stakeholders are; I offer a framework for categorizing them and recommend different communication methods for each type that would save you plenty of headaches. If you are looking for a Product Management role, you must have noticed that job specifications always list stakeholder management as a mandatory skill. When working as a Product Manager (PM), your impact depends on your ability to negotiate with C-level, motivate the development organization, and convince additional teams. What PMs often do wrong (that I wished I learned earlier) is treating every stakeholder the same. In this post, I explain how to categorize stakeholders and interact with them accordingly to save you time and effort. This method is helpful not only for Product Managers but also for Project Managers and any role that has to interact with stakeholders. Image Source: Stakeholder-pie-chart by UnitedUtilities What you will find in this article: A definition of a stakeholder How to identify stakeholders within your organization The Power/Interest grid to classify your stakeholders How to create a communication plan for your stakeholders What is a stakeholder? The first step of managing stakeholders is understanding who they are. In my PSPO-2 course, our trainer introduced us to Paul Stamsnijder’s definition, which I particularly appreciate. ” Paul Stamsnijder — Stakeholder management “Stakeholders are individual persons or groups of persons who have a direct or indirect interest in the organization and/or vice versa. They are people, organizations, and institutions that have an interest in developing and/ or delivering the products and services of the organization in one way or another. In other words, a stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in your business. Stakeholders are organizations or individuals that can be affected by your project. A stakeholder is anyone who has vested interest in your product Image Source: Definition of a Stakeholder by ProjectManager.com Identify the stakeholder in your organization Once you know what a stakeholder is, it’s time to identify the one for your organization and project. Start by brainstorming all the people who are affected by your work. Search for individuals who have power over your project. And finally, list the ones who arae interested in the outcomes of your project. To help you in identifying them, I integrate this table from mindtools.com. Image Source: List of possible stakeholders by MindTools.com What to look for in a stakeholder You now have a list of people and roles; the next step is to “score” them according to a set of criteria. : How much influence do they have within your organization? Power : Are they interest in the success of your project? Can they stop your initiative? Intention : What are their personal goals? What do they care about? Personal goals : What are their needs? What do they want, and how can they achieve it? Needs : What type of person are they? A framework like DISC (part of another article) can help you understand them better. Personality : Who do they admire? Who do they listen to? Who are their influencers? Influencer Answering those six questions gives you a better understanding of those stakeholders and helps you for the next action in your stakeholder analysis. The Power/Influence framework After listing your stakeholders, you can classify them according to two variant: The power they have over your work (x-axes) The interest they have in it (y-axes) You get four quadrants to categorize people from your list: Low-interest & Low-Power: Monitor them with minimum effort Low-interest & High-Power: Keep them satisfied High-interest & Low-Power: Keep them informed High-interest & High-Power: Manage closely Image Source: Stakeholder Power/Interest Matrix by The Pennsylvania State University : You don’t need to spend a lot of time or resources on those stakeholders. Try to be as transparent as possible by making your Product backlog and the documentation available to everybody. Make sure to include them in your weekly or monthly newsletter. Redirect them to existing documentation as much as possible; you don’t want to spend extra effort to satisfy them. Low-interest & Low-Power (Monitor) : Keep them in the loop. You want to assess what their intentions are and how they could potentially help you or stop you in the future. Aspire to keep them pleased with minimum effort but showing that you care about their opinion, and they could have a word in your project. Be careful as they have high power, and they might switch to high-interest, so make them feel like they are in control (even if they are currently not) Low-interest & High-Power (Keep them satisfied) : Inform those stakeholders frequently and listen to their suggestions. They might be supporting your project and very helpful. Make sure they understand you welcome any of their opinions and advice, but you are in charge, and you make the final decision. You don’t want to end up wasting time explaining all your choices or having to decline their recommendations diplomatically. Let’s say it’s like a Product Owner during the Daily Scrum: they can attend, but they cannot participate. Keep an eye as they gain power and could, therefore, impact your project. High-interest & Low-Power (Keep them informed) : You need to dedicate most of your time to these stakeholders. The success of your Projects depends hugely on them. Most likely, they will be the Project Sponsor or the decision-maker. They have the most impact on your Product, so you need to make sure that you communicate clearly with them frequently and uniquely. Unpersonalised newsletters or generic presentations won’t work, you need to have one-to-ones with them and have them decide the frequency of your meetings. In some cases, it’s also essential to educate them about your role as a Product Owner and how you need to be empowered to make decisions and to say no when it’s necessary. High-interest & High-Power (Manage closely) The Power/Interest framework encourages you to divide your time strategically according to the type of stakeholder and use different communication methodologies. Next, we see how to personalize the content and channel of your message according to their category. 4) How to create a stakeholder management communication plan In this stage, you want to create a table that lists all stakeholders, their interests, goal, and the way you communicate with each of them. The columns and level of details are up to you. I list below useful classifying criteria as well as remarkable examples provided by Smartsheet and TeamGantt. Variables to arrange your communication strategy: Defining the stakeholder: : The name of the person Who : His/Her job title Role : How much they are interested in your product on a scale chosen by you. e.g., “low vs. high” or “1, 2, 3” from low to high interest Level of interest : How much power they have in your product. Try using the same scale as the level of interest Level of influence : What is your stakeholder’s most crucial objective? What do they want to achieve? Goal Defining the communication strategy: : Which channels are you using to communicate with this stakeholder. Does it need to be personal? Can it be with online tools accessible to everyone? Does it require a meeting or a newsletter is enough? How : What type of content you should include in your message? Should it be KPIs and important metrics or more project advancement? Message : You need to decide the recurrence for each communication. The most effective notifications are sent on a regular frequency. Depending on the content and length of the message, this can be Daily, Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly, Ad Hoc. Once you have a regular frequency, you can push back ad-hock requests for a status update. Frequency : Make sure every communication has a valid reason for existing. You don’t want to overwhelm people with too much notification for them to cope. Purpose : What do you want to achieve thanks to this communication strategy? Use here the four categories from the Power/Interest framework. Desired Effect Examples and Template from TeamGantt and Smartsheet You can start your communication plan from scratch, but numerous websites offer valuable templates to begin building your strategy. I provide two examples, as well as the links for the templates. I hope they are useful. Examples: Example of Stakeholder Communication Plan from Smartsheet.com Example of a Stakeholder Communication Plan by method from TeamGantt.com Templates: TeamGantt Communication Plan Template ( ) Google Spreadsheet SmartSheet Communication Plan Template ( ) Excel file Congratulations if you made it this far! I hope this article helped you managing stakeholders in your Product Manager role. Please let me know in the comment section if there additional tips that you would find useful. And don’t forget to check my other posts about Product Management and Agile Methodologies. Also published behind a paywall at https://productcoalition.com/how-to-manage-stakeholders-as-a-product-manager-c0ce374ee92f

The Product Manager's Guide To Identifying and Managing Project Stakeholders

Building a product, we face the moment that we need more types of tests. Screenshot, UI, API, or Performance? There are many of them and every one is designed for other purposes. Every type is different and can help us with other things. I think, most of them should occur in mature projects, but for sure - you should know all of them. Screenshot testing What is screenshot testing? Screenshot testing is a technique used by end-to-end testing which captures a screenshot from a given URL and then compares the result with an expected image. The most common usage of this type of test is to check if the user interface (UI) isn't broken and the page has been rendered properly. Why you should do them Coming from old internet explorer to newest version of chrome. Using mobile and desktop in various OS. It's hard to check everywhere if our application renders properly. Not to mention a problem, where the developer will break something accidentally. A simple change could destroy our design. How you can do them You can capture bulk screenshots through different desktop and mobile devices running in the various OS. All of them, you can compare with an expected image (snapshot). If the test will pass, you can deploy a new version of the application, otherwise, with the designed flow, you can ask a manager or designer to accept or reject changes. A simple diagram, I've prepared below. Deployment diagram But there is one thing you need to remember. You need to work closely with designers and developers. It's their job to accept changes in UI or revert them to the developer if something's broken. Popular tools Percy.io Wraith PhantomCSS UI testing What is UI testing? UI testing is a technique used by end-to-end testing whose main aspect is to check how the application handles user actions performed via input devices - mouse, keyboard, and others. Another one is to check if displayed elements on the page are interacting correctly. Why you should do them Imagine that by an accident, your application has a faulty UI element, which is core for your business. Your users won't be able to get what they want, book an appointment, or buy a book. You will lose money and for sure clients, because with no trust in the application - you can't build the value. By that, UI testing is fundamental. Tests will behave like a real user. Will interact with your application and check the output. What's better, they will do more than check the presentation layer. A complex test needs the business and data layer also working. How you can do them There are various tools created for control browsers. Some of them, you will find at the end of this caption. These tools will give you the possibility to create a test, which behaviors should be designed as a real user. Running them every deployment, you'll always know if somethings break. Also, you can set up these tests in the deployment pipeline. But... Not all that's pretty. These tests are slow. By slow, I mean that everyone needs to load a page, interact with it, probably reload, etc. This takes time. Many tests, takes much time to create an output, so it's important to run only the core one. Wanna learn more about it? Check out my latest article - ! click For sure, you shouldn't give up on them. We always need to provide a complete working application. Deployment diagram Popular tools Cypress Playwright Selenium API testing What is API testing? The API testing is a set of actions, which includes sending calls to API to get output and validate the response against defined input parameters. They determine if the API returns the correct response or react correctly to failures or unexpected behavior. Instead of using standard user inputs, we use the software. They're different than UI testing because don't concentrate on the presentation layer and the feel of the application. The main point is to check the business layer. Why you should do them When you modify code in the backend, automated UI tests can be time-consuming and repetitive. With API testing we skip UI, which makes tests much faster. That's why we will know faster if our changes break business behavior. How you can do them These tests can run similarly to UI ones. The main aspect is that you need a freshly build API, then you can run tests and base on the result deploy the new version of the application, or reject changes. There are many various tools to perform API tests. Some of them, I've put below. Designing and writing API tests is crucial for business work. Especially, when your architecture is built on micro-services. You can check every one separately. Deployment diagram Popular tools + Postman Newman (if you want to run collections from CLI) Supertest Performance testing What is Performance testing? Performance testing is a non-functional testing technique that determines the speed, scalability, stability, and responsiveness of an application under a particular workload. The goal of this type of test is to evaluate application output, speed, data transfer velocity, network bandwidth usage, and response times. Why you should do them You need to know if application speed meets expectations on production. Performance is a key determinant of adoption, success, and productivity. Running them, you will identify performance-related bottlenecks, which affect the user and created a poor experience - where you lost money. Bottlenecks are a single point or component within a system's overall function, that holds back overall performance. You can also use them to compare two or more systems and identify the one that performs better. How you can do them This is specified by organization and application. It depends on what you need and what the business considers most important. You can use some of the tools, which I've listed below. Deployment diagram Researching this post I've found some interesting articles on how to build a pipeline with performance tests. I'm not sure if it's working well, but - why not to get a try?:) Here a few links: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/how-build-performance-testing-pipeline https://speedcurve.com/blog/performance-testing-in-ci-lets-break-the-build/ Popular tools Apache JMeter LoadNinja SmartMeter.io Conclusion The listed types of tests have pros and cons. All of them are useful, and many you should have in your projects. Of course, everything depends on needs. We've discussed: Screenshot testing UI testing API testing Performance testing I hope, that this article clarifies to you a bit which types could be useful where and for what we're doing them. Have a nice day! 🥳 Also published at https://kodziak.com/blog/what-is-screenshot-ui-api-performance-testing

An Introductory Guide to Screenshot, UI, API, and Performance Testing

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The Real Smart Meter Threat There is a lot of hype and hysteria about the smart meters the electrical companies have been rolling out. However, there is a very real problem and not a lot of people know about it and the power companies have done their best to keep it quiet. My vendor is Southern California Edison (SCE), which I will refer to throughout this article as a generic reference to all the power companies rolling out smart meters. To set this up, I had a friend who was telling me how the smart meters would fry your brain, cause cancer, etc., so in the interest of calming her, I did some research and found that they work on the same frequency as items like baby monitors and cordless phones, so no problem there, however…. Choppy WiFi At the same time as I was researching this, I had started having a problem with all my wireless devices in my house, laptops, iphones, android phones, tablets, etc., they kept losing their wireless connection and I’d have to turn them off and turn them back on again (the WiFi, not the device). In my research I saw other people complain of the same thing, so I had SCE come out with a manager, an electrical engineer and a smart meter expert. We stood by the meter with an android phone and an iPhone, neither could connect to the WiFi. They unplugged the meter and both could now connect to WiFi, I said “that seems to indicate a problem” and the smartmeter expert said “that doesn’t prove anything”, so they plugged it back in, and both devices lost connectivity, again the smartmeter expert said it proved nothing. They left, and I was not satisfied. A couple days later the manager who had been to my house, calls me, off hours, from a personal phone, and tells me he’s been doing some research and there is in fact a problem with the devices, but SCE refused to acknowledge it publicly because it was a massive problem for them. He told me there are two wireless devices in the unit, one “phones home” once or twice an hour, this one is not the problem. The other is a Zigbee device, and it pings off about every 30 seconds. Think of the Zigbee as kind of super bluetooth. These smart meters work as a mesh network, they beam data to each other around the neighborhood till the get to the transmitter meter that sends it off over the cellular network, the house with the giant smart meter is the transmitter. Now, think of the WiFi and zigbee signals as notes on a piano, Wi Fi is the white keys and zigbee is the black keys. Each note is a “channel”, so while you might not be on the same channel, it is close enough that it causes disruption. By default most home WiFi routers are 2.4ghz and on channel 6 or 9. If you are on 5ghz, then you won’t have a problem, but 5ghz has less range. The zigbee stomps all over channel 6 in particular. Basically, if you change the channel on your WiFi router to 1 or 11, it moves the signal out of the way of the zigbee and pretty much clears up the problem, not totally, but it is significantly better. I have a nifty app for my android phone called “WiFi analyzer” and it will show you all the WiFi signals it is picking up, their strength and channel. Even the customer support people at SCE don’t know about this, I’ve explained it to a few and every one of them commented about how they’d started having this problem and realized it was the same time the smart meter went in. This is an easy fix, but you need to know how to get in to your router settings from your web browser. Much More Than a Conspiracy This problem however is broader than an inconvenience, and this is why the power companies are probably trying to hide this, but much like GM hiding the ignition switch problem over the expense to a replace a $1 part and hoping no one will notice they knew about it, they are hoping no one will die. How could you die you might ask? Many people are now using VoIP (voice over IP) phones that rely on a WiFi connection. From Vonage to Skype, to Oomla, or even just doing WiFi calling from your cell phone, instead of using the network, to keep your costs down. What if you have an emergency and call 911 but you can’t get through because your WiFi keeps disconnecting? That’s how you could possibly die from this. Sure, it’s a bit sensationalist, but it is a real possibility. There was enough outcry over the conspiracy theories of brain damage from the radiation that the power companies relented and would put an old meter out there, but they charged you for the privilege. If you are having a problem, force them to come to your home and demonstrate the problem per the steps I mentioned above. I’m not personally against the idea or the promise of the smart meter, but I don’t like the inconvenience and damage to my expensive electronics. I gave SCE the option to buy me a 5ghz router in compensation, but they refused. Main image credit: EMF Safety Network

Smart Meters Can Kill Your Wifi Signal, Not People

Right now, many Americans are facing difficult times, with more than 33 million people filing for unemployment over the last eight weeks, the US economy is feeling the pressure. We are currently in one of the most difficult economic periods we have ever faced. What’s baffling most people is why the stock market is up almost 30% since March lows. How could that be with the economy shut down due to the coronavirus, oil reaching negative prices, and with so many people out of a job? And that’s not even taking into consideration the possible renewed trade war between the US and China… If you have concerns about putting your money back to work in the market, I don’t blame you. Fortunately, there is also a lot of opportunities out there if you know where to look. Companies that are not only following the market momentum but are also set to benefit from the ongoing coronavirus difficulties that we all face. The Big Shift into Tech As a coronavirus worked its way around the world, a new reality after the pandemic has become the norm. The trends that were already in motion have been sped up dramatically, giving people no choice but to rely on modern-day cutting-edge technology to survive. For those who have been following the markets, the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index has been outpacing the S&P 500 index, as well as the Dow Jones industrial average since March 23 lows. That’s no accident. The coronavirus has changed how we do things. Some companies are feeling the wrath of change while other companies are relishing in the new tech-driven economy. Let’s take a closer… The Amazon Affect It’s no secret that Amazon (AMZN) was a favorite among many families before the pandemic. The ability to order nearly everything from the comfort of your own home and have it delivered directly to your doorstep in one or two days has been disrupting the shopping industry for decades. However, now, by being forced to stay inside, there is no choice when it comes to acquiring necessities. If we ever needed a kick in the butt to try Amazon Fresh, Amazons food delivery service, there would never be a better time. The advantages are pretty clear, not only do we get to avoid coming in contact with people who might be infected, but we also get to skip those long lines at the register. It seems like we weren’t the only ones to notice as Amazon the selling out of food quite rapidly. The technology giant was trading at a high of $2180 before the pandemic started. However, after a temporary setback to the market selloff in March, it exploded back up to a new all-time high $2475. And why not it had first-quarter revenue totaling $75.45 billion, blowing past the estimate of $73.69 billion. Should we have known when the company was scrambling to hire 175,000 new workers? Amazon has so much demand, its famous prime day, originally scheduled to happen in July, has been postponed because it doesn’t think he can handle the demand. A New Way to Work and Play With a shelter in place order in the works, how are kids going to attend school and parents work? Another company that became an instant winner right out of the gate Zoom Video Communications (ZM). Most of us likely never heard of Zoom Video Communications before the pandemic, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone now who doesn’t have someone in their household using the remote classroom and work platform. Both the kids in my household are using it as a remote classroom, while my friends and I used it to talk smack to each other during our online poker games. According to Zoom, they saw a 50% increase in business by the first week of April. They are now hosting more than 300 million daily meetings for its users. Easy Collaboration Advancements With more people working from home, tools that make collaboration easy among colleagues is a must. This is where Slack Technologies (WORK) can thrive. Slack’s enabled users to get only information that was relevant only to them, which dramatically speeds up communication and efficiency. The company’s chief executive, Stewart Butterfield, stated the company had 7000 new users in the first quarter, then just one week later added another 2000 users. Butterfield added that existing customers are expanding their usage and more “Enterprise deals are getting done. More new teams are signing up. More upgrading to paid plans.” Do people and companies want better collaboration tools… You bet! The Giants Gets Bigger All the companies growing in today’s environment need new technology to expand their business, this means they also need an increase in storage in a higher demand for data. Someone has to supply that. Video companies need to store their shows, supply chains require a place to keep up with their inventory, and everyone wants to keep a database on their customers and their past purchases. This is precisely what the companies building the cloud supply. Push button storage is what companies need to build out their data infrastructure without having to continually be reinvesting in additional servers. This is where companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet take the reins. Cloud service enables companies to concentrate on what they do best instead of putting time, money, and people into maintaining their data. Microsoft has stated that they saw a growth of 59% just due to the coronavirus. Amazon Web Services also reported that revenue rose by 33%, while Google Cloud saw sales growth of 52%. Microsoft also has a similar story to Slack when it comes to their Team collaboration service. According to the technology giant, Microsoft said it had a 775% jump in demand in Italy. Overall it added as many users in a week as Slack has added since our inception. Technology is Quickly Changing the Way We Live All of these changes are happening in front of us right now. You can let them pass you by, or you can jump on board and profit along with the new economy. There are many potential winners out there, so far, I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg. Companies like Smartsheet (SMAR), sells affordable productivity tools, or BlackLine (BL), which provides automated accounting software, or Chewy (CHWY), that allows pet owners to order pet supplies online, just to name a few. With so many people being forced into a new reality, those who would typically be laggards to adopt new technology are now being forced to expedite their path to innovate, thus causing a dramatic surge in the technology sector. Don’t get me wrong, price still matters, so investors need to walk a tightrope between growth and attractive capital gains. Going forward, our lives will be more technology-driven, and the stock market is going to reflect that. For those looking to step in and benefit from the new reality, the best advice I can give you would be to look at applying the right to the stocks that are reflecting the technology demand of the new economy. The trends we see playing out today represent the vision of the world to come. option strategies -- To take advantage of the new world landscape and learn options trading for free visit OptionStrategiesInsider.com

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