More seriously though, thanks for the feedback. We're not sure what the best pricing is yet. $10/user/mo is in line with similar products and is a small price to pay for getting rid of unnecessary overhead and management. It might be too high though.
Probably not as interesting now that you can play with the actual tool, but we also wrote several blog posts describing our thinking and goals for solving this problem:
Ha! I think project managers as infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Just seems like there should be ways to smooth out the process, especially with smaller teams/companies so less project management is required.
No problem! It's a weird question to ask. A lot of companies just hire a project manager and let them work it out. There seems like there should be a better way, or at least some partial alternatives. I'm hoping to find some answers.
There's obviously a lot of different project management strategies.
Some companies seem to have project managers assign daily tasks to each developer. The PMs then spend a lot of time defining the tasks and moving the schedule around. They have weekly/daily meetings with other PMs to do cross-project planning.
On the other hand, Basecamp's Shape Up (https://basecamp.com/shapeup) process defines a desired outcome with some clear parameters and a six-week deadline and simply lets the team figure out the rest. There's not a lot of project management happening on a week-by-week basis.
So my question is, what do teams in the middle of those two extremes do? How do teams spend less time on minutia of planning projects and tasks and more time doing?
Does the PM ever bother you to get the status of something, or is it always clear from the kanban board? I've seen the "bug the developer for a status update" move a lot in the past.
Agreeing on the API contract seems like a fantastic way to streamline the process!
More seriously though, thanks for the feedback. We're not sure what the best pricing is yet. $10/user/mo is in line with similar products and is a small price to pay for getting rid of unnecessary overhead and management. It might be too high though.