Building Business Software from Bang in the Middle of Nowhere — Part 2
On November 18, 2016 we launched Zoho Desk, our context-aware help desk software. Being the first software of its kind coupled with the fact that this product launch was happening in a quaint little town miles away from the tech hubs piqued a lot of interest. Around 30 journalists thronged our Tenkasi campus to conduct newscasts, press conferences, and interviews. Since then, the product itself has seen a good deal of success. Zoho Desk users have doubled and migrations from other services have tripled in the last 8 months.
In part one of this series, Hari from Projects wrote about why we took the road less travelled and set up an office in rural Tamil Nadu. I want to take a different direction, and tell you how we used our own products, especially Zoho Projects, to overcome coordination challenges and ship Desk successfully.
Managing work over long distances
When we started, Zoho Desk was a small, but dedicated team. We crammed into a tiny conference room together, and while it was not spacious, our face-to-face discussions were enough to arrive at decisions, and emails and sheets sufficed for data sharing.
As our team grew however, real challenges popped up. Valuable ideas were coming from many directions, but it was getting difficult to gather them and weigh them against each other or shelve them for a later discussion. Eventually, we decided to use Zoho Projects to share our ideas and record/track our day-to-day development. Even before we opened the Tenkasi office, everyone was well-acquainted with Projects, so when part of the team had to move to the new location, the transition wasn’t bad at all.
Since all project discussions and files are in one place, newbies who join the team or employees who return after a break quickly get a grip on what’s going on. This defeats the need for a formal on boarding process for our team.
Zoho University at Tenkasi uses Zoho for classroom discussions. They post code snippets, record issues, fix them, and manage their projects from start to finish.
Breaking the hierarchy and making sure discussions happen
Casual hallway conversations are a great way to come up with ideas. For the Desk team, Zoho Projects is that hallway. It encourages otherwise shy employees to come out and post their ideas or pick up an idea and see if it works. Once development is in progress, if someone from the project management team has a question or wants to drop in a suggestion, they don’t have to go through the entire organization tree to do it. Projects gives them direct contact with the people working on it, increasing transparency and trust among the entire team.
One example of a feature conceived in Projects is the Satisfaction Survey. As a young developer, Yuvaraj picked up the idea of introducing a customer satisfaction survey within Desk. This was initially developed as a prototype, but when the discussion moved into Zoho Projects, suggestions started to pour in.
A project was created exclusively for this feature which then received a constant inflow of ideas and feedback from the team. Even today, the team continues to create feature-specific projects to avoid clutter and encourage meaningful discussions. Without Projects, ideas like this would otherwise get bogged down in email threads.
Bridging the communication gap while keeping conversations in context
Any communication app can help you interact digitally, but most of those conversations lose context pretty quickly. This is where Zoho Projects is different. Teams can choose the best collaboration option for their purpose.
Most status updates and team conversations take place through Feeds. When the team needs a go-to place for important instructions and processes, they choose Pages. When an important announcement needs to be made, then they switch to the Forums, while personal and group discussions happen over Chat.
These features ensure that the conversation’s context is always intact, keeping conversations from going off the rails.
Well-planned development and tailor made issue tracking
The Desk team organizes discussions by creating a dedicated project for each feature. Important stages of module development become project milestones. For the Portal Themes project, each theme was a project milestone and each work item became a task in that milestone. Such feature projects are used exclusively by developers and occasionally by managers when they want to take a quick look at the progress.
When the developers are ready with a first cut of the feature, the testing phase begins. Testers post and manage all their build updates and issues in a master project. This is where the Issue Tracker module comes in. Of everyone in the team, testers are probably the heaviest users of Issue Tracker, feels Vasantha who has been with the team for the past 8 years.
Each dev build is a milestone and issues are logged under the corresponding milestone. The team uses custom fields to include more information about these bugs and tailor the issue tracking life cycle to fit their needs.
Countdown to launch
During the crunch, our team works round the clock, and team leads spend a lot less time at their desks. Even juggling three meetings a day, they were still able to keep track of advancements through the mobile app.
A leads-only project was created where all final statuses were shared. Each tasklist bears the lead’s name and any tasks under them were the important modules they had to deliver. This gave a quick bird’s eye view of all that was being rolled out, while keeping the nitty gritty details off the page. In a way, this served as a checklist of must-finish items.
All of this culminated in the head-turning Zoho Desk launch and the rest is history. As with any Zoho product, Zoho Desk continues to improve, and this launch was just the beginning.
Do you work over long distances too? If yes, tell us about the tools and techniques that help you bridge the gap.
