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Product company 🚀

11-50 ppl 🎩

E-commerce Software 👻

Switched from Asana, Miro 😎

How e-com startup tests assumptions and spots product opportunities

I started using Fibery for product management. Over time, other teams build their spaces there too. Right now, Fibery is our only work-management tool. We also use it as a knowledge base.

We are still very small so we didn’t have that many tools to replace. This is also the reason why we moved to Fibery easily. I can’t imagine achieving that at my previous company, an international unicorn, where multiple countries, teams, and departments were hooked up with their tools.

We really only replaced Asana. For some cases, Fibery wins over Miro (whiteboards) and Google Sheets (project management, feedback collection). Don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing, we are very happy that we have a tool that does almost everything we need and that we don’t need to switch from other tools.

The primary motivation was that I was looking for a product management tool. Asana didn’t really give me a good view of epics or a roadmap. I had heard of Fibery before so I gave it a try and I was mesmerized by its flexibility. I could set up any view, any process, see any fields on cards. Total freedom.

I can see the score on cards in views where I want them. And switch them off in other places. And I could sort cards by the score if I wanted to — which I don’t, but I know I can and I love that.

I try to increase our confidence in high-impact activities by testing assumptions and running experiments and MVPs. Very often, we learn by doing — because building something small is cheaper and faster than solid upfront validation.

So, for each major feature, I make a list of assumptions that must be true for the feature to succeed. And I rate our confidence in these assumptions and their importance. And those that are important and have low confidence are those that we need to validate the most. So we gather data to increase the confidence: sometimes market data, sometimes our product analytics, sometimes user interviews — whatever gives the best answer.

All credit goes to Teresa Torres of course, I just try to follow her method and use Fibery to fit it.

And here is story mapping on a whiteboard. I map the flow and create stories for key points right from the whiteboard, this is actually where Fibery shines at its best:

How do you track features and analyse progress?

Definitely flexibility. I love that I can look at the content any way I want. It’s a tool that’s built around my needs. I am not forced into a single holy workflow, which is what most tools more or less do.

I love the fact that Fibery has a whiteboard because it makes sense in so many cases. And I am quite sad that it’s very basic and kind of painful to use but I understand the reasons.

I am also excited about how fast Fibery improves. I use the tool and it keeps changing right under my hands. And most of the changes really do make working with the tool better, week after week. I have never seen this with any tool I had used in my life, including large tools with huge dev teams. It’s fun to watch and makes you tolerant to Fibery’s weaknesses — because you know it’s only a matter of (mostly short) time before they disappear.

It’s not a tool where you can just send invites to all team members and they just start using it. If there wasn’t for me as a Fibery expert/advocate, our company would never adopt it. There are many things that people expect from other tools and that Fibery can do, but without asking Polina you never find out how.

The most severe case is notifications, in my opinion. People expect to be notified about actions that are relevant to them, out of the box. Or, in small teams, about everything that goes on (Trello’s great ‘watch board’ feature). It’s a collaboration tool. But it’s hard to collaborate if you cannot communicate. Fibery can cover some cases but you have to put an enormous effort into setting up manual rules — and all of that separately for each space.