Bored of Scrum and Kanban? Thinking about making the move to Shape Up?

This post is here to get you clued up on what the development methodology Shape Up looks like in practice. I’ll be giving you a sneak-peak into what we do here at Process Street as our EPD team shares their secrets. Learn how Shape Up facilitates the smooth running of a cross-functional team.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Shape Up, or if you’re interested in the Design part of the E-P- “D = design” team,or maybe, you’d like to get your hands on 3 Shape Up workflows to plug straight into your team, check out the following posts:

• Shape Up vs Scrum: 6 Months to 6 Weeks – How We Cut Our Dev Cycle 75%
• An Interview with Ivy: Shape Up From a Product Designer’s Perspective
• Ditch Scrum! 3 Shape Up Processes & Checklists to 5x Your Dev Cycle

In this post I speak to Process Street’s Product Lead, Michael, and our Full Stack Engineer Herbie. We talk about all things Shape Up and discuss how the methodology facilitates the success of a cross-functional team.

• Q1: Summarize what the EPD team is, and your role within the team.
• Q2: As a Product Lead what would you say are the key differences between Shape Up and say something like Scrum or Kanban?
• Q3: How do you find working in small highly focused cycles as opposed to Sprints
• Q4: Does the Shape Up method allow for more asynchronous communication (and less meetings)?
• Q5: As a Product Lead/Engineer am I right to think you work on a parallel track with other members of the EPD team. Could you talk me through this process?
• Q6: What does Shape Up empower you to do?
• Q7: This is your area of expertise, what are your key takeaways when it comes to Shape Up, how it works alongside the EPD team, and so on.

Let’s get started!
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We’re all using multiple apps for work, and we know how quickly this work becomes inconsistent and messy. You don’t always know what’s been done or what to do next.

For years, Process Street customers have been automating work and showing us first-hand the value of integrating Process Street with other tools to create powerful workflows like updating Salesforce opportunities, filing Jira tickets, and sending DocuSign contracts.

Today, we’re excited to announce Automations, a new set of direct integrations helping you create and run custom processes using built-in functionality from some of the world’s most popular software tools.

Anyone who’s ever updated an opportunity in Salesforce or created an issue in Jira knows the power of those applications. It can feel like a world of endless possibilities right at your fingertips. It’s what we love about these tools, and why teams like us use them every day.

But sometimes, instead of endless possibilities, you need a specific set of tasks done quickly and correctly. You need a process. That’s what we’ve helped thousands of companies with, and that’s why we’re so excited to announce our newest feature, Automations.

Automations brings your critical apps together to drive your team’s most important processes. Powering Automations is a new set of native integrations with:

• Salesforce
• Jira
• Slack
• DocuSign
• Google Sheets
• Plus powerful new functionality within Process Street itself

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It’s 4:55 on a sunny Friday afternoon. You have a whole weekend of relaxing in the backyard planned. Maybe you’ll have friends over for a barbecue, or finally finish that crime thriller you started last year and forgot about. There’s always that super-extended director’s cut of a film from four years ago that just came out.

You’re blissfully contemplating all your stress-free options when your line manager pops their head in and cheerily says, “HR wants to see you first thing Monday morning. Have a great weekend!”

The truth is, the role of HR teams – and even the name – has evolved quite a bit over the years, though its reputation hasn’t been quite so quick to keep up. People Teams, as all the start-ups are calling it these days, still have a vital role to play in the structure and organization of a company, though.

So, when is it time to create a super team-up for your start-up? More importantly, how do you do it?

I sat down with Process Street’s own VP of People, Jay Hanlon, to talk:

• The HR team’s role within an organization
• HR teams: The problem of bad branding
• Key factors in building a healthy HR team
• The final word on HR teams

Come on in and have a seat!
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How many different tabs do you have open on your computer or laptop, right now?

I bet it’s a lot.

Let me guess. You’ve probably got one open for your emails, one for your social media, one for Slack, and another for Process Street?

And, maybe you’ve also got tabs open for your HR management system, your recruitment software, your reporting platform, your payroll service, your employee engagement tool, and…well, the list could go on and on and on.

Am I right?

But, this makes finding the tab you need when you need it virtually impossible, it slows your computer…right…down, and even the simplest HR tasks can end-up taking twice as long.

“Too many tabs, in almost any web browser, will lead to overtaxed computer memory, a reduction in battery life, and, for sure, a cluttered browser workspace.” – Forbes, Too Many Tabs Open: Save Your PC Or Mac From Overheating

What if there was a way to speed up your HR tasks? What if you could get all your task notifications and updates in one, central place instead of several? What if you could improve communication with your team and spend less time waiting or chasing for updates and more time on the things that matter?

Interested?

Allow me to introduce you to our newest feature, built for Slack lovers: The Process Street Slack App. Just click the button below to add it to your Slack!

Read on to discover how the Process Street Slack App can speed up your HR tasks as we whizz through the following:

• How our new Slack App helps you get HR tasks done faster
• How Sue manages her HR tasks with Process Street’s Slack App
• How to get Process Street’s Slack App & start streamlining your HR tasks

Let’s get cracking. ️
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Having everything you need in one single place just makes life easier, doesn’t it?

That’s why Process Street is launching the Slack App.

According to research, the average employee switches between 35 job-critical applications more than 1,100 times every day.

Turn your Slack Workspace into a super-tool for recurring work with our new Slack App. You can receive Process Street notifications, work on tasks, approve or reject decisions or documents, and complete checklists, without ever having to leave Slack !

Open fewer tabs, work from one place, and add more time back into your day with Process Street’s Slack App.

Sounds good, right?

That’s because it is. But, don’t take our word for it, read this post to get a quick overview of:

• What the new Slack App is, how it works, and what it does
• How you will benefit from the Slack App
• How to get the new Slack App

Ready to make your life easier?
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Slack changed the way teams worked by bringing conversations, files, and day-to-day coordination into one shared space. In December 2020, Salesforce agreed to acquire Slack in a transaction with an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion, a sign of how central workplace communication had become.

This insider look explains why we built the Process Street Slack App, how CTO Cameron McKay shipped the first version in two weeks, and how teams could bring workflow notifications and approvals into the place where they were already working.

Until a few weeks ago, I had no idea what exactly a full-stack engineer was, let alone what the role entailed. I know, I know – I work for a tech startup, I should know these things.

You’re right; I should.

So, to educate myself, I sat down with one of Process Street’s engineers, Herbie Porter, to discuss what he does, his first year at Process Street, and the art of making pandemic cocktails:

• The very distinguished Mr. Herbie Porter
• One year ago today…
• The makings of a programmer
• Shape Up with Process Street
• Essential tools for the discerning engineer

It is my privilege to introduce you to…
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Jonathan Bond is a Process Street Staff Product Designer, Star Wars fan, and human problem solver. Reach him on Twitter @jrbond.

The path you actually take in life is often wildly different from the one you thought you’d take. I spent years undertaking a fine arts degree. However, after I graduated, I wanted to get my hands metaphorically dirty (and literally cleaner — goodbye, paint!) by going into graphic design.

Initially, I bounced between various agencies doing what you’d expect any freelance graphic designer to do: logos and websites. While it was interesting and paid the bills, there was a new buzzword on the block in 2010 that sounded even more exciting: UX.

“A user interface is like a joke.
If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.”
– Martin LeBlanc, CEO

User experience (UX) design is focused on the individual thoughts about a product or service a person might have. It takes into consideration qualitative data like the user’s emotions and attitudes towards a product, as well as the more practical elements like ease of use, efficiency, and so on.

The more I read about UX design, the more I liked what I read. I felt it fit my own design philosophy; I just connected with it. This was something I wanted to be involved in.

As luck would have it, a company that wanted someone to improve their app’s aesthetic hired me to be involved with that. I still didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I kept reading and studying, and ten years later, I’m still doing that – now at Process Street.

This post will cover:

• Product design at Process Street
• The details make the (UX) design
• You are not your user

Let’s begin!
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When you’re doing any kind of content marketing, you want to be able to understand how well you’re doing. You want to be able to look at the performance of the content you’re creating and feel assurance that you’re:

1. Driving forward key goals and objectives tied to your content strategy;
2. Continuously optimizing and improving the quality of your content in order to hit those goals.

Especially when you’re creating this kind of content that involves a degree of creative input (writing!) it can be difficult to measure quality.

This is where maturity models come in. Maturity models can be a great way to build and assess how successful an organization or system is at achieving continuous improvement.

Ultimately, it’s the idea that you’re constantly seeking to test and improve the way in which your organization runs. You’re not standing still.

We’ve written before about more generally applicable Capability Maturity Models, but this post takes a look at our internal Blog Asset Maturity Model (BAMM) process that we use to audit and continuously improve the quality of our blog content.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• How to assess content quality
• Content marketing metrics to measure success
• What exactly is a maturity model?
• Our internal process for quality control: The BAMM review
• Using processes to systematize content creation – more reliable and higher quality

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