9 useful tools for startups in 2021
1. Project Management
Every enthusiastic team needs a tool that can track the work they are doing. A project management tool provides you with the ability to easily establish a hierarchy of tasks for effective and efficient completion. It also lets you indicate which steps are sequential and which tasks are dependent on one another.
In turn, this makes it easier for the team to do their work. There are many tools and services introduced in the market to reduce the friction of tracking work. These are two that I love:
Clubhouse
Trello
2. Communication
People need to be connected and organised no matter where they’re working. A strong communications channel ensures anyone is reachable easily and work can be done without any hiccups. Instant messaging helps with both collaboration and productivity.
Slack
Flock
3. Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment
CI/CD allows organisations to ship software quickly and efficiently. It facilitates an effective process for getting products to market faster than ever before, continuously delivering code into production, and ensuring an ongoing flow of new features and bug fixes via the most efficient delivery method.
A CI/CD pipeline introduces monitoring and automation to improve the process of application development, particularly at the integration and testing phases, as well as during delivery and deployment.
Azure DevOps
CircleCI
4. Documentation
There are a lot of requirements why we would document something:
- Teams work on multiple projects and might forget the implementations they did at a later date
- New members join the team
- There is a series of steps as a checklist for a Release
- There are policies and guidelines team members must have handy
All these are possible to be tracked and maintained by smart tools for creating and sharing documentation.
Slite
Notion
5. Design
Teams brainstorm ideas using various tools like whiteboards, post-its, chart papers etc. But how about when members are remote or maybe when we need to save these sketches for later use and be able to edit them as per future amendments?
Digital design and brainstorming tools help us overcome this by allowing collaboration and brainstorming in digital whiteboards.
Miro
Figma
6. Mail
Well, nothing in today’s world work without email. It is the foundation of formal communication in the modern era. Individual members need access to their email ids that can be made professional using the company’s domain name (<username>@yourcompanyname.com)
GSuite
7. Source code management
Every major software needs to track code as multiple people are contributing to it every day. Adding features, fixing bugs and regular maintenance work is pushed into the code repository round the clock. Software developers need to review and track code effectively.
Git
GitHub
SourceTree
8. Content
Writing appropriate content for your email, marketing, sales or investor pitch presentation is important for conversion. This happens if we use the correct grammar and write clear sentences to express our thoughts on paper.
Grammarly
Hemingway app
9. Storage and Sharing
Every team needs to share ideas and content via PDF, spreadsheets, presentations, word docs, images and even videos. There needs to be an easy way to structure the file directory. We also want to leverage the benefits of granting permissions based on view only or edit privileges.