At Hive & Spire, we’re focused on change.
We’ve chosen to embrace change, and to make the clear, consistent communication of change and its history for a project, product, and organization our #1 priority. From communication to project management, from design to development, and to the boardroom, we are the change.
Why we’re here
Hive & Spire grew from the need for a tectonic shift in how we work. After decades of developing software, managing startup products, projects, and helping to build businesses from scratch, we came to the realization that there is a vast chasm between the way people work and the tools they use to do that work. Whether at small or large companies, we found three core symptoms were putting the emergency brakes on meaningful work. First, many tools are myopic; an initial appearance of productivity and support quickly turns into time sinks between tools that swallow your productivity. Second, bringing people into new projects, and explaining to stakeholders how the past should inform future decisions is vastly more time consuming than it should be. Third, that communication has become a highly inefficient, disruptive distraction rather than a facilitator.
We inventoried the tools that were used at our companies and what we found is a shocking proliferation of tools and massively inefficient ways of working.
Perhaps you’re thinking “with all these specialized tools for Project, Product, and Documentation surely we were more effective!” But that simply proved wrong.
Instead, we found that when the time pressure was on, and we needed to make strategic and tactical decisions, the best way to work was to drop all our SaaS tools. We’d find a whiteboard, some markers, post-its, pens, and get to work with no tech. We’d design user flows, inventory use cases, plan project execution, estimate work, and make serious decisions about what MVPs should look like. And we did all this without the market leading software for that purpose. We would get done in a day or two what would otherwise have taken a week or two of back and forth, lots of pain updating the tools, the creation of presentation decks, and the ultimate what-about-isms that occur when stakeholders didn’t see the full picture and started second guessing all the decisions. But bring them into the room, stand them in front of the whiteboard, and suddenly we’re all on the same page. And, it turns out that we’re not alone.
We learned that the leading products that our companies spent thousands on per person per year were less effective than abandoning the software all together. But why was this the case?
Other products on the market make change expensive.
In our experience, there are two types of SaaS tools being used. First, ill-focused tools that try to do everything and do it poorly. That usually results in the second type of tool, which focuses on very specific needs to the exclusion of everything else. What you end up with is a huge array of tools that don’t sync information (a normal user we talk to will have between 20 and 35 different work specific software tools they interact with every week). One of our founders used 32 tools, while the other used 24 in their most recent engagements.
With so many tools, you soon find a proliferation of sources of truth. Keeping them in sync across your team is extremely time-consuming busy work that steals creative and strategic time from your entire team. Even a few tools that don’t work really smoothly together can have a serious negative impact. Making changes becomes an increasingly expensive chore. In a world that’s increasingly focused on agility and speed in software, this is antithetical to those values… but no teams we’ve talked to have escaped it.
Understanding the past, present, and future of your product is a nightmare.
One of the consequences of tool proliferation is that adding new team members is exponentially more expensive. The adage that “adding a developer to a late project makes it later” is made far worse. There is so much disconnected history, orphaned documents, and tool onboarding that differs so widely from team to team and project to project.
Knowing the decision history of a product requires that there’s a single source of truth that is comprehensive. For most teams, this work simply isn’t done. If you’re team is working in an Agile or Lean manner, then comprehensive documentation is often discouraged in principle. Ironically, it’s often demanded in an overreaction to anything that goes wrong. For new joiners, or anyone periodically inspecting the work, it’s simply exhausting; and that means they are less likely to do it, and take much longer to get up to speed.
More communication isn’t better communication.
It should be obvious… context switching is expensive to productivity. Most people spend their days with chat tools open and an expectation of responsiveness. These tools are meant to facilitate rapid communication and are certainly doubling down on their value propositions in an increasingly remote workplace. One of our founders has 6 separate instant chat tools for work. Now, chat itself isn’t the problem - despite being deeply problematic for it’s intermittent reward mechanics and lack of enforced norms. Rather, how we’ve all grown to use chat, and more importantly, WHY we’ve grown to use it that way is the problem.
Specifically, why we we need to keep answering basic questions over and over? And why does it seem like this problem is on repeat for everyone who looks over the work? The answer is intrinsically linked to the symptoms above. We have too many sources of truth; it’s hard to know which is correct. We can’t control the order that people explore our documentation and specifications. We struggle to maintain a clear distinction between what is a past, probably obsolete decision, what is current, and what is a future proposal. Most teams simply don’t have the time, permission, or patience to sustainably plan and document despite their tools.
These three symptoms compound each other to create unhappy teams, stressed workers, and kill creative productivity.
Change Must be #1
Managing change and effectively communicating change is the #1 priority for effective agile management and thus agile and digital transformations. We consistently find the gap in expectations between upper management, the project manager, and the engineer is exacerbated by the tools instead of supported by them. For Hive & Spire, we’ve embraced change to build product, project, and document management for agile teams of all sizes that facilitate, rather than hinder your team.
Business, software, and the workplace are broken…
Our Mission is to repair the fragmented, dysfunctional work experience.