As Hetchr’s first birthday approaches next month, we can’t help but think of how our vision, mission, and product have evolved over time. We began our journey over two years ago with one central goal: improving collaboration at work. Our ideas within this broad topic have been refined over time, as we continue to test and improve our initial vision. Here’s what we’ve learned over the last year and what’s currently being developed:
Right in Front of Our Eyes
In 2019, we built a product to help software engineering managers understand their team’s performance with metrics based on their existing tools. The developers that tested our beta gravitated towards a secondary function of our product: the live feed. Developers could see a live history of every action within their team and could get insight into their team’s progress within development cycles. It was clear that software engineering teams have a need for improved communication, without the hassle of calls or check-ins. Aggregating all of these actions was already a step in the right direction, and it happened to be right in front of us.
We then thought to ourselves: “how can we bring a live feed of a team’s actions, while reducing the noise between these tools?” As a developer, communication is tough. You deal with a lot of information spread out across multiple tools, with multiple people, on multiple topics. You have to multitask between your code and a variety of tools while handling reports, questions, and progress updates. Centralizing all of this information into one dashboard was the natural answer.
Let’s rewind for a second: remember Compact Discs in the 90s? When they came out, it was a huge innovation to have quality sound with more songs on a small device. The only problem was most CDs (aside from the perfect albums) only had one or two songs that you actually liked. It still wasn’t possible to buy individual songs, so you were stuck skipping through CDs to find your favorites. Then one day the iPod arrived, allowing you to store hundreds of songs and create playlists of your favorites. We’re aiming for the same thing with development and project management tools: taking the best features and putting them in one place, fully customized to your style.
It’s All About ATOMs
We are creating a centralized dashboard that takes the most important elements of your existing software engineering tools and allows you to interact with only the relevant features for you and your team. This dashboard allows you to pick and choose Aggregated Tech Operations Modules (ATOMs, the core building blocks of Hetchr) that fit your team’s workflow.
In other words, ATOMs are features of your existing tools, like Github PRs, Circle CI pipelines, Slack mentions, and Jira tickets. Grouping the useful portions of your tools into one dashboard opens up one single layer of communication that is tailored to each person’s workflow. There’s no need to keep a mental checklist of which tools and tasks you need to pay attention to, it’s all in one spot. Each ATOM is bi-directional, so you can make edits / control your tools directly through Hetchr.
Flexibility is a key component to the dashboard and it’s pretty typical to be a part of multiple teams or projects and need to get up to speed as quickly as possible. We’ve designed our product with this in mind by opening up multiple workspaces within organizations.
Each of these workspaces can customize their members and ATOMs, and you can easily flip between workspaces without getting lost. New team members can be onboarded and access their workspace’s dashboard to get up to speed within minutes.
Concretely, how can Hetchr help you?
Hetchr saves software engineering teams time and money through:
- Increased information flow/communication between team members
- Reduced meetings and standups
- Decreased time to onboard new team members
- Increased visibility for the entire team
- Increased productivity
- Automated exportable reports
- Personal and team productivity metrics (in the future)
Our website is now live and you can sign up for early access here.
We’d like to recognize the team members and beta testers that have helped us get to where we are today. We wouldn’t be here without you.
Special thanks to:
Our development team
- Gautier DiFolco, our current Lead Developer
- Ianis Vincent, our current Front End Developer
Our closest friends
- Sam Alba, ex-VP of Engineering at Docker (currently building a project in stealth mode)
- Jean Helou, CTO at Yupwego
- Antonin Ribeaud, Freelance FS Engineer
- Faouzi El Yagoubi, CTO at Ovavi
- Valentin Pichard, DevOps Engineer at Instadeep
- Matthieu Ambrois, CTO at HeyProf
- Stanislas Cuenat, Freelance FS Engineer
- Enguerrand Pinot, Head of Engineering at Surprise
If you’d like to stay up to date with Hetchr, feel free to follow us on social media as we update our journey. We’re looking forward to the next months!
Sincerely,
The Hetchr Team
