The improvements are mostly unnoticed by over 1000 people who rely on Allt for their everyday work. But, these small improvements made Allt a stable, powerful and simple platform to manage work.
2016 was a very crucial year for Allt on the whole. We have committed over 25,000 lines of code to Allt, ensuring that the stability and performance are better than what we promised.
We are not working on new features for the platform, we are working on perfecting what’s already there. Our vision for Allt is to make it the most humanly simple platform ever created to manage work.
To make sure there’s consistent innovation in helping you manage your work easily, we’ve been doing something backstage. We’ve been practicing “Prod Day” — A day where productivity of our teams are on steroids.
Prod Day
So how does Prod Day work at our company? Well, glad you asked.
Prod Days are dedicated to those small ideas, that you’ve always wanted to see in Allt, come to life. But wait, there’s a catch. When we say ‘small ideas’, it has to be really small. Something that you can go from paper to production in less than 10 hours.
Let me give you an example here. The Lock Todo feature is something that our CTO, Swaathi wanted to have in tasks. During one of the Prod Days, she pitched to the entire team about the idea, the approach, and a very clear time of completion. (All our meetings during this day happens offline, and not on a Slack channel).
Once the idea is exciting enough for everyone, they team up together to get it done.
This small practice has fostered a ton of small improvements to Allt, right from the user experience to the infrastructure aspect of the platform.
So during a Prod Day, an idea goes on to become an improvement in Allt .
Ideas get thrown on the table in the morning — ideas turn into workflows/sketches in 30 minutes — programming start in the first 75 minutes of the Prod Day — after 8 hours, we have a shiny new improvement to the platform.
What has come of our of Prod Days so far?
While there are a ton of ideas on the shiny neat white table at our Design Room for the next Prod Days, here are some of the ideas that were already incorporated:
- Kanban Boards — Toggle between a simple task view into Kanban view.
- Lock Todo — Lock your tasks so that others can only observe and cannot make any modifications to your task.
- Links — Your very own internal bookmark aggregation.
Prod Days are meant for our customers. This day helps us re-align ourselves to the goal and predict what our customers would want in the future.
The next Prod Day is approaching fast, and if you would like to see something on Allt, drop us an email.