Why we’re creating Stove: a roadmap collaboration app

What is Stove?

When people cook together, it is obvious to anyone looking over whether something is simmering on the back burner or on high heat and is going to be done very soon. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get to that level of clarity in our work with clients?

Our work in creating digital products, projects, and campaigns is incredibly collaborative. For us it is critical that we collaborate seamlessly in order to influence one another and create successful work. Stove is designed to bring client teams closer to the Madeo team by having real-time insights on progress towards our shared roadmap.

This might sound similar to other project management apps like Jira, Trello (we love you!), Asana, or Basecamp. Stove is unique, because it actually brings multiple project management apps together in real time, removes a lot of noise, and shows you only what matters.

What do Madeo clients get from Stove?

Stove shows you what’s done, currently in progress, and what’s ahead. You can also see due dates, add comments, or add new items to the roadmap. And, at the bottom of Stove you can easily open any of the past “monthly insights” reports that our team prepares.

These reports are unique to each client: a strategist gives brief insights on a range of topics, including security and improving performance, or more granular details about user behavior. And, if you don’t want to actually go to Stove, you can have a digest of updates come to you in one simple email.

What happened to good ol’ spreadsheets?

We designed Stove to pull, almost automatically, the relevant updates from the tools that we’re using. But we didn’t spend over 500 hours to date just for that. We observed every limitation in spreadsheets and status meetings and created a roadmap for addressing each one, in order of impact on improving our collaborations. We created an alpha version, which we shared with a few clients as “alpha users” and together we observed how Stove compared to our existing spreadsheets. Everyone unanimously agreed that Stove, even with its very limited alpha features, was still better than our shared google spreadsheets. So, we moved Stove to a beta phase and invited more of our clients to start using it.

Why we didn’t want Stove to have a password?

We designed Stove to bring Madeo team members and client team members closer together as one team. We didn’t want something to get in the way of easily and instantly being able to see what was going on. So we decided not to force anyone to download anything, sign up, or have to remember another password.

Anyone involved with the organization’s work, be it staff, consultants, or other agencies, can type in their email address just once and can instantly see what is going on; on their desktop, or on their phone.

Who is Stove for?

At the moment Stove is only available to our community. This keeps us focused on user needs, and on the community we are dedicated to. We know each and every user, and we can build every feature intentionally to solve actual problems. So, if you join our community as a client or as a staff member, you are going to use Stove, and it is going to make working together much better.

What’s ahead for Stove?

We have a lot of interesting ideas for Stove, but we are also very conservative about introducing new features that don’t improve things for users. That being said, we are exploring adding more types of insights that can help bring us closer together during collaborations. Our goal is to make sure that we neither overwhelm teams with information nor end up with too many cooks in the kitchen (I had to say it).

If you are curious about Stove, how it works, and what working with Madeo would be like, contact us. Stove is just the beginning– there is so much ahead for making collaborations better.

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Written by Ramy Nagy, Founder and Creative Director, Madeo.