Our product launched in February 2024, which means it has been almost a year since we have been shipping new features and improving the existing ones every week. Today, our product stands shoulder to shoulder with leading tools in the project management space. But here’s the thing: we use 5day.io ourselves to make this all happen.
In this article, we share how our product and engineering team uses 5day.io to manage projects, collaborate across teams, and ship impactful features. If you’re in the IT product industry and looking to gain ultimate visibility to your workflows, this guide is for you.
3 ways we use 5day.io to ship impactful features
Behind every impactful feature is a process, a series of decisions, collaborations, and iterations that bring an idea to life. At 5day.io, we’ve perfected this process by using our own tool. Here’s 4 ways our product team uses 5day.io to stay organized, and ahead of schedule.
Strategy and Planning
Way before any feature reaches the development stage, our Product Owner, aka Komal, plans the feature backlog every quarter. This backlog is created by talking to the marketing team, sales team, and customer success team.
Based on the data collected, we’ve created a 5day.io Product Backlog project. This project has a complete list of all the features, their status (i.e. did the stakeholders agree to move forward with this feature?), and their priority.
It looks something like this:
At 5day.io, we use the Agile framework to ship features confidently. After mapping out the features in our backlog, the Scrum Master helps break down these features into smaller phases, based on the development team’s bandwidth. We will discuss this in detail soon.
With clear due dates in place, the next phase can be picked up by the design team, so they have a clear idea of what needs to be done and remain focused on it.
During the strategy and planning phase, the most extensively used features by the product team are:
- Priority: All the critical tasks are flagged for the team, so they know what needs to be taken up first and maintain focus on the most urgent work
- Custom Fields: Custom fields are created to document information important to the stakeholders, like the ICP our feature is for, what quarter it’s going out in, release plan and more
- Filter, Sort and Group By: These features are used extensively to find specific information from a list of all the features in the backlog
- Sections: All the features are categorized in relevant sections like Q1, Q2, Q3, or Released, On Hold, In Development etc.
Research and Design
After the feature roadmap is finalized, tasks around research and design are created. Here, the product owner and product designer work together to collaboratively finalize designs post research.
All the tasks related to design, including persona development, user journeys, affinity mapping and more are done here. Discussions and files are extensively used here to go back and forth about the changes.
Simultaneously, the product team starts creating detailed user stories for developers so that they can use them to build backend and frontend design.
To do this, a user story section is created in the Sprint Execution project. All the updated user stories are added to this section for the team’s reference. How does that help? We’ll get to that in the next section.
Agile Development
Now, this is where the magic happens. Managing people, projects, documents, and discussions is at the crux of 5day.io. Our product team has worked hard to build features that are not cluttered and get your work done. And that is the same principle that helps us move fast to ship features confidently.
When we move into the development stage, one of the first things our Scrum Master Anil does is use the Sprint Management feature.
By turning this feature on, you will get automatically created sprints in your project, that equal the duration you selected. These sprints have their separate section, and analytics that help you get insights into your project’s progress.
Once the sprints are created, all the tasks are assigned within it to the respective teams. We categorize all tasks using tags for Backend, Frontend, QA, and DevOps team. This leads to clear insights into each team’s bandwidth and the tasks assigned to them.
For every user story created, a set of tasks is assigned to all team members. But with hundreds of tasks every sprint, how does a developer keep track of user stories? Well, that’s where the magic of task link comes in.
All the tasks created for all teams link back to the main user story. This helps everyone in the team know exactly what goal they are working towards, and clarify any doubts they have about the task by navigating to the original source in one click.
At the same time, all the tasks associated with the feature show up on the primary user story task, so the loop of information is complete.
The most frequently used features during the Agile development phase are:
Sprint Management: To manage and organize tasks into sprints, providing clear deadlines and deliverables
Story Points: To estimate appropriate and efforts spent on each task
Sprint Widgets: For sprint specific visual analytics that tracks progress during sprints, including velocity, burnup and burndown charts
Task Prioritization: To prioritize tasks based on business impact or technical requirements
Task Breakdown: To break down larger development tasks into smaller, actionable items for better tracking
Sprint Retrospective: To track daily progress and blockers by collecting input from team members
Time Tracking: To monitor time spent on tasks so that development is on schedule
Ship products more smoothly using 5day.io
Most project management tools built for IT teams are complex or legacy tools. They have an overload of features that do not help your team, just increase adoption resistance.
At 5day.io, we focus solely on the features that truly simplify your daily work, not overwhelm it. Our goal is to help your team deliver impactful results without getting bogged down by unnecessary complexities.
Do you want to try 5day.io for your IT team, but find it difficult to start?
Follow either of these 2 simple steps:
- Reach out to us to get a detailed demo and let us handle your complete onboarding
- Create your account to explore the tool on your own and ping us if you have any questions
