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Show HN: Standup Jack – A Slack Bot for Your Standups
- benwerd 11y agoHow does this compare to Howdy?
- matthewmueller 11y agoIt looks like Howdy offers quite a bit more than just standups. But if we compare Standup Jack to their standup product, it looks like someone chooses when to start standup (the "run check in" command). Standup Jack is slightly more automated, where you pick a time that works well for you and Jack will message you each weekday at that time for an update.
- joslin01 11y agoI really like the overall branding / design of this tool. Nice work. Going to give it a shot.
- matthewmueller 11y agoThanks! Let me know what you think :-)
- mooreds 11y agoReminds of https://home.idonethis.com/ https://home.idonethis.com/ except Slackified! (edit: typos)
- matthewmueller 11y agohaha, yep. It's quite similar. I Done This offers way more though. Standup Jack is just focused on running great standups :-)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dksidana 11y agoSeems very similar to https://geekbot.io/ https://geekbot.io/
- matthewmueller 11y agoOh cool, yes it looks like we are trying to solve the same issue :-). One difference I can spot right away is that Geekbot will post the status update immediately, while Jack will collect everyone's responses and post them at one time. It's hard to say which one is more effective. I'm definitely bookmarking this service, thanks for sharing :-)
- saiko-chriskun 11y agogeekbot also allows custom questions, multiple standups, and is free.
- deedubaya 11y agoThe team updates seem odd with everyone's response clobbered together. I'd much rather see the answers grouped by user rather than question.
- matthewmueller 11y agothanks for the feedback! I'd be curious to know if other people feel this way too. Maybe it can be an option :-)
- dwightgunning 11y agoI was thinking about that too. My initial reaction was "that looks weird" (that they're grouped)... it reads like a status report. However, the way something looks on a landing page isn't necessarily an indicator of what will work best in practice. Real-life stand ups typically go around the circle once and people answer all the questions in one block because it reduces all the bridge statements like "that's it from me", "over to you, Dave", plus the cognitive burden of adjusting to different voices/accents over and over. Those reasons aren't such an issue with a textual re-cap. I would do some hallway user testing (with printouts) before you go all the way to implementing a new feature.
- gsharma 11y agoSmall teams will do good with the current grouping. Larger teams will get complicated. Feature idea: DM @Jack "What did @john @mike @gsharma say for their standup today?"
- matthewmueller 11y agoLarge organization support will definitely need some work. I think the solution will be multiple standup channels for different teams inside the company. I love your idea. It could also work for aggregation: "What did @john say this week?" or when there is multiple standup channels, querying for people who aren't in your team's standup.
- mmanfrin 11y ago
- gregshap 11y agoNifty idea. Key question missing for my team: "Is any of your work blocked by someone else?"
- hendler 11y agoAgreed. Handling that communication would be interesting. "Hi, Bob said your commit had issues. See ticket #[12]"
- matthewmueller 11y agoThanks for the feedback! The last question is actually: "Is there anything blocking you". I originally cut it out of the picture for simplicity, but I'll add it back in :-)
- doseofreality 11y agoMy guess is that no one would really read these standup summaries.
- matthewmueller 11y agoI think that's highly dependent on your team. We've been using it heavily to help stay connected without nagging each other. It's also especially useful for remote workers :-)
- mmattax 11y agoDisclaimer: I've been working on a similar product (https://jell.com https://jell.com) We don't have a bot (we do support slash commands). One thing that sticks out to me (and a lot of the other standup bots) are that the screenshots/demo often only include the simple case of a user inputting a single answer to a question. Does your bot handle multiple answers? Seems like that could be a differentiator for bots (and the reason why we've stuck with Slash commands). Good Luck!
- matthewmueller 11y agoThanks! Jell looks great :-) Yah, so the bot's questions are context aware, so answering "yes" does different things depending on the question asked. I'll be going wayyy deeper on that soon and open sourcing some neat tools :-)
- wpietri 11y agoOh god. This shows a complete misunderstanding of what daily stand-ups are for. This is just a bot for daily status reports. The point of a daily stand-up meeting is to get everybody physically together, re-make human connections, quickly surface issues, get people talking, and get everybody charged up to go tackle the day as a team. Having a bot help you put the right cover sheet on your TPS report is in no way a daily stand-up meeting. One way you can tell is that it does not involve people actually standing together. If people want to do daily status reports, that is totally fine by me, but please just call it that. Then when somebody asks me for help and I suggest they try a daily stand-up meeting, we don't have to spend 15 minutes while they un-learn the wrong thing.
- sadkingbilly 11y agoI was thinking the same thing. Who is really going to read these updates? If I was forced to do this at a company, I'd probably automate responses with a bot of my own. I'd call it the schitt-bot.
- wpietri 11y agoThat's exactly it. The stand-up meeting was created because typical status meetings were a waste of time. Much was said, but most people were bored out of their minds. The solution was to get everybody together to have a quick, real conversation about the upcoming day's work. And to keep it quick and dynamic, everybody had to literally stand up. Done right, this is great. Merely renaming a lame status meeting to a stand-up meeting doesn't fix the problem. If people find so little value in doing an on-line stand-up that you need a machine to force them to do it, that's a sign that nobody sees it as worthwhile.
- matthewmueller 11y agoHey thanks for the critique. I agree that this is a status report, but I think (virtual) stand-up is also appropriate, because the questions are more or less what's asked of you at an in-person standup. By having stand-up conducted by a bot, it's less invasive and easier for remote workers to give updates on their own time. But I do agree that nothing beats in-person meetings :-)
- WesleyJohnson 11y agoHistory/Back is broken. If I navigate to /faq and then use my back button, my url updates but the content doesn't. Most recent chrome stable on OSX. Cool product. I'm going to see if my team would be interested in something like this. I like the design and branding as well. Kudos.
- matthewmueller 11y agooops, you're right. thanks for the bug report :-) thanks for the kind words!
- sic1 11y ago$1 per user, per month? Ouch. That's a lot to bite off honestly. We have 80+ people in our slack account, but i'd maybe wanna use this for ~20 of them. Doesn't seem to support that type of deal though.
- matthewmueller 11y agoThanks for your interest! Please contact me at hi@standupjack.com to chat further.
- zachlatta 11y agoAlso, on this note, we're in a similar situation. We have ~250 people in our Slack, but would only want this for 3-4 of them (the full time staff).
- NDizzle 11y agoI was hoping the mascot would be a bottle jack with googly eyes.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- matthewmueller 11y agoHaha, nice idea :-)
- matt_morgan 11y agoCan I ask Jack to talk to only 4 of 6 members of my team? I don't see a way to do that.
- matthewmueller 11y agonot yet! but i'm planning on adding admin options soon :-)