Better tools

When everything works, the reader flashes green and emits a pleasing tone; if something goes wrong, it glows blue — never red. Red lights are forbidden at Disney, as they imply something bad happened. Nothing bad can happen at Disney World. (from http://www.wired.com/2015/03/disney-magicband/)

Think for a second about the tools that you use everyday. Do you actually enjoy using them? Are they pleasant to interact with? Or do you you dread opening them up each morning, just knowing that they’re going to be a hassle to use?

If you’re a developer you probably use a lot of tools:

• Editors: IDEs, text editors, Emacs, Vim
• Source control systems: Git(Hub), Mercurial, Subversion, etc
• Project Management: Jira, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, etc
• Email: Gmail, Outlook, etc

And the list goes on and on.

But which tools do you love?

Probably not a lot of them. In fact, I think that I’ve run into at least one person that hates every tool listed above.

Project management tools, though, seems to engender a level of hatred that’s above and beyond everything else.

It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. Every team that I’ve ever worked with has multiple people who hate whatever tool we’re using. They’re all pretty terrible, but they’re all seen as a “necessary evil.”

We can do better

We can build something that people love.

We can build something that helps people bring their ideas to life without getting in the way and making your day worse.

We can build a tool that is actually designed to work with you, instead of fighting against you.

At Shortcut, that’s exactly what we’re trying to build. We’re working on the first software project management tool that people will actually love using.

If you’re interested in being an early user, please sign up at https://clubhouse.io