Six years ago, Kareem Mayan and Ryan Stocker co-founded Savio, a product management platform that helps sales-led B2B SaaS companies centralize and prioritize commercially viable feature requests. From day one, Shortcut has been their tool of choice for tracking work, keeping teams aligned, and moving fast.
We recently sat down with Kareem to hear more about how Savio uses Shortcut to collaborate, automate workflows, and drive outcomes.
Finding the right dev tool
Before starting Savio, Kareem was the CTO of a startup struggling to manage development work efficiently. Having used project management tools in the past, he understood the importance of a system that supported - not hindered - his team’s workflow.
“I first found Shortcut back in 2014 or 2015 when I was leading a team of 8-9 developers who didn’t have a dedicated dev tool. Jira felt like a bag of bolts, and I wasn’t looking for a general-purpose tool like Trello or Asana. Shortcut was different: it was fast, had great UX, and was clearly built with software teams in mind.”
So when Savio launched in 2019, Kareem brought Shortcut with him.
Why Shortcut?
For Savio’s team, the key to an effective project management tool was simple: it needed to align with how developers actually work.
“Shortcut has sensible opinions about how development teams function. We branch based on feature names, write and push code, open pull requests, and merge them. Shortcut understands this workflow and integrates seamlessly, so Stories move through our process automatically. That saves us time, reduces manual work, and keeps communication up-to-date.”
The power of integrations
With Shortcut at the center of their workflow, Savio takes full advantage of its integrations to eliminate friction.
“The GitHub integration is huge for us. It moves Stories forward as PRs are opened and merged. We also use Zapier and Webhooks to automate workflows in other tools.”
Savio even built its own Shortcut integration. “If we want to know whether something made it to a developer’s roadmap, we check in Savio. Shortcut updates feature request statuses inside of Savio as work progresses, keeping everything in sync.”
Keeping teams aligned
Savio operates as a fully remote company, so having a single source of truth is essential. “Shortcut keeps us aligned on priorities. We stack rank work in the Kanban view, and since we don’t rely on Slack, Shortcut is where we track progress and communicate about projects. Even our non-technical teams use it, like marketing, who run projects in Shortcut because it’s so easy to get up and running.”
As a leader, Kareem starts his day by making sure he’s not a blocker. “My #1 priority is checking for updates where I’ve been mentioned or asked a question. Our development team moves fast, so I don’t want to hold anyone up.”
Scaling with Shortcut Objectives
As Savio grows, they’re looking for better ways to tie daily work to broader business goals.
“We’ve been struggling to track objectives at a higher level. Now that we have multiple teams, zooming our Epics and Stories up to company-wide objectives, like growing traffic, improving conversions, or increasing revenue, is going to be extremely valuable.”
