.svg)
Vanta, a top startup and leader in automated security compliance, helps more than 2,000 companies simplify and automate compliance for certifications such as SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, GDPR, and integrations.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Vanta was founded in 2016 in the wake of several high-profile data breaches that shook collective faith in internet businesses. Vanta’s vision was, and still is, to restore that trust by enabling companies to improve and validate their security and compliance posture to their customers, prospects, and partners.
As Vanta began to take off, Matt Spitz, Head of Engineering, needed a better tool to help his teams track tasks and run iterations and sprints. Switching up their process meant switching up their tool.
He began looking for a project management tool that would optimize workflows - something easy to use without feeling clunky, something that wasn’t overly opinionated or complicated, something that didn’t get in their way, and something that wasn’t time consuming to learn.
Check out the more detailed breakdown of what Vanta was looking for in a project management tool 👇
How Vanta Shopped for a Project Management Tool
Basics
- Ability to assign tasks to individuals and assign points
- Ability to group tasks within larger projects (epics) and milestone/release (higher order than projects)
- Ability to group tasks by status (e.g. blocked, on hold, doing, in review, done)
- Ability to express dependencies among tasks
- Reasonable text editing experience (e.g. Markdown, at least WYSIWYG)
Useful Views
- Sprint-level view: ideally, a board to view by status and filter by person or project
- Velocity calculation to easily measure points completed per sprint
- Project-level views: progress reports and burndowns per-project
UX for ICs
- Prioritization of the user experience for day-to-day users over creating reports and viewing progress at the “management” level; the same for a given tool’s configuration
Arbitrary Tags/Labels
- Categorization of engineering tasks, customer asks, product tasks, remediations for outages, etc.
Integrations
- GitHub
- Slack
- ZenDesk
Out-of-the-Box Functionality
- Use the tool as designed without significant custom configuration
Transparency for the whole company
- Something we can share with everyone, even if they care about low-level tasks
Not uncomfortably expensive
- A good tool that’s useful on a limited budget
Shortcut is the Perfect Balance Between Structure and Usability
Matt Spitz had never used Shortcut before. It was a peer, a Head of Engineering at another company, who recommended Shortcut because he and his team liked it so much. But before settling on Shortcut - which Vanta has now been using for a year and a half - Matt looked at other tools.
Here’s how Shortcut stacked up against Jira, Trello, and Linear:
- Jira tends to be the default for large engineering organizations, but it’s unnecessarily complicated. So complicated, in fact, that Vanta would need somebody who’s dedicated to mapping processes and translating processes into Jira’s overwhelming configuration option. They didn’t have the mental overhead for that.
- As Matt explains: “It's not worth my time, or my team's time, to constantly think about and deeply understand the massive configuration options that are available and adapt those to our workflow.”
- Trello, on the other hand, didn’t have enough structure. Sure, people use it for their personal to-do lists, but it’s not for managing a team.
- Linear, at least at the time, simply didn’t have enough features.
- Shortcut, out-of-the-box, had just the right amount of opinion, and just enough configuration to really suit Vanta’s needs. It was flexible enough to change their processes when needed, and having a tool that can adapt to Matt’s rapidly growing teams, and rapidly changing teams is super important.
To this point, a lot of the same functionality that was valuable to Vanta as a 10 person team is just as valuable as a 50 person team. This includes 25 engineers, a handful of product managers, and a handful of designers, who all run their workflows in Shortcut. Vanta also runs its support escalation process using Shortcut.
It turns out, Shortcut was the perfect choice for Vanta.
Teams Work Side by Side in Shortcut
As an example of how Vanta’s teams work side by side using Shortcut, here’s how their support team and their engineering teams work together:
Vanta’s support team visualizes and tracks the progress of support tickets escalated to engineering that run across the board using API webhooks that sync with Zendesk. While support is working with customers on a ticket, a bot relays messages back and forth between Zendesk and Shortcut. If an engineer asks for more clarity, this gets posted as an internal comment in Zendesk.
Then, Vanta’s support team can post comments and change the status of the Zendesk ticket to say “done”, and the person running the support board can move it to their side of “done”.
The great thing about this is that engineers and support can each live in their respective tools without having to introduce any third channels. Their workflows bridge together.
Team are Happier When They Use Tools They Love
Features the Vanta team most loves about Shortcut include:
- Story editing
- Mass editing
- Search tools
- Tagging ability
- Deep workflow integrations with tools like GitHub
- Grouping ability
- Ease of use
Best of all, Shortcut stays out of their way. “For engineers, it's really frustrating when anything gets in the way of translating our ideas into product. Shortcut does not get in our way,” Matt says. “I've worked at many, many companies that have used many, many tools and I've never heard anywhere near this kind of positive feedback. I've never heard positive, unsolicited positive feedback about a task tracker until we started using Shortcut.”
With more and more companies turning to third parties to automate and simplify their certifications, the future of Vanta looks bright. As they continue to grow, Shortcut is honored to be part of their journey.
