Launching is hard. The product is never polished “enough”. There are always a hundred more tasks to be completed, and in the midst of a pandemic, it can seem impossible to get a product to the finish line.
Yet, we persevered.
We set a deadline of April 30th 2020 for our v1.0, and were all cylinders go, with dozens of completed sprints and pull requests from our team and 50 other teams in our early alpha. Best case scenario: my co-founder Syed and I expected a hundred other teams to sign up within a few weeks. Instead, post launch, thousands of workspaces were activated. In short, we were completely blown away by the response.
Quickly, Tara AI went to page 1 of Hacker News and the outpouring of love and support began. We realized how large of a problem we had truly set to solve, and in 8 months, 20,000 of you worked with Tara to deliver:
- 100,000 tasks
- 25,000 sprints
- 15,000 product requirements and
- 7,000 Github connections
We heard from so many of you how you switched from the “clunk” of Jira, the “mess” of Asana, and how a tool that was built by engineers (for engineers) became your team’s “superpower” to develop and release faster.
Consider this a promise to you, our power user:
Tara will always have simplicity at its core. Simplicity is beautiful, and we promise to continue to maintain an easy to use interface. We persevere to add value with powerful functionality, and you will never require a full-time “administrator” to use the tool. This is a decade-old concept that needs to end, 1- click is all it should take to start and run a sprint, or connect your project management software to source control.
Tara will provide visibility and speed as you move quickly to deliver software. You should be able to zoom in/out within different concepts in your product delivery assembly line, and the tool should get out of your way as you deliver software.
Tara should add predictability to your workflow. Predictably helping your team deliver on their tasks, sprints or pull requests, and providing indicators to do so. Continually delivering on your sprints, helps you deliver on your team’s monthly product milestones, which adds up to delivery on annual business goals for your organizations. In short, predictability in effort completed, and estimating effort, becomes integral to delivering on release timelines.
So what’s next?
In 2020, we received over 520 feature requests from a highly active community of power users via Intercom, email and our slack group. And, we saw sprints being created in just over 15 different languages. In 2021, we’re delivering:
A smarter Tara. Developers have to manually change statuses and constantly provide updates to the rest of their team, to move tasks across the development pipeline. We’re building automation that works intuitively with your source control and development workflow, so that your tasks flow from branch creation (TODO) to merged pull requests (DONE). Teams will be able to provide their DOD (definition of done) and automatically move tasks in the hand-off from development to QA, from one engineer to the next.
An improved interface. We’re making it even easier to search and filter through the platform with smart labels, to help prioritize your work. We’re also working on a new navigation that makes it faster to create tasks, product requirements or sprints, at any level, as your team delivers software from specification to release.
Larger teams. Today, Tara is optimized for workspaces and teams of up to 30 developers. We’ve mindfully crafted the experience for small teams, yet we continue to hear from larger teams that are anxiously waiting to make the switch to Tara. Moving forward, we’re building functionality to support access controls and user management, along with reporting and quarterly/monthly milestone setting. Our mobile experience is also a part of this roadmap.
More integrations. We’ve shipped several updates to our Github integration, alongside a new Gitlab integration. Next up, we’re working on more source control connections, to welcome teams from Bitbucket and other platforms. We’re also releasing our full-fledged Slack app, with reporting functionality and task creation, directly from Slack.
And, there’s more. We have an even larger roster of updates planned for 2021. To deliver on this ambitious roadmap, we’re hiring engineers, designers and scientists looking to change productivity for developers.
We’re excited to see what you will continue to build with Tara. Here’s to our customers.
Onwards and upwards.
<3,
Iba ❤️