All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

Kerika is work management for Lean, Agile and Distributed Teams.

How to create a Branding Framework, Netflix-style

Kanban & Lean, Tutorials,

For our marketing users we have created a new template: how to create a Branding Framework for your company or product, in the way that Netflix does.

Screenshot showing template for creating a Branding Framework
Click to view this template

To give credit where it’s due, this template has been adapted from The Three Tools Netflix Used to Build Its World-Class Brand | First Round Review, where Gibson Biddle talks about how this framework was used at Netflix for their branding strategy.

What do you need to achieve for branding? Well, Gibson believes it requires answering three questions about your company:

  1. What is it? Be descriptive.
  2. What are the customer benefits? How does it improve customers’ lives?
  3. What is its personality? If your product, company or service was human and you met at a cocktail party, how would you describe him/her?
When using this template to answer these three questions, make sure you:
  1. Bring in as many people from across the company when you do your positioning, to get as many perspective as possible.
  2. Be succinct and clear, to the point where a middle-school student could understand what you are saying.
  3. Limit yourself to three words.
  4. Avoid fuzzy words.
  5. Create a personality for your company.
  6. Own a specific word in your company’s mind.
The first three steps, identified as tasks in the Getting Started column on this template, are:
  1. Understanding what is a brand.

    A brand is the unique story that consumers recall when they think of you.

  2. Understanding what is a branding pyramid

    Screenshot showing the Branding Pyramid

  3. Understanding the concept summary

    The concept summary takes all of the thinking from your positioning model, branding pyramid and internal discussions about what your company wants to be when it grows up — and reduces it to one paragraph.

The template walks you through the process, step-by-step:

Screenshot showing details of Branding Framework

The next time you need to do a branding exercise for your company or product, use this template. And let us know if we need to improve it.

How to manage a Grant Pipeline for Nonprofits

Academic & Nonprofit, Kanban & Lean, Tutorials,

A large number of our users are from small nonprofits (and they get free use of Kerika under our Academic & Nonprofit Plan!) and to help these folks manage their grant pipeline better we have create a new template that’s available to everyone:

Screenshot showing Grant Pipeline template
Click to view this template

This simple, yet very flexible, template lets your nonprofit team track all the grant opportunities that are out there, and make sure they get attended to as they go through the process: Prospect → Qualified Lead → Prepare Grant Application → Await Response.

As the possible grants move through the process, for each opportunity you need to track at least this information:

  1. Name and contact details for donor.
  2. Organization (include specific department or program office if you are dealing with a foundation).
  3. Key motivations: what’s the donor’s known mission, and how does your nonprofit fit within that vision.
  4. Likelihood of donation: this is something that you update as the task moves through the process.
  5. Pitch process: smaller donors may have an information process, but larger donors are likely to have intermediaries like foundations or family offices that have a specific process they like to follow before they will commit to a donation. Make sure you follow their process!
  6. Expected Date: when you think the donor might make a decision.
  7. Fiscal Year: which fiscal year the grant will come in, for your nonprofit.

Not all of this will be available in the Prospect stage, but it needs to be gathered in the Qualified Lead stage for sure: otherwise, your lead isn’t really qualified, and you are not going to be in a good position to win that grant.

Creating this, and other templates for nonprofits, are all part of our “social good” mission.

Check it out and let us know if we can improve it.

How to organize a Campaign Photoshoot

Kanban & Lean, Tutorials

We have a new template for folks that need to organize a marketing campaign photoshoot, or any other professional business photoshoot:

Screenshot showing the Campaign Photoshoot template
Click to view the template

The template contains a step-by-step guide, with each task laid out as a separate card on a Task Board. Here’s an example of a task:

Screenshot showing an example task from this template
Example Task

As you can see, this template contains not just a list of tasks, but also useful links for folks who are doing this for the first time.

Cards also contain a checklist of subtasks, where appropriate:

Screenshot showing the checklist of subtasks
Example Checklist

Check this out, and let us know if it needs improving!

Some improvements for Task Auto-Numbering

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Usability, , , ,

We got feedback from some users after our last big release on how we could improve the user experience for folks who like to use the auto-numbering feature for Task Boards, and we have made these changes:

When you open a task, it’s number is shown (but can’t, of course, be edited)

Screenshot showing the Task Details dialog with numbering turned on
Editing a Numbered Task

You can now search for a numbered task simply by typing “#number” in the Search box

Screenshot showing how search by task number works
Search by Number

Kerika’s New Search Capabilities

Technology, , , , , , ,

We have completely rebuilt Kerika’s search capabilities, both on the back end and on the user interface, to make it much easier to find tasks (cards) and documents across all your Kerika boards.

Screenshot showing Task results from Search
Search Task Results

Search results are organized into two tabs at the top: Tasks and Documents.

Within each tab, results are further segmented into two tabs: This Board, and Other Boards.  This makes the most common use of Search even easier: most people want to find something that’s on a large board that they are viewing.

For each search result Kerika shows you what part of the task/card matched the query; in the example above, the search term showed up in 8 Board Chat messages.

Clicking on a search result gives you two action buttons: Open the task/card, or get a link to that task.

The search results are ranked by relevance; we spent weeks fine-tuning the algorithm based upon real-world usage and we think we have got it right now! But we know there will be times when you really need to narrow your search very specifically, and that’s handled by the Filter Results button which gives you so many options:

Screenshot showing Task Filter options for Search
Task Filter

The Documents tab shows you all the content that matches your search results: we get this from Google, if you signed up using your Google ID or email, or from Box, if you signed up using your Box ID.

Screenshot showing Document Results from Search
Search Results for Documents

Selecting a document result gives you two buttons: OPEN, which will open the document for you in a new browser tab (or in Google Apps or Box on a mobile device), and DOWNLOAD.

As with Tasks, there are numerous options to filter and narrow your search for documents:

Screenshot showing Documents Filter options for Search
Documents Filter

 

How Kerika became zippy

Kerika, Technology

With the new version you will notice that Kerika has become much faster on the desktop than previously: now any board, regardless of size, should load in under 3 seconds if you have a fast Internet connection.

With the old version this wasn’t true: the time to load a board was proportional to the number of cards (tasks) that were on the board, and while most users didn’t notice any lag, people who were using Kerika at a large scale, e.g. with boards of a thousand cards, would have to wait a while for the largest board to full open.

With our old code, every board was loaded sequentially column by column, starting with the leftmost column, and within each column every card was loaded before another column’s loading started.  This approach didn’t scale well, and the flaw of this approach became all to obvious when we built our mobile apps, which used a “lazy loading” approach.

To fix this, we rewrote the desktop app from scratch, an effort that took nearly nine months for our small team to complete, from design, implementation, testing and endless refinement.

With lazy loading the system prioritizes which cards to load, rather than trying to load all of them one by one.  If your board has 15 columns, for example, not all of these can be viewed at the same time: most displays will show just 5-6 columns at a time.  Kerika keeps track of which part of the board you were last viewing, and then intelligently loads the board from that point of view.

All the other columns are loaded only as the system senses you are going to need them: as you scroll to the left or right, for example, the system automatically (and quickly) fetches more columns into view. If the system does this fast enough, the user never realizes that her entire board wasn’t loaded at the very beginning, because no matter where she is looking, everything she needs is always in view.

We took a similar approach to loading columns with a lot of cards (tasks). Instead of loading all the cards that exist within a column — and these can number hundreds, for large boards — the system considers how many can be displayed at a time given the user’s particular device: laptop, desktop, tablet, or phone.

Having calculated how much of a column can be actually viewed by a user, the system loads just those many — and a few more in anticipation of the user scrolling her view of a column. As the user continues scrolling down a column, the system races to fetch more cards from the server so there’s never a gap in the user’s view.

But lazy loading alone wasn’t enough, we also had to deal with the speed at which a browser can display a bunch of cards. This speed varies by browser type, as well as device.  A low-powered computer, perhaps running an older browser, can’t render cards as fast as we need for the user to have a true real-time experience.

A more space-efficient layout for Task Boards

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Usability, , , ,

We have redesigned the Task/Card details dialog to provide a more space-efficient layout, so you can see more of what you need without having to scroll:

Screenshot showing the Task Details dialog
Task Details

What used to be vertical tabs for Details, Chat, etc., is now a compact horizontal tab; this frees up a lot of space to see the details of the tags.

The other big change we made is to make the Priority setting separate from other Tags:

Screenshot highlighting position of Task Priority field
Task Priority flag

Clicking on the star will bring up your task priority options:

Screenshot showing possible values for Task Priority
Task Priority

Cards are tasks, so we are renaming cards as Tasks

Usability,

If you have a engineering background, you will be comfortable calling the items that show up on Task Boards as “cards” — a term that originated with Kanban production lines in Japan, and then found its way to Scrum boards everywhere.

But for everyone else, “card” is a somewhat obscure, even baffling term, and we would often get asked a fundamental question: “what should I put on a card?

To make this clearer to folks, we are renaming cards as Tasks, because that’s what a Task/Card is: something your team needs to get done.

This is really a cosmetic change: wherever you had previously seen the word “card” you will now see either “task” or the more generic “item”.  The ADD A CARD button, for example, is now ADD NEW TASK:

And what had previously been called “tasks within cards” (or sub-tasks), is now more simply called a Checklist:

Screenshot showing a Card's Checklist
Card Checklist

Again, this is a change in terminology, not a change in functionality, but we hope it will make Kerika easier for the wide variety of users we have across the world, ranging from companies and governments all the way down to schoolkids.