Tag Archives: Kerika

About Kerika, the company.

Getting psyched for 2016!

Kerika

We have big plans for the next year, and, in fact, have been very busy through the holiday season as well working on our product roadmap.

2016 will involve a major rewrite of our software: first the back-end, to improve scalability and to also use newer technologies like containers that make for easier deployment, and then the front-end, which will make Kerika even easier to use — especially for people new to Kanban and Scrum.

2015 has been a great year for us: our registered users doubled, and so did the number of paying customers.

It has also been a great learning opportunity for us: we met in person or had long telephone conversations with a wide range of users and got an even better understanding of the problems we can address with our software.

What we have heard consistently from folks about why they like Kerika: “it provides really great functionality in a really simple system”.

Our focus on providing a simple, intuitive user interface rather than delivering raw power is winning people over.

As we plan our future roadmap, the key goals we want to achieve are:

  • Make Kerika easier for new users. “Power users” already love us, but we need to make Kerika even more accessible for people who are completely new to visual task management.
  • Avoid religion.  Too many of our competitors are dogmatic about how to implement Kanban or Scrum; we will continue to remain pragmatic and let people work the way they want, rather than insist that we know the only true path to project success.
  • Build solutions rather than tools. Some of our competitors focus on building as many buttons, “power-ups” and other bells and whistles. You know, because “if less is more, think how much more more could be…”  Our view is different: the smarter the system, the fewer the controls that need to be exposed and manipulated by the user.
  • First class mobile experience. We have not delivered this in the past.  To do this, we need to change our back-end and front-end infrastructure very signfiicantly, and we have made that financial commitment. Look for good stuff in 2016.
  • First class support, for all users. We get at least one unsolicited email every week from a user who is surprised by the level of support we provide, even to free or trial users.  We need to keep this up. (OK, so this has nothing to do with our product roadmap but we feel strongly about it so we thought we would emphasize this point…)

Thanks to all our users who have helped us grow so far. In a reversal of cards and gifts going from vendors to customers, here’s a lovely calendar and card we just got from one of our happy customers:

Calendar and card
Calendar and card

Timing is everything when you send email

Kerika,

We occasionally email all of our users, when we have released something significant in terms of functionality or usability improvements.

On average, we probably send these emails 2-3 times a year, although we release software updates much more often.

Not every software update is announced in a mass email, although all the improvements and changes are always noted on this blog: unless the changes were big enough to require some additional explanation, we prefer to let users discover the new features on our own.

What we have noticed with the last couple of announcements is that the timing of the email makes a very big difference in terms of how many people actually open and read the emails.

Here are the last two emails we sent:

Timing is everything
Timing is everything

 

The “Release 62” announcement was actually far more significant, in our opinion, than the more recent “Release 66” version, at least in terms of UI changes and new features.

But, the Release 62 announcement went out mid-day on a Monday, and it was largely ignored as a result: only 9.7% of people opened that email.

The Release 66 announcement, on the other hand, went out on a Saturday afternoon, and had nearly double the open rate.

We think the simple explanation is that there was less competition for our emails on Saturday afternoon: fewer emails from colleagues and fewer crises to attend to.

We had long suspected this to be the case, but never had such clear proof that timing is everything when you send email 🙂

Join us at the Lean Transformation Conference

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, , , ,

Once again Arun Kumar, Kerika’s founder and CEO, will be speaking at the annual Lean Transformation Conference organized by Results Washington.

This conference is all about Lean and Agile in the public sector: thousands of folks from state, county and local (city) government agencies will be attending, and as usual Kerika will also have a display booth on the 5th floor of the Tacoma Convention Center.

Arun’s topic this year is “Can You See It Now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows”.

We look forward to seeing our Washington users at the conference; please do stop by our booth or sign up for Arun’s talk!

 

Kerika is now a Box Pro Partner

Kerika,

We are pleased to announce that our technical collaboration with Box continues, and Kerika has now been named a “Box Pro Partner” reflecting the strong ties we have built between the two companies as we continue to integrate with Box’s cloud services 🙂

Box Pro Partner
Box Pro Partner

From Projects to Boards: a clarification

Agile & Scrum, Usability, , , , ,

We used to refer to “Projects” and “Boards” somewhat interchangeably on our website, our blog and in the Kerika app itself.

There was no special reason for this: in our mind, a Project was clearly a Board, and vice-versa, and it never occurred to us that this might prove a source of confusion to anyone.

Well, we were wrong about that.

In the real world, people are very cautious about “starting a new project”, because this might involve getting formal administrative approval, budget allocation, staff changes, etc.

In other words, in the real world a “project” is a big deal.

But, in Kerika, starting a new Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard is not a big deal — and that is very much by design.

Unlike so many other collaboration tools that make it difficult for you to create as many boards as you like, Kerika was always designed to make it very easy for you to redesign your work as needed: start new boards, move cards or canvases from one board to another (using Cut, Copy and Paste), and to move ideas and content from one context to another.

Many of our competitors don’t offer this kind of flexibility: either the software makes it hard, or their billing model actively discourages you from creating multiple boards.

That will never be the case with Kerika: we will always support flexibility in how you organize and manage your boards.

Still, our interchangeable use of “projects” and “boards” was definitely causing some confusion, which we have fixed with our latest release by using the term “Board” consistently and avoiding use of the term “Project”.

So, if you were a Project Leader previously, you are now a Board Admin on that board. Your rights and privileges remain the same, it’s just your title that changed.

Board Admin
Board Admin

When you start a new board, what used to be called “New Project” is now labeled “New Board” to make it clear what you are doing:

New Board dialog
New Board dialog

We hope this makes for better usability: let us know what you think.

Using Filters with your Task Boards and Scrum Boards

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

A new tutorial video that shows you how Kerika’s powerful Filter feature lets you customize your view of any Task Board or Scrum Board: just see those cards that are assigned to you, or create more custom views of a board by selecting cards based upon their status, tags, or the people assigned to work on them.

You can even hide entire columns on the board if you like 🙂