My first year at Kitemaker

It's been a year since I joined Kitemaker as a founding product designer (and head of social media, principal CSS nitpicker, and resident grumpy grandpa), and I've decided to reflect a bit on the work we've done together.

Prior to Kitemaker, I had experience working at Slack, InVision, and several early-stage startups, which gave me a clear idea of what I sought in my next role. I found the team at Kitemaker with promising vision, some design debt and a need for my very particular set of skills. It was a perfect match.

Our small team of five accomplished a lot over the past year. We redesigned and rebuild the entire app from scratch in 4 months, delivered several crucial features, redesigned the brand and built a new web presence. All modesty aside, I'm very proud of what we've achieved.

I've put together a few highlights of the things that I think brought the most impact. Feel free to check out our Changelog for more.

All new UI

We redesigned the Kitemaker user interface and touched every single screen in the process. We aimed to remove all known design issues, make the UI consistent and fluent, and improve the overall user experience. In the process, we created a new design system, rewrote most of the frontend code, added a ton of UX improvements and new features, and set ourselves up to ship several major features very quickly after the UI upgrade.

Major redesigns are always difficult to justify and even harder to pull off. However, with the whole team on board, we managed to reach public release in just 4 months.

Feedback and insights

We have introduced a new Feedback module. It enables you to collect feedback from your users and link their insights directly to your work items and themes. Anyone on your team can reference this feedback and use it to support their product decisions.

Cycles

A tough and highly requested feature. One of our core product/design principles is that Kitemaker is about managing the work, not the workers. It took us a few attempts and lots of internal and beta testing to figure out what that entails when it comes to managing your development cycles/sprints.

Roadmaps and Initiatives

We have completely revamped how roadmaps and initiatives work. Based on heaps of feedback, we focused on flexibility and visibility. Both initiatives and roadmaps can be shared among spaces, allowing for better cross-team collaboration. Roadmaps are editable boards, so you can fully customize columns and make the roadmap fit specific purpose.

Create work items from everywhere

We have added an option to create a work item or a theme from selected text, comments, and todos. So pretty much from anything :) This makes it very easy to divide your work whenever needed and to create new work items from discussions.

Inline comments

Discussions in the activity feed are great, but sometimes you may want to comment on a specific text in a work item or theme description. We have now made it possible to select a portion of the text and comment on that specific part.

A few small features I appreciate

We shipped a multitude of small quality of life features as well, these are my favorites.

Public boards

If you wish to share your boards publicly or with users who don't have access to Kitemaker, we now offer a public board feature. This feature lets anyone access your boards via a special, confidential, top secret link.

Intercom integration

The integration of Intercom with Kitemaker allows for the import of feedback from Intercom conversations. The conversations are synchronized with Intercom, enabling you to view the most recent conversation status within Kitemaker and link insights to work items.

Autosorting

We made it possible to separately order each column based on specific criteria. This way, you can order “Todo” column by impact and effort, and “Done” column so the newest work items are on top.

What’s coming next?

The past year at Kitemaker has been a wonderful reminder of why I love working with small, nimble teams. It's impactful work done quickly, with very few one-way doors, shared responsibility for decisions and the resulting product, along with the autonomy to move forward and learn daily.

Having covered a lot of foundational work last year, I'm excited that we are now considering the implications of adding AI to Kitemaker, the possibilities and the pitfalls.You can find more on our public roadmap.