Zoom, Notion, Figma
- I feel Zoom can be easily disrupted because the UI and a bunch of the UX isn't perfect- but there's nothing there yet that nailed a better, smoother call experience. Would love to hear if you found something that works well around the globe!
- Notion is a great document system, decently priced, and reliable enough. It beats GDocs/... handily and is as-good or better than Quip IMO.
- For designs I do love Figma because the sharing is so easy. Adobe XD by comparison feels very backwards, with managing files and versions.
Minimal
Slack
Geekbot
Notion
GitHub
Sketch Cloud
These are enough to communicate effectively with team members and get things done.
Interesting... I've used Standuply as a Slack standup meeting integration, but never used Geekbot.
How is Geekbot working out for you?
Thus far for the past ~5 months it has been fantastic. I had a couple of bugs around Christmas time, but they don't seem to exist at all now.
Anything that speeds up communication and keeps a record for everyone
The tools that I've found make working remotely easiest fall in one of two categories: They speed up communication, and/or keep a record of everything for the entire team.
Speeding up communication is most important for individual tasks, as you want a quick way to share what’s on your mind. Zoom for video calls (or literally any other call app: Facetime, Hangouts, even Skype) shrink the distance between teams. Slack (or any other chat app, even iMessage or Facebook Messenger) do the same with text. And so do Google Docs documents, GitHub commits, Figma graphics, and any other file built in a collaborative app, since you can hand off work to others with comments about what’s needed and where you left off.
Then, all except for video calls leave a trace behind where you can search through the written text, comments, and more (and even video calls can do that if you enable call recording). That’s almost more important than the speed of communication, since you need ways to let team members work on their own when they’re not in the same room. Asking for the same details over and again slows everyone down. Instead, modern tools for remote teams let you search through everything and have a record of conversations. For even more organization, it’s great to pair communication tools with notes tools like Notion or Quip, or an internal blog like WordPress O2, for a more organized record of decisions.
Depending on your team’s needs, one option is to opt for a tool that includes everything in one place such as Basecamp. It has chat, notes, tasks, and more together so everything your team is working on lives together. Notion can similarly cover a wide range of things your team may need—though it doesn’t include chat.
Notion helps keep my life and teams organized
My biggest problem working with my team is finding things. Some stuff is in our Teams, some in G Suite, some in our O365 Inbox, some on my company's corporate blog (Neo), etc. Whenever I get information I immediately put it in an organized location within my Notion. Notion is my single source of truth for everything. Anything I need is either in Notion or linked from Notion to wherever that data may be stored. Central knowledge bases have been a big point of friction in the teams I've worked in remote or otherwise. If everyone knows where to go to find things, then that's a big win. Notion solves that for me.
That's a great point—with everything scattered between apps, Notion makes a great place to centralize everything.
Does your team have any great tricks to share on organizing Notion to make it easier to find stuff?
I suppose two things. 1) just putting things into pages and continuously sorting and organizing as needed so long as the info is recorded. Notion has pretty good search. Also, using @ mentions and links to nest or reference related pages. Organizing knowledge can really be done continuously as the team deems best. 2) being creative with Notion's database and nested database features. You can really build anything you want with that. I have one database for open items across all projects and I use views to filter and analyze the data. I also use custom fields to really give me date and linked database control to related rows in other databases. I also have a daily database that acts like a journal, but could easily be a standup log. Lastly, I am working on documenting how I organize things in Notion, but I am not yet on a stable version to share. Perhaps in 6 to 12 months I will start blogging and sharing actual examples of what I've found to work best.
That'd be awesome—would love to read that when you get it published!
Filtered views on databases are super handy. I've got a huge list of software in Notion I'm keeping an eye on, for instance, and that's basically how I over time did the research for this beta software post
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Whoops, I messed up the formatting there. Basically Slack for all general communications. Geekbot for daily standups. Notion as an HQ with all relevant files and documentation for non-development roles. GitHub for everything development. Sketch Cloud for handing off design files, libraries, and inspecting documents for developer handoff.