For Developers!
Have rooms for technology-specific development teams
Pretty much every developer has run across this situation — you are working on a feature and you realize that a lot of it has dependencies on the backend/frontend development team to finish up something before you can move forward.
Instead of now having to either
- Set up a call with the other team OR
- Message either their team lead or another developer from the team and hope they reply in time
As you can imagine both of these situations lead to a large waste of time. Now imagine a situation that would’ve happened if you were to be in office –
You walk over to your colleague, ask them a question & go back to your work.
The same can be achieved in VoicePing — just head over to the other team’s channel and quickly speak with the other developer(s) and unblock your own work — no more hassles in scheduling or waiting while they text back.
Maintain transparency for issues & their resolutions
Another one of these issues, which specifically plagues teams with large disparity i.e. a few senior developers and MANY junior developers.
If a small set of junior developers hit an issue, and one of them ends up having a call with a senior developer asking for resolution — the senior developer subsequently helps the junior fix the issue and the knowledge transfer ends there. The remaining junior developer(s) are still unaware of how to resolve if they hit a similar bug.
Here comes sync to slack to rescue! All the conversations across your workplace get synced to your slack channel — publicly accessible (if you choose to do so), as a result, other developers can quickly glance through the conversation thus enhancing knowledge transfer in your team.
Find out what issues/tickets are being worked on in real-time
Merge conflicts are every developer’s nightmare. These often end up happening when two people end up working on roughly the same feature without having internal communication as a result one of the two developers ends up being stuck with
We often run across issues where people have multiple tickets self-assigned, but they could be working on any one of them at any point of time, which one of them is anyone’s guess!
Having such real-time transparency makes everyone’s life easier — a quick single button press next to the user’s name would lead us to a call where you can discuss what you plan to work on and together, prevent merge conflicts, cause merge conflicts hurt everyone :’(
For Project Managers!
Realize time-consuming issues before they cost you a fortune!
As developers write the issues they are working on when tracking time, all of this information is accessible in a handy fashion on our portal (accessible only to workspace managers)
As a result, now we can easily see which issues ended up being a sinkhole for the time of your developers.
Make Daily Stand-Ups a breeze
“Daily standups = disastrous waste of time” this is what many developers think of standups, as inevitably a five-minute standup turns into a major time-consumer. But what if, we mix things up & let the PM (or the scrum master) know precisely what you were working on the previous day, what was the progress, and whether or not the issue is resolved? Yes — that’s a dream come true on VoicePing.
Using the same working diary, the scrum master can check the logs for each developer, precisely know their progress & as a result, the long scrum call can be cut short to precisely where they are stuck or what they plan to tackle next!
Besides, no more pesky zoom links are being pushed around. When everyone’s available (which by the way can be easily seen by the dashboard) the manager simply initiates the call and everyone’s added to it! A breeze, isn’t it?
Build Trust by networking
Team building is a difficult task in and of itself, working remotely just makes it 10x difficult!
This applies both ways, team members find it intimidating to approach the project manager for a casual non-work talk (that actually builds trust & forms relationships) & the project manager has friction to overcome in trying to get the team together on a zoom call and awkwardly having to talk through with everyone.
Many firms (back when physical offices were a thing) implemented an open door policy where the manager’s cabin will always be open and employees can go and talk with him/her whenever they want to — this instilled a culture of openness that was taken away by the remote first attitude.
But it doesn’t have to be this way — employees can now see when their manager is available (and when they are busy) and have a quick talk with them whenever they please without having to pass links, asking if they are free, etc. It’s all in one place — you know in a single glance whether they are free or working on something important or are busy altogether & if so choose to talk to them, it’s a single button click away.
Instill a culture of coaching
Coaching is something pretty much every firm needs to embrace if they want mutual growth i.e. employees growing & thus pulling the firm higher up. Just like the previous point, none of this will be possible if there are a thousand barriers to open and free conversations — something that we at VoicePing highly promote & have made sure is reflected in our product design and strategy