November 18th, 2020
The team at Brooklyn Data Co. offer clients a scalable, full stack data team. Alexis Johnson-Gresham, Engagement Manager, says they “help with everything”, including building out modern infrastructure, training and hiring an in-house team, setting up processes, and establishing a data culture.
As part of setting up processes, Brooklyn Data Co. focuses on helping clients establish strong standup habits as a way to build an overall agile mindset. With many clients, Brooklyn Data Co. is introducing their team to agile and the idea of having regular standups for the first time. “Standups are a really important part of learning how to incorporate agile practices,” says Alexis.
“From our perspective, asynchronous standups are the way to go—we are fully distributed, we serve clients across multiple time zones, and some of our clients are themselves split across multiple time zones. Asynchronous standups just make sense.”
- Established in 2018
- 17 team members
- Fully distributed across 5 countries
- Passionate about data for good, providing pro bono work for The Trevor Project
Prior to finding Status Hero, Alexis and her team experimented with other Slack standup tools, but found they weren’t flexible enough to use with their clients and across organizations. “That’s a challenge with a lot of tools. They just aren’t made for the consulting/partnership use case.”
They explored a number of other options, but in each case it wasn’t quite right. Some tools had clunky UX or confusing onboarding experiences. Other tools claimed to have Slack integrations, but in reality they simply pointed you to external websites. Since Slack is where the Brooklyn Data Co. team does most of their work, a fully integrated Slack experience was critical.
Eventually Alexis found Status Hero.
During the free trial Status Hero immediately stood out because of the simple UI and easy sign up process. The Brooklyn Data Co. team got up and running quickly and the positive feedback from the testers started to come in.
“One comment we got across the board from testers was that they really enjoyed the single form setup (our old product had more of a conversational bot style approach) and the fact that the form automatically populates the text from the last reported standup.”
The Brooklyn Data Co. team decided to move forward with Status Hero and start using it with the entire company and introducing it to clients.
Now that they’re using Status Hero consistently, they’re seeing a number of benefits for team members, managers, and clients.
Internally, Status Hero removed the friction from daily standups, making a critical process quick and easy for everyone.
Utilizing the Slack integration, Brooklyn Data Co. set up a dedicated standup channel for their internal team standup. “It’s really great as managers to be able to get a sense of progress, problems, and redirect folks who might be working on the wrong thing.”
And team members are getting a lot from Status Hero too. It’s helping to increase awareness of what’s happening on different projects and is improving collaboration on blockers.
For their clients, Status Hero is helping to create the foundation for an Agile mindset, providing a smooth way to transition to considering, setting, and achieving daily goals. “Compared to having a simple Slack reminder set up or just leaving it to individual prerogative, the custom time settings and individualized reminders have led our clients to be able to get on board with daily standups really easily and really consistently.”
Status Hero is even helping Brooklyn Data Co. have better meetings.
“Though we still need some meetings, Status Hero lets us keep them focused on decision-making rather than status updates, saving us a bunch of time!”
