Are productivity and analytics tools really helping us?
How can we really utilize the tools at our disposal to make real improvements to our startups?
Gone are the days when everyone just used Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, and that was just it.
No Jira. No Notion. No Tableau. No PowerBI.
Just the basics. Nothing more.
It’s crazy right now. Hundreds, or thousands, of SaaS companies offer all kinds of tools that by now all seem derivatives of one another.
My tool of choice is Notion. I might literally be their biggest fan. Anyone in my previous company can attest to that.
I’ve used it for everything. Tracking tasks and epics, filing bugs, writing documentation, tracking vacations (that one failed), and even drafting processes.
Every few weeks (or days), I would create new databases, new views, or perfect the filters/sorts in an existing view.
We also used PostHog for experimentation and website recordings. I spent hours there creating tests, analyzing their results, and meticulously staring at recordings.
I was thinking about this today, all the effort that went into this. And it made me feel that sometimes it was misguided.
I was letting the tools dictate how I work. How I do my day-to-day job. I wonder if I was ever confined or limited by what I had at the moment.
Over the years, I’ve been exposed to the following productivity tools, at work or for my personal use: Notion, Asana, Jira, Clickup, Trello, Todoist, Habitica, and Odoo.
I’ve also been exposed to the following analytics tools: Google Analytics, Firebase, PostHog, LogRocket, Adjust, Tableau, PowerBI, and Metabase.
And outside of this list, I’ve researched and trialed at least 3x the size of the list above.
Do I have favorites? Yes.
Does using any of the tools guarantee a better process or better results? Definitely not.
Before choosing/adding/stopping usage of any tool, you should think abstractly. What’s the purpose behind this choice? How is my team structured? What features do I need to make it work?
Always ask why.
Let’s say I want to purchase Tableau for my organization.
If the reasoning is as basic as that my company needs a data visualization tool that is full-fledged and user-friendly - then the decision might be flawed.
Ask why.
Who’s going to create new reports? Are they fluent in SQL? Who’s going to be viewing the data? How frequently are the data sources changing? How much do we expect the tool to be used?
Then ask why one more time.
You might get away with using basic open-source tools like Metabase.
But you might actually find yourself needing something completely custom-built and internal in your own back-office system.
If you had mistakenly gone down the Tableau route when all you wanted was to track weekly revenue, you would’ve spent days and weeks obsessing about all the KPIs you can create using drag-and-drop - when the revenue tracking could’ve been done in a few hours by your engineers within your system.
Don’t let the tools, no matter how popular they are, drive your process and day-to-day.
Instead, find out what you need exactly, draw out the process and flow you require, and make an informed decision regarding how you’ll make use of the latest tools to improve your business.