The Trackmemo journey

Wouldn't it be great if we had Google Now for Work? As a Product Manager I often joked that my main job was to deliver information - too often information that was buried deep in some comment thread or inside an application. Jipy, on the other hand, had worked for years as a common resource across multiple teams and spent a bulk of his time ...

Wouldn't it be great if we had Google Now for Work?

As a Product Manager I often joked that my main job was to deliver information - too often information that was buried deep in some comment thread or inside an application. Jipy, on the other hand, had worked for years as a common resource across multiple teams and spent a bulk of his time sifting through hundreds of emails where he was CCed without him knowing why.

Google Now for Work made sense to us. The application would intelligently notify a user when something important to his work changed. No more waiting for someone to reply to your email. And no more wading through a pile of unnecessary status updates.

Our first step was to build an aggregator for updates across different SaaS applications. By March 2014, early users could connect a few popular cloud applications, and "track" things of interest to them in these applications. But our very first users came back with - "Now what? I still have to send someone an email to discuss these changes."

We realised that making information easier to access and collaboration are two sides of the same coin. Trackmemo needed to support team collaboration in addition to aggregating updates. By August, we had almost rewritten the entire application to support team conversations - in the process learning why it is good to separate your data model from your MVP. We got 10 teams in Bangalore to test our private beta release. And received a ton of good product feedback. The most requested features were a larger library of applications to connect to, a simpler onboarding experience and the ability to search.

Also users had, by this time, started asking us - "How are you different from Slack?" In the next product iteration we redesigned the UI with a clear focus on threaded conversations - that was our primary differentiator. To move fast on user requests on new application integrations, we developed a common integration framework. We built user notifications to highlight important updates and full-text search. Most importantly, we crystallized Trackmemo's value proposition for a team - "no more status updates"

We launched our public beta in mid-December at Unpluggd. As we talk to our new users, see how they use the product, and understand their needs better we realize this is just the beginning of the road for Trackmemo. In the next 6 months we are looking at integrating with over 30 applications, build team level analytics, and bring the experience to mobile devices. Stay tuned!