In July 2009, we launched AgileZen with the goal of providing customers with a simple and visual way to organize their work on the web. We created AgileZen because we felt the pain of software that was difficult to use, complicated, and too focused on collecting information instead of on team communication. We knew there was a place in the market for a company that makes products for the people who use them.
Almost three years later, thousands of people have used our software to track their work items and become more effective at what they do.
But we can do better.
Working with other people is all about communication, and with more and more people working remotely, teams need a better way to collaborate. Understanding the context of what’s going on is more than knowing who is working on what and when it will be done. To have true insight into work, you also have to understand why and how.
The problem is that this contextual information is scattered across all kinds of different tools. Today, there’s no way to have visibility into all of the communication going on around the work without rummaging through all sorts of places: emails, chat messages, support tickets, documents, spreadsheets, CRM tools, SCM commits, and so on. Trying to understand the context of work by gathering information from all these sources is a huge waste of time. There has to be a better way to organize all this valuable information, and make it easy to access it when you need it.
While we always recognized the problem of work items and communication living in different places on the web, it wasn’t until recently that we figured out the solution. It took creating AgileZen, gaining an understanding of how customers were using it, and listening openly to their feedback for the solution to come into focus.
Because of this, we’re launching a whole new AgileZen with the goal of bringing clarity and visibility to work items and communication! This version of AgileZen will still be easy-to-use and intuitive; that will never change. However, the new product is not only about helping you visualize all your work in progress, but it’s also about connecting that work to the contextual information that matters. It will be a version of AgileZen that gets back to basics, focusing on only a few key features. This means that it won’t match the current version of the product feature-for-feature.
This version of the product will be free and unrestricted during the beta period, and even after there will always be a free plan available with the ability to collaborate with others.
We’ll launch a private beta soon, with a public beta to follow starting in August, 2012. We decided to get something out as soon as it was ready because we know the value of feedback from our awesome community of users.
If you’d like to be part of the beta, please sign up for our mailing list, follow us on Twitter, or check back to our blog, since we’ll announce more details over the next few weeks.
