As of Monday, May 14, Nate Kohari is no longer with the AgileZen team. Nate formally announced this news on Twitter earlier in the week:

This is really hard to swallow. My employment at Rally Software has been terminated, ending my involvement with AgileZen.

— Nate Kohari (@nkohari) May 15, 2012

As an original co-founder of AgileZen, Nate played the role of visionary and technologist from the beginning. In the recent past, he was instrumental in building the AgileZen team within the Rally organization. His departure came as a surprise to the entire team, and he will be greatly missed.

It is impossible to replace a person and leader like Nate. As a team, we will continue with the vision previously set out in order to deliver the best product we possibly can. We maintain our August release date and are excited to share our new, amazing product with you.

As always we are available to field any questions, comments, or concerns you may have. We will monitor the comments along with our Twitter feed. Alternatively, you can email me directly at alex@agilezen.com.

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.

Earlier this year I wrote a post on goals for 2012. One of those goals was hiring, so I thought I would give an update on how things have been progressing. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve added Jayme, Pat, and Ashley to the team, and we’re now up to nine full-time people! (Courtney also works with us a couple days a week to design everything from icons to t-shirts, and she’ll be helping us as we re-design aspects of the marketing site).

Jayme started working on the team in February as a Senior Software Engineer, and yes, he and Mary are married, so that makes two married couples on our team. Pat joined us in March as a Senior Mobile Apps Developer. Since creating an iPad app for AgileZen has been highly requested by customers, he’s currently working on a prototype. Ashley joined us this week as a Customer Support Specialist. She’ll be answering all your questions, from billing to technical support. Mary has been running support for the past year, and she’ll be bringing Ashley up to speed on everything before focusing full time on user learning (like documentation, demo videos, and more).

We just updated the team page with pictures and profiles for everyone, so be sure to check that out to learn more about us!

A few perceptive individuals noticed that we’ve been using a new logo for the past few months when we’ve sponsored events like Startup Madness and Triangle Startup Weekend. We’re in the process of re-inventing a lot of things here on the AgileZen team, one of which is the logo. We’re happy to share the first of many changes you and get your feedback!

We wanted something that captured the essence of why customers use AgileZen, so we looked through all our survey answers, Twitter conversations, and customer feedback to help guide us to our new look. Ideas like simple, approachable, clean, visual, and friendly (among others) were used as our inspiration. Along with these ideas, the new mark was inspired by two things: an Ensō, a circle often associated with Zen, and the three circles that are prominent in the Rally logo.

Although we’re using this new logo on the marketing site, you’ll notice that the product branding is the same. We’ve opted to keep the “green AgileZen” for the current version of the product because we’re using the new circle logo on a new version of the product that will be available in late summer.

As many of you have noticed, we’ve been quiet for some time, and this is because we’re re-inventing the product in addition to the branding. We’re really excited to start sharing some of those details, so we’ll be announcing more information over the next couple of weeks.

We were happy to support Triangle Startup Weekend as sponsors, andI was fortunate enough to participate by pitching an idea, putting a team together, and launching an MVP. Below are five lessons I learned from the experience.

1) No talk, all action

This is the unofficial mantra of participants during Startup Weekend. It’s amazing what you can accomplish in 54 hours if you put your head down and work. As an example (and shameless plug) we built Unfundable, a crowdsourced funding platform, from zero to product over the weekend and were able to demo the full product during the final pitch on Sunday. Instead of spending time building a slide deck, spend time building a product. If you can’t build a product, see #2:

2) Get technical

On Thursday night I gave a talk at NYU Poly and in the Q&A a young man asked me for advice for “those who aren’t technical”. I said he should try to get technical. The next morning I met with a bunch of Sloan Business School students doing a trek through NYC. A young woman asked me the same question. I gave her the same answer.

- Fred Wilson, Principal, Union Square Ventures (via AVC.com)

Fred Wilson is 100% correct – and this is coming from a marketing guy. I devoted time during high school and college to learning basic web design principles along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. By the time I founded my first company at 21, I was able to get us up and running on the web with no outside assistance. By the time I was knee-deep in yet another startup in 2011, I realized I need to learn to code for real. So I learned. None of this is to diminish the expertise and value of people who have devoted their entire professional lives to being software programmers. I’m not even in the same solar system of programming skill as the dev team members here at AgileZen. But, it’s most important to be able to speak their language and build an MVP.

3) Pitch better

Your job when pitching your idea / startup / product is to get people to want to work with you. Very quickly. Regardless of whether you’re pitching for 60 seconds at Startup Weekend trying to put together a team or pitching to VCs looking for millions of investment dollars, convince people that YOU are the person to work with. Make them believe that you have it. Here are a few tangible pieces of advice:

• Don’t ever say “I’m nervous” – if you’re nervous pitching your idea, how will you be selling your product?
• State the problem and your solution within 30 seconds. If the audience doesn’t get it, you’re doing it wrong (unless they’re institutional investors – they never understand anything ;) ).
• Don’t read from notes or a slide deck, it makes you sound impersonal and unprepared.

4) Identify your marketable skill(s)

If you’re trying to be a part of a Startup Weekend, attempting to launch a startup, or trying to get a job, you need to know what your marketable skills are. It’s perfectly fine (and normal) if you’re not very good at some things. In fact, you’re supposed to be terrible at some things because you’ve devoted your time getting good at other things. With this said, if you don’t have any marketable skills, you should get some. If you can’t explain what you’re marketable skills are and back them up, then you need to work harder at them. There is always the opportunity to improve or even learn something new.

5) Find a cat to herd them all

The most challenging part of Startup Weekend is managing the team. Everyone is passionate, opinionated, and ready to work – the trick is making sure everyone is moving in the correct, most productive direction (54 hours is not very much time). Because you’re working with a team of such intelligent and imaginative people, direction and focus are difficult to master. In this case, we are all cats – one needs to take charge of herding them all.

I’m using the free version of AgileZen. The project I track is the development of a Windows Phone 7 app. We are 2 people working on this app. We were using Excel before AgileZen in order to track “tasks” to implement in our app – it was cumbersome and not flexible.

Now with AgileZen, we have the following categories:

• Backlog: default backlog
• Design: tasks which cannot be implemented because of a lack of UI design
• Decision: tasks which cannot be implemented and need to be discussed before to make a choice
• Ready: tasks ready to be implemented
• In Progress: tasks in progress
• Completed: tasks completed and ready for peer review (testing)
• Archive

March 14 AgileZen is sponsoring Startup Madness and will be live blogging the event. Follow along here or on our Twitter feed.

This post was written by Kelly Taylor – @ktinboulder from PR Newswire

I am the Product Owner on a 10 person development team building tools to help  our PR, Marketing and Investor Relations Communicators teams find insights in the social web and traditional media then distribute their text or multimedia content to targeted audiences. We are using Ruby on Rails, jQuery, MongoDB and many APIs in our web applications.

Our team was using an enterprise ALM tool for a year which was wonderful for Product Owners and Executives as the user interface was very conducive to planning Sprints and Releases. Backlog management was great and Stories could be well elaborated. However, the development team hated using the tool and it was a constant source of frustration.

We decided to try AgileZen using a very minimalist approach and a commitment from the team to use the Kanban Board. Our team also uses Campfire, GitHub and Jenkins in our workflow and have leveraged APIs to post updates automatically to Campfire. The frustration ceased and we have never looked back.

Being part of an enterprise, we struggle with large team collaboration and consolidating portfolio roadmaps. We have leveraged AgileZen’s multiple boards feature to have high level portfolio planning boards for management as well as our day to day development team board. The ability for each team or group of stakeholders to define their own workflow for a board has been key to the success of AgileZen for us.

When your development team is empowered to use the tools that optimize their workflow, consistent delivery of quality software will follow.

Our team is growing once again and we’re looking for someone with awesome customer service skills to join us as a Customer Support Specialist. In this role, you interact with customers via email to help them with all sorts of questions from sales inquiries to technical support. We’re looking for someone who learns quickly, can communicate clearly, and wants to give customers the best service possible.

Our team is small, cross-functional, and likes to have fun! If this sounds like the environment for you, check out the full job description.

We’re looking for someone with a great design aesthetic to help us improve both our marketing site and our application’s UI. The ideal candidate will have experience with graphic design, information architecture, user experience and will be an expert in web technologies like HTML and CSS.

The position is likely contract-to-hire, but we’re willing to skip right to the hire step if you’re particularly awesome. :) We’re mainly looking for someone in the Raleigh-Durham area that can work out of our office in downtown Raleigh at least a few days a week.

If you think you might be interested in working with us, get in touch with me at: niki@agilezen.com.