Michael Dubakov

Not all productivity tools are made equal. See how Fibery can become your company's OS, beating out alternatives.

Eight months have passed since the last Fibery digest, and it's time to reflect on the past and share future plans. From narrowing down core use cases to re-positioning Fibery as a no-code product discovery & development platform

Embark on a journey from painting & poetry to software development and understand why abstraction and complexity become inevitable when a discipline evolves.

If Fibery wasn't your top choice as a PM, it definitely will be from now on. Analyze user feedback & market signals, identify top insights, and unite discovery with development: this is Fibery 2.0

We've been busy working on Fibery 2.0 and now it's finally here! Read Michael's article to see what it means to you as an existing Fibery customer.

How many times have you tried RICE and failed? Fibery CEO Michael Dubakov brings you a side dish for your backlog that's probably better than any (dis)proven method out there.

Wondering how the Fibery team uses Fibery for developing… well, Fibery? Join Michael Dubakov as he guides you through the past 3 years of progress since his latest rumination on the topic.

Tune in for the results of the 2nd annual Slow December at Fibery. Contrary to popular belief, it was not just about chilling and procrastinating: our team experimented a lot and shipped features that you might already be using.

Feature spec should be inside Feature, not some other external tool. This article explains specs creation tips and tricks for product managers.

TLDR: 160 new customers (and 340 total) ❤️. 300 new features and 1300 fixed bugs 💪. 45 new releases 🌶️. 8 new teammates 🇫🇮🇵🇱🇨🇾🇨🇭🇵🇱🇭🇺🇵🇱🇵🇱. First offline retreat ✈️. No status meetings ✏️. Inevitable AI 👾. Slow December 🐢. Dopamine and cortisol 😍😨.

AI tools exist for anything you can dream of - including feedback management. But are they worth the hype? Check the use cases and tools, and see them for yourself.

Productboard is a solid product. However, it doesn't cover some important product development areas.

Explore the evolution of feedback processing and discover a better process for handling customer feedback. Learn how product companies transition from random notes to specialized feedback tools and the benefits of connecting feedback to the product hierarchy.

🥊 Startups are struggling. 🇵🇱 +1 Developer. 🇵🇱 +1 Designer. 🇭🇺 +1 Writer. 👓 Content marketing. 💸 Financial management. 👩‍🔬 Home page experiments. 🏋️‍♀️ 6 product themes are in progress. 🥹 Per-entity permissions are close...

This post offers a comprehensive analysis of the root cause of the downtime and provides actionable steps to prevent similar incidents in the future. It aims to openly address our failure and assist other companies in learning from our experience. We also owe our customers an explanation.

Living organisms can coexist in the same area if they are different enough. This applies to markets and products as well. If a product is similar to others on the market, prioritize unique features to differentiate it and carve out a niche.

Discover how we use nested documents, emojis and icons, views inside documents, multi-column layouts, callout blocks, file blocks, table of contents, AI assistant, and markdown import at Fibery.

☀️ Fibery retreat. 😅 New (old) positioning. 🃏 Teams re-structuring and Fibery product roadmap. 💔 Product Market Fit. 🇵🇱 +1 Educator. 💸 Cashflow and other reports. 👩‍🔬 Home page experiments. 🏄‍♀️ Product improvements: Documents, Emojis, Search.

Deep review of Fibery and ClickUp. ClickUp is an extensive complicated tool that focuses on Tasks. Fibery is a complex tool that focuses on connected processes.

🇨🇭 +1 Head of Marketing. 🇨🇾 +1 COO. 🇵🇱 +1 Customer Success Specialist. 💰 $50K MRR. 🍳 -1 PR Agency. 🌊 Planning our true first offline company retreat. 🗺️ Map View. 🗞️ Documents improvements. ⭐️ Fibery + AI.

Learn how Fibery's AI tools can simplify building and operating your workspace with ease. Discover AI text assistant, AI in automations, and future plans.

Slow December was an initiative taken by the Fibery team to take a break from their usual work routine and work on personal projects without the pressure of deadlines or mandatory meetings. The team members benefited from reduced anxiety 😌, restored energy, and increased creativity 🎈

Whine with me about the biggest problems in software development. From user satisfaction to more profound issues, let's discuss it.

Why are deadlines important for software development—even if we all hate them sincerely? I’ve spent 10 years figuring it out. Enjoy the results of my research!

Feedback organization helps to prioritize features, build better solutions and engage customers. Let's explore how to do it right in a B2B SaaS product.

$5.2M round A 💰. Tattoos bet 🔥. Fibery for Startups launch on Product Hunt 🍤. +1 Product Manager 🇫🇮. Co-working space in Warsaw 🇵🇱. Product Roadmap till May 2023 🔮. Fibery AI Assistant (experimental) 😅. SOC 2 Type II 🔓. Digest number 50 👴.

The best way to try out a product management role is to launch your own product. All other skills and qualities will gradually come. Or not.

In the age of specialization it looks like unbundling is the only viable strategy. Well, it is not.

There's only one way out: start creating the minimum viable product. This is the most effective strategy for product validation. Why? It brings you external feedback.

Measuring developer productivity by hours is an attempt to reduce uncertainty by squeezing it into a simple model. Yet in our industry, we must accept uncertainty, learn to thrive with it.

The most popular products don’t become mass popular overnight. It’s a process. Usually they popularity is uneven, they are unknown in some niches, but very popular in another niches.

Read this if you had intrusive thoughts like: “dammit, this app is the same as I thought of a year ago!” or even “I’m fed up with my managers, time to do something of my own.”

Learn the insider’s rules and steps in new product development to launch your software product successfully in one year (maybe).

What happens to a product with multiple unfinished features? It simply cannot become people’s favorite. It’s much better to have just several finished Features in a product than loads and loads of unfinished ones.

Fibery, the work and knowledge hub for startups 🧠 + 💪, today announced that it has raised $5.2 million in a Series A funding round led by Tal Ventures, with additional funding from Altair Capital.

In December 2022 Fibery received SOC 2 Type II certification. Fibery meets standards in security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. Ha!

Some Round A 🤑. Time for bundling! 🧶. Market demands profitability 🐻. $500K+ ARR 🐕. 200 new features 💪. 40 new releases 🌶. 150 active startups 🦄. Marketing wins and losses 💎. SOC 2 (almost) 🦒. 5 new teammates 🇨🇿🇵🇱🇨🇦. Full remote ✈️. Dopamine and cortisol 😁😨.

Communication in Fibery reflections 🤯. We are (still) hiring! 🙏. +1 Product Designer Aliaksei 🇵🇱. Video production 📸. Merch project 🎁. PR agency partnership 📣. 4 releases with tons of new features 🏋️‍♀️. Form View 😍.

100% free for startups with ARR < than ours (for 1 year), open-source projects, Ukrainian companies (till August 24, 2023). 50% discount for nonprofit & educational organizations and Ukrainian companies (from Aug 24, 2023, till 2030).

Forms - the most popular way to grab outside data from users, customers, co-workers, and potential employees. Available in Fibery now!

Petr 🇨🇿 joined our company as a head of business development 🥹. New home page 🟢. 4 releases with tons of new features 🏋️‍♀️. Form View (experimental) 🙏.

We are prepared 🤺. $40K MRR 🤑. +1 developer (Dmitry) 🇵🇱. We are hiring! 🦄 CTO group 🕹. Status page 🚦. New relation lists 🏃‍♂️

Marketing reflexion 🧐. Support is overloaded 🏋️‍♀️. Dark Theme 🌚. Send Emails and Slack messages from Fibery 🎙. Hide Fields from Entity View 🙈.

Record growth with +$4K MRR 😅. 50% discount for nonprofit and educational 🏋️‍♀️. 100% discount for open-source projects 😎. Panels Navigation fun 🤪. Share Space to the web 🌍. Pinned fields 📍. Hierarchical checkboxes list 🌲.

I spent two weeks in a customer support role, participated in 170 intercom chats, and survived.

Growth recovered 😅. Some re-structuring 🏋️‍♀️. Digital Agency solution 🦋. How Fibery uses Fibery video 🧘‍♀️. Fibery End Game 🎲. Phishing story 🎣. Search in panels 🔦. Customize pinned Fields 📍. Change workspace name and logo 🔧.

How Fibery will transform product companies work and knowledge management processes, help them invent better solutions and build things faster 🐌 → 🦉

It's a rant. If you are not prepared for aggressive style, bad words, and existential crisis, don't read this article. It was a warning. It's a rant.

Ukrainian war affected our performance. $30K MRR 🐌. 69 reviews in G2 ❤️. Marketing for customer-built products is hard 🥉. 12 customer stories 👻. 2 hours downtime 🥲. New navigation ⛵️. My Space 🔒.

Why products changelogs are cool to have + some practices how to write them.

How to apply selection theory to new products development and new features.

How 2.5 hours downtime happened. What was the root cause. What we learned.

How Genotype and Phenotype concept helps to build flexible products.

Every product manager loves new features. Feature start is not as easy as it looks. Let's dive into it and explore some best practices.

Russia should stop this war.

Product managers tend to focus on large cool features, but small features, improvements, and bugs are also important. This article describes various approaches to handle small things well.

How to balance between dynamic and static quality, and amplify new knowledge exploration in a new product development.

Sync processes for product planning, dependencies management and vision sharing are easier to run, but async processes are more performant. How to choose?

Software products get destroyed by 'More features' race, technical debt, technological progress and market changes. This post explores ways how product managers can keep products alive.

Fibery startup news: Activation metric works. The activation trend is not. Max joined the team. Ilya is mixing things. MRR is growing. The outreach channel failed (again). 770 bugs. Feed View. Experimental navigation you will enjoy.

Independence. Emigration & remote work. $3.1M Seed round. Booming market. 58 posts in our blog. $290K ARR. 100 new features. 32 new releases. Fibery for Product Teams release. Some product/market fit. 4 new people.

Dissatisfaction leads to progress—in business, personal development, and software development in particular. Learn how to embrace frustration to get the best things done.

New getting started concept. New pricing. In search of Activation Metric. Animalz cooperation failed. Promising leads. Live onboarding experiment results. Three new releases.

Deep review of Fibery and Monday. Monday works best for simple processes. Fibery works best for complex processes and knowledge management.

Does a CEO have to love small talk and networking? Behold eight tips on how to avoid it and still be a successful introverted CEO.

Imho, HR is overrated. Learn to run a company without HR department and with a high level of employee engagement and streamlined company culture.

How to accept criticism? I can be straightforward about it. Only through practicing a lot with it.

Activation stats. Experiment with Fibery structure. Experiment with a 90-days trial. Experiment with live onboarding. Experiment with an outreach agency. Partners program. New features.

How to achieve the state of determinate optimism and why does it matter in Product Management.

I won’t tell you about any widely-known tricks or common questions like if a person is stressed, talk about some everyday stuff first. Let's dig deeper.

How to motivate team without actually doing anything? Check out this article for 3 tips for employee motivation in software development.

TLDR: Meditations on complexity. Fibery Partners program. New templates. Automations rules webinar. Huge WIP.

Read this post to find out the only reasonable way of how to split equity in a startup fairly, efficiently, and without losing trust in your co-founders.

How many meetings should I squeeze in my day? Which team meeting to attend, which to ditch? What’s the hourly cap for meetings in one’s life? Let’s discuss!

Achieve transparent work culture and mutual trust at your company in three hard, challenging, yet very efficient steps. Works for a remote team as well.

Why do we work from Monday to Friday and who said it’s optimal for software development or the creative industry?

TLDR: We closed $3.1M seed round. Building a second brain for teams. Fibery mission. Building in Public. Automation rules. Documents and Rich Text history.

We, at Fibery, are helping teams solve complex problems, and happy to announce that today we closed a $3.1M seed round led by Altair Capital.

Thinking about the next big thing. Fibery for startups webinar. Fibery vs. ClickUp. Minsk office is closed. Share Documents and Entities. Group permissions

I believe that luck (random positive events) plays a paramount role both on peronal and company levels. Read this blog post to see how even one random chance can have a great impact.

Forget these interview questions 🙅‍ and never ask them your potential employees in software development (or elsewhere).

Goals and KPIs can destroy the workflow. How can meaningful objectives be disruptive? Learn to avoid the mess in setting goals and KPIs in just one simple step.

Emigration from Belarus. 90-days trial. Lemonade! -Anna, +Ilya. Web site changes. Full-text search. Cumulative reports. SAML SSO.

Find out how a startup founder should profit from both entrepreneur self-doubt and confidence—especially when the product needs to be tested yet.

4 new releases. 11 new customers. Automated actions. Undelete things. Crazy Thursday aka 'Der CollabdocDenburg'. Fibery for User Research.

It’s never too late: read these 8 easy, frank tips on overcoming fear of public speaking and learn to speak confidently on stage.

Use this easy rule of thumb to know when to close a startup instead of staying a “promising company” that won’t deliver anything in the next ten years.

The pre-internet era was full of wonderful and very powerful systems that are well forgotten now, but we definitely can learn from them, try to understand why we had an enormous degradation in the 1990s and 2000s, and why we are enjoying hypertext systems renaissance now.

Check out what transparency in the workplace can bring your company — and how no transparency screws everything up.

Better traction and $10K MRR. 13 new customers. Fibery 2.0 foundation. Regular posts in our blog. First webinar. Super Polina. More explanatory videos.

Learn from my experience of how to focus on work when Slack and Facebook lure you into talks.

In a knowledge economy, we compete with knowledge, not force. Our productivity tools should become knowledge management tools as well — thus, making companies more intelligent.

Many demos for product teams. Product Teams A/B Test. Complexity. Other niches experiments paused. New roadmap. Hierarchical Lists View released.

There is an important decision to make: build a lifestyle business or a startup? And the sooner you decide, the sooner you will stop worrying and start living.

Aha! is a weird-looking product with tons of features. It's easy to compete with it aesthetically, but hard functionally.

Quite many top startups had a transformative near-death experience that changed everything and help them to find a path to success.

Independence and freedom. Fibery for Product Teams release. Some marketing activities started. Kate joined our marketing team. Fantastic reviews from our customers.

Using Fibery inside a product development company as a tool for product Roadmapping, OKRs, Ideation, CRM, Feedback management, Competitors tracking and Software development

Fibery 2.0 release moved to January 2021. Not so many new features, but expect a new burst soon. Anna joined our company as the Head of Marketing. Winter (or Summer) came.

TLDR: First integrations are released. Product teams validation is in progress. Hope to have Fibery 2.0 launch in December. We are still looking for Head of Marketing

An unorthodox way to integrate Fibery with external systems, like GitHub, Intercom, GitLab, HubSpot, Jira, Braintree and others.

Got $700K tranche. Cooperation with the new design agency. Start of a direct sales experiment. Product workspace is coming. Integrations are coming. We are looking for Head of Marketing.

Fibery startup progress in August 2020: Elections in Belarus. WTF??? Violence. Shock. Revolution. Depression. Hope.

Fibery startup progress in July 2020. More customers. Terms Sheet with VC is finally signed. Better North Star metric!

Vizydrop team will join Fibery in August. Terms Sheet with the VC fund is negotiated and confirmed. Stability problems resolved. Performance improved. New blog delivered. Fibery sticks better.

$1M confirmed from angels for the seed round. Deeper negotiation with a VC fund. Tons of content. Largest customer. Roadmap for the next 3 months is nailed. Chaos.

Deep review of Coda and Fibery on a real case. Coda is a set of powerful docs / Fibery is a set of connected apps.

Deep review of Airtable and Fibery on a real case. Airtable is a set of connected tables / Fibery is a set of connected spaces.

Notion is an awesome product. However, it’s not perfect. Notion works best for individuals and small teams, while Fibery works better for larger teams and complex processes.

Public launch April 1st. Product of the Day on PH. Some offers from VC. Super-productive month. Better activity, but stagnating MRR. Cool Whiteboard View. Remote.

Features prioritization is the hardest problem in product management. Learn how to get better in it using... networks.

In this article I tried to briefly review all possible ways to add automation layer into a system.

Wiki concept is not new. But in Fibery it has a new twist.

Panic mode. +Pavel +Alexey. Productivity soars. No VC. Remote. New pricing scheme. New getting started.

Introducing Fibery 1.0 — a modular workspace that replaces costly isolated tools and brings teams together.

First true customers. 100 active accounts. +Polina. Up to speed. −Telemetry. Still no public launch. Independence!

Public announcements moved to February. -Nikita. -VC. -Snow. -Speed. Cortisol pit. Crossing Valley of death. Optimism.

Public announcements moved to January. +Lena. Tons of feedback. First money! Hype is over. We consider rising a ~$4M round.

Fibery 1.0 is silently launched. Silence is hard to keep. HackerNews front page. Twitter madness. 3000 registered accounts.

Today we’ve released the very first version of Whiteboard View: draw diagrams, schemes, mind maps and flows.

Nikita is back! New web site. Pricing simplified. Sidebar redesigned. Getting started experienced. Polishing is eternal.

Domain evolution is done. Notifications are done. Actions Buttons are done. Fall is free. Creators! Polishing is terrified.

Historical and conceptual review of the trends in no-code work management wave. Why it's time to empower creators?

Notifications are somewhat done. Rename is graceful. Action Buttons are born. Canvas View is growing. Javascript. HN banned us.

Table View is done, Notifications are in progress, Automation Rules are postponed. Everybody is a unicorn. Serious shit! Summertime.

We’ve completed basic functionality for Table View in Fibery and are ready to share it with the world.

Fibery startup progress in June 2019: Public API and Formulas are completed. Release is closer. Team got crazier.

We create Fibery.io based on several main principles. They are short, deep and concrete.

Fibery supports formulas. So far Formula field supports Number only (Decimal or Integer). More data types will be added later (Date, Text…

Several people burned out, new features are delivered, public release will be sooner (we hope) (despite ill fortune).

We’ve fixed 60 bugs, completed some features, added one teammate and frustratedly discussed many potential options for Fibery future.

Fibery startup progress in March 2019: We’ve provided access to Fibery to 100 accounts and collected some feedback.

Our Slack Bot has no AI yet. However, it can be useful. Fibery Slack bot can create entities from messages, create entities via a command.

Today we’ve released Zapier Integration in Fibery. You can connect many services together using Zapier and automate some actions.

We’ve released private beta in February. Now we are fixing bugs, setting up accounts, collecting feedback and think about future.

Fibery (work management platform) is two years in development already, and we are finally going to release something.

Fibery startup progress in January 2019: Private beta goals, selecting a market positioning (hard), apps re-design.

Company: decreased burn rate. Product changes: formulas, filters, timeline improvements, create entities in batches.

Fibery startup results in November 2018. Good development speed, new app creation flow, wiki, customizable entity view.

Work management tools paradigm shift is there. There are few promising vendors that trying to disrupt work management market.

Fibery startup progress in October 2018: Alpha version feedback, new web site, custom app creation, apps import and export.

Fibery startup progress in September 2018. Slow month with not so many news. First positive feedback. Company name selection.

Startup backstage is an interesting thing to observe. I’ll write regular posts about Fibery progress and results.

Overview of the Fibery vision. Building blocks and main concepts. Custom Domain. Custom Rules. UI Components. Apps.

Looking for a Customer Success Specialist

Looking for a Partners / Business Development Lead who will expand our partners network.

Looking for a Product UX/UI Designer with a strong expertise in UX/UI web products design.

Looking for a Product Manager who invents and delivers useful stuff, preferably with a B2B SaaS collaboration tools background.

Looking for a head of marketing / growth who can help us grow from $0,5M to $5M ARR in 2-3 years.