PowerX customer storysee all customer storiesHow PowerX tracks development and prototypes work in Fibery

Author

Henry Franks

Chief Software Officer

TEMPLATES used in this customer story

PowerX is a technology startup focussing on telecoms network tower intelligence.

We have an AI platform that optimises power usage particularly in mobile networks for developing economies, saving 50% on costs and reducing CO2 emissions by 30%, and provides visibility and operational support for network health

What do you use Fibery for?

We are using Fibery for keeping track of our software development process, managing product strategy, standards and regulatory compliance, and prototyping work.

I have found it to be an extremely flexible and powerful tool, once I got my head around it I've found it seeping into every aspect of our process. Whenever we need to experiment with process iterations or new workflows, Fibery is our first port of call.

Why did you switch to Fibery and what tools did it replace?

We actually started from scratch — I set up the software department and evaluated a lot of tools. I came across Fibery (can’t recall how, I’m afraid!) and had a play, and was instantly in love with the simple flexibility — just enough structure to give you rails but allows you to explore and experiment easily without spending hours setting things up.

I’m a process experimenter, and we love iteration and continuous improvement internally, so Fibery gives us the flexibility to easily play without getting bogged down. In previous lives I have used a variety of tools and found them often to be too opinionated, too narrowly defined, or with clunky UI/UX. We use Fibery to replace a classic post-it developer wall, Jira, Confluence, and Trello-style tools.

Now spill the tea: How does your Software Development process look like?

How do you scope & plan development?

Software
Development Template

We are a heavily customer-focused company in terms of iterating our offering towards product-market fit, so we have requirements come in from all directions: sales demos, more mature customers, market research, internal R&D, etc.

These are tracked in various places, some Fibery and some not (e.g. Hubspot, email, adhoc!). We use Fibery to provide a flexible tool here to “think around” the ideas – whiteboards, documents, even entire new workspaces to test out processes.

Once these get refined and accepted, we’ll start using our fairly customised software process workspace to generate stories with detailed requirements and acceptance criteria, which then get estimated and moved through implementation, QA and release in a fairly traditional agile fashion using Fibery’s tools.

How do you track and analyze progress?

We have a couple of Kanban boards for tracking Stories and group Stories into Initiatives which get tracked on a timeline as an artifact that the rest of the business can use. A points dashboard is used for tracking velocity.

How do you store a development wiki?

Full disclosure time! We started off using Fibery as our wiki, but have recently moved to Notion. I’m not sure how I’d articulate why, but Notion does make it easier to manage documents rather than semi-structured processes/workspaces.

This split has evolved fairly clearly now — if it’s a written doc it tends to go in Notion, but anything that requires a bit more structure or automation we default to Fibery.

How do you run retrospectives?

Retrospectives Template

We have retros every sprint. We initially used Fibery whiteboards for this but had issues with lag when lots of people were using them together. Actions typically get turned into Stories to be accounted for in people’s priorities.

Praise time: What is your favorite Fibery feature and why?

The new multi-panel interface is fantastic and has taken Fibery to the next level for me a little bit.

Rather than any single feature, it’s more the holistic aspect that makes me reach for it — I have a new process, project, or prototyping to do, I can spin something up really quickly to keep on top of it.

For two recent examples, we have been implementing ISO27k information security standards and it took me all of 20 minutes to build a risk assessment tracker, and we also had a complex onboarding of a client that required tracking several hundred assets through a fairly involved onboarding process which we ended up tracking entirely in Fibery.

Сriticism time: What you don't like/lack in Fibery?

The whiteboards could definitely be improved — I tend to default to Miro, which is a pity as Fibery shines for that early prototyping, thinking-with-tools aspect for me, of which whiteboards are a large part. They’re just a little clunky and don’t translate intention into outcome in a very intuitive way.

The docs also are a little basic, but it sounds like you guys have some interesting stuff in the pipeline there with blocks? Excited to see how it pans out :)