How Tokatab prioritises and plans features in Fibery

One thing we don’t do in Fibery is CRM. We used MailChimp before as an emailing tool, and I used to set up an integration through Make (ex.Integromat) that copied all MailChimp users into Fibery so that I could tag them and check their status through our subscription and onboarding process. Since then, we moved to Sendinblue (another marketing automation tool), which offers more robust CRM tools (and fewer integrations with Make (ex.Integromat)). The convenience of having all customer data in there, and being able to send them an email in a few clicks is great. And the lack of two-way sync into Fibery would make data management messy.

For offline efforts (contacting choirs and other institutions where people sing and might be willing to learn piano), we are also using Fibery to track which person has been contacted through which channel.

As a Product Management consultant myself, I’ve used and liked/disliked a lot of tools in the past. Notion, Coda, Airtable, Miro, Jira/Confluence, ProductBoard, Airfocus, Craft.io…

Before Fibery we were using Jira/Confluence as our Development & Product Management tools. I don’t like them, especially Confluence which I think is a pain to use but they have a pretty generous (ie free) offer for small teams that is hard to beat. Then I realized that life was too short to work with tools you don’t like, tested Fibery and we benefited from the “free for 1 year” startup offer.

Fibery also replaced some Google Docs and Sheets files that we used to have.

I would have liked for it to replace some of our Miro boards but the whiteboard feature is not there yet. We still use it for simple diagrams or sketching out user journeys, not that much for brainstorming.

We still use quite a lot of Google Docs: for business plans, pitches, AdWords reporting, etc…and sometimes for product specs as the commenting system and change tracking is still a bit better than what Fibery offers.

How do you ideate?

We log and prioritize problems on our Product Discovery board. Most of those problems come from user testing, and sometimes from our own intuitions/priorities. We put all our testing notes in Fibery, highlight relevant portions and link them either to Problems (if the solution is not obvious or the issue is big), Stories (if a small development is necessary), or Features (if a bigger development is necessary).

Once in a while, we organize brainstorms either on problems or solutions (using Miro). Then we log everything in Fibery.

As a half remote team (I live in Paris, the rest of the team in Lyon), we discuss a lot of things on Slack and use the /fibery create command a lot.

Also, we use Fibery’s comments system a lot when working on a specification.

How do you prioritize features?

We use a “(P)RICE” framework where:

• We score each Problem based on their reach, impact, and confidence.
• We score each Feature based on their reach, impact, confidence, and effort.

Each Feature is attached to one or multiple Problems, and its final score is a cross between the problem’s score and the solution score.

Individual Stories can be attached to Features in which case they inherit the Feature’s score + a ponderation based on each Story’s priority (low/medium/high). If a Story is not part of a Feature, it can be attached to a problem which score it inherits too.

It might be a bit overkill :)

How do you plan and track features?

We then put all the Features in a now-next-later roadmap. Items in the Now roadmap have an additional score boost which helps surface them higher in the backlog views (and the attached Stories bubble up to the top view).

We also have a quarterly objectives document, and we often embed items from the roadmap in it using the # integration.

How do you manage customer feedback?

We use Loopedin for customer feedback. I’d like to integrate it in Fibery but the volume of feedback is unfortunately pretty low so I’ve not prioritized it yet. Looking forward to linking the feedback to existing features when the volume ramps up :)

• The quality of most views, and especially the ability to mix distinct item types on the same view.
• The high customizability, especially the ability to hide or show fields, group vertically AND horizontally in Kanban views, have rules to color cards.
• The “everything is a database” approach.
• The Automations are really nice and powerful.
• Bi-directional links and the ability to highlight text and create anything is great.
• The ability to press cmd+k, type something, check that it doesn’t exist yet (through search), and then create it on the fly is incredible.
• I’ve played with Reports and they seem very powerful but we don’t use them that much yet.

• Documents could still be improved, not the editor necessarily but the way information is structured and how we access it. A lot depends on the sidebar and it can get quite messy to navigate. The fact that documents can be embedded inside entities is neat but also adds additional complexity. Fibery looks a lot like a database with views on top of it; for more “freeform information”, the navigation doesn’t fit.
• The Whiteboard Feature is usable but still not a joy to use.
• The Calendar view could use some work.
• Navigating the Table view when you have lots of columns remains hard as you lose sight of the title of each item.
• The Slack integration was quite buggy in the past but seems to get better.

• The cmd+k search or create command is a joy.
• We have a little automation to duplicate an existing feature, add a “v2” to its name, take all stories that are not done yet inside the original feature, and translate them to the new one. Quite useful :)
• Amplitude for product analytics is great.
  So is June.so.