Another project management tool?

Lee's Summit company trying to grow in the competitive project management space for agile software teams

I have been a professional product person for four years this month, and in that time I have used no fewer than a dozen different project management and ticketing solutions. If you include each excel spreadsheet as a different instance, the number triples. Some have been worse, some better, and they’ve all had their share of idiosyncrasies. I’m not alone in this, so I suspect I’m not alone in asking DevStride: “what in the world makes you different?”

DevStride is a relatively new, and fairly small, venture-funded company. It was founded in 2021 and has a number of employees in the high single-digits or low teens, depending on source. It describes itself as an agile project management tool, with features designed to manage the agile process from the portfolio level all the way down to discrete subtasks. Sort of uncommon for a company of this age and size, it’s already branched into a second product via acquisition: Filo, a collaboration tool that I think actually solves a really important problem in the modern workplace but more on that later. The founding team is made up of experienced founders with a history of working together, so expanding the product portfolio is probably lower risk for them than most others.

DevStride as a platform seems to be fairly agnostic to how a team practices agile, with fairly intuitive support for Scrum and Kanban. Work items within the system can also be moved between cycles (sprints) and Kanban boards without any loss of context, allowing teams to work in different methods out of the same tool. There is also a Gantt chart module for managing larger initiatives or projects. All of the usual suspects are there as well, such as effort estimates, time entry, bug tracking, and some standard reporting.

So, here’s the thing: I actually kind of like DevStride. Everything is pretty intuitive if you’ve used similar tools. The page is pretty information dense but doesn’t feel overwhelming. It’s full featured but lightweight and I see how a team could get the whole thing up-and-running in like a day or so, maybe minus the integration and automation. But it has the same limitation as every other agile work management tool. Modern software development is complicated, and interdependent, and uncertain. Tracking and managing the work that goes into it is tedious and time-consuming and highly prone to humans just not. At the smaller end of the market, does it really make sense to cut a capex check to a software provider if it’s no more utilized than an excel sheet or just winging it?

The market for agile project management tools is also extremely busy. There are the massive companies at the top like Jira and Azure DevOps, unrelated tools with built-in support like Notion and Airtable, plus everything in between. Taking a sizable portion of that market without a strong product portfolio or massive differentiator would be nearly impossible. The good news is that it is a sizeable market, so even a small share can build a fairly sustainable company even if there is a ceiling on growth. I can’t tell what their go-to-market looks like from the information I found, but the product feels like a really good fit for small software companies and agencies that may not want to wrestle with a larger competitor. I think the flexibility makes it a great choice for small agencies where the client requirements or contracts may require different approaches to the workflows and processes for specific projects.

A bit on Filo, which is the part I am fairly interested in. I’ve always worked with distributed or hybrid teams, and something I’ve always felt missing from the environment is a digital version of a shared space. For co-located employees, you can write things on whiteboards and have impromptu conversations about the work that’s going on. For distributed teams, you have to replace that quick, unscheduled communication with instant messages, scheduled meetings, Miro, and wikis. Communication also gets distributed and there isn’t a central hub for knowledge and decision making. It seems like that is the gap that Filo is meant to address. Everything a team decides can be documented in one place. Integrations with Miro, Figma, and Zoom mean that impromptu meetings can take place in this space and ultimately be documented. Something like this should be considered a critical part of all teams that aren’t 100% co-located. Filo is also not alone in this world: Basecamp does approximately the same thing and I think Microsoft Teams is supposed to do like 80% of this (although I’ve never met anyone who likes Teams or knows how to set up Teams or go a full workday without wanting to Office Space the very idea of Teams). I think it can be a similar market to the flagship product. It exists in a large enough ecosystem that carving off a small piece can be enough.

DevStride raised a healthy round in late 2022 and has a strong MVP+ and experienced team. It will be fascinating to see what happens next, and if there are any pivots in the future. It would be nice to see them have a real differentiator from the other project management tools on the market (there could be one hidden behind the “Schedule a consultation” button on the website, but that strikes me as a problem all its own). I do believe, maybe foolishly, that someone will eventually create project management software that no one hates. I’d like to see it happen in Kansas City.