Q: Why Skinnyboard?

We built Skinnyboard because we had an itch to scratch.

Our Agile journey has taken us from paper index cards and giant whiteboards to Basecamp API integrations. We realized that with a distributed team, we needed something “good enough” to manage our day-to-day coding tasks.

Building Skinnyboard has been a very mcluhanesque process. It’s helped us to focus on our work, inspect and adapt, and develop a precise tool to optimize our development process.

Since we’re scratching this itch, we figured other people might have the same sensation.

Our goal is to provide a tool that gets out of your way (Individuals and interactions over processes and tools )by providing very precise functionality very well.
Q: So what can I currently do with Skinnyboard?

You can:

Board Basics:

* Create a project board/sprint plan
* Create/assign/invite users
* Write and size user stories
* Create and estimate tasks from stories
* Move tasks through the process continuum until “DONE”
* Tag/customize stories and tasks
* Quickly filter stories and tasks by keyword
* Ensure Security with SSL Encryption

Analyze

* Generate a burndown at any time to see when the board tasks will be completed
* Inspect the project history with the Birds-Eye View (BeV) which provides a “back of the room” view of the board providing at-a-glance project status.

Integrate

* Broadcast board progress on Twitter
* Import To-Do Lists from Basecamp
* Import CSV text

Benefits:

* Easily prioritize work
* Always know who is working on what
* Track when work will be done
* Track project trends/history
* “Don’t fix what ain’t broke” �" Easily integrate your existing project management/communication tools

Q: What’s with the pricing model?

We’ve come up with the “buck a board” model because we believe that a skinnyboard represents valuable information both in the present (as a collaboration tool for getting work done) and in the future (as a historical reference to past performance for the purposes of continuous improvement).

Time is the commodity we value most. A Skinnyboard, in combination with the analysis reports helps teams optimize their time today (burndown) and in the future (bird’s-eye). We also believe in paying for services (software or otherwise) that optimize our time.

We used Skinnyboard (in it’s various iterations) internally for over 9 months, and we have accumulated over 50 boards of real-world projects (i.e. “software customers paid for”) that we constantly refer back to get a retrospective sense of the “size” of things and our past velocities. This time machine approach helps us to quickly match “this task is like that task from ‘project x’” and be more effective in our planning.

We provide 3 types of plans, which are basically buckets of boards. You can have as many tasks or users as you wish, and you can graduate up or down through the plans if you need to.
Q: Am I secure?

Yes you are! All accounts are SSL encrypted.
Q: Why can’t I do {insert functionality request here} with Skinnyboard?

We have had some magnificent beta-testers that have signed up from across the Web and have provided us with great feedback. Significantly, the majority of feedback was with fiddly functionality issues and bugs that we were working on, not major deviations from Skinnyboard’s core focus.

That said, for the record here’s our current thinking on questions like:

* Q: How do I manage my project files and messages in Skinnyboard?
A: We use Basecamp and we link assets (infrequently) to it if required

* Q: How do I manage version control in Skinnyboard?
A: We use Beanstalk and Github.

* Q: How do I instant message with my team in Skinnyboard?
A: We use Campfire and iChat

Q: So, that’s a nice start. What’s next?
Our roadmap looks something like this:

* Move Bird’s-Eye view report out of beta by adding story/task information to the snapshot view and links back to the actual board for that point in time via our “time machine” functionality.
* Provide a “Board pack” option to easily add packs of 5 boards to your plan at any point in time to augment the three existing plans
* Publish our API to allow you to hook into Skinnyboard from other applications
* Integrate with version control services to link board snapshots with builds
* Partner with other service providers to offer Skinnyboard as an add-on service