A project management tool for teams without project managers

We’re looking for small teams to join our latest alpha, which brings team communication front and center.

At Twobird, we’ve been hard at work on the alpha of Twobird Teams: a project management tool for teams without project managers.

This alpha is rooted in something that we’ve seen over and over again: a team starts with the best of intentions to keep their project management software up to date, but over time, things slip and the tool is no longer is the source of truth for the project. More and more tracking gets done through ad hoc communication between team members—like chats, emails, and video calls. As the project evolves, the software doesn’t keep up and becomes less trustworthy: busy team members can’t be bothered with the tedious work of updating project management tools when they have so many other tasks on their plates.

Traditionally, people see this unfortunate pattern as an example of humans failing our tools—but we think this is the tool failing us. The best tool is the one you already use: communications! We built Twobird Teams with communications (email) front and center. With Twobird Teams, you can have meaningful long-form communications about your projects, and track progress on the tasks that naturally result out of those discussions.

Discussion and communications about your projects happen inside Groups, which make it really easy to post new topics and reply to existing ones. The threads that live in your Groups can optionally be added to the Board, where they get a status and assignee, to let you track things, giving you an overview of the state of the project, and grab new tasks.

We use Teams at Ginger Labs every day, and the biggest benefit has been in the richness of our discussions. By centering communication and project management around your existing inbox, we’ve found that we get more input from more people, and often end up with a better result because of it.

Are you interested in trying out the Twobird Teams alpha? Comment below or email garrett@twobird.com. We’d love for you to take Teams for a test run and let us know what you think.

If you’re looking for a less distracting and more rewarding inbox experience, sign up for Twobird for free — and if you liked this piece, follow us on Twitter @Twobirdapp to hear our latest updates!