Turning Brainstorming Into Action: A Practical Guide in 9 Steps
We’ve all been there. You conduct a lively group brainstorming session during which your team members contribute a bunch of interesting, creative solutions or ideas…but nothing actually comes of it. Instead, the results merely stagnate on a photo you took of the...
Using Mentions to Collaborate Better in Cardsmith
Introducing the Cardsmith Changeblog Hi, Sarah Joy from the Cardsmith development team here. You might recognize my name from the in-app messages you receive when we deploy new features and bug fixes. While those messages are useful to give you quick overviews of...
Why We (Still) Love Sticky Notes
Can we all take a second and appreciate that our current reality looks a lot like the future we predicted ever so long ago? A moment in time with actual hoverboards, self-aware robots, and a new (good) Star Wars movie? Yep, the future is now. So why, on a daily basis,...
TenX Accelerator Program – Milestones for Startups
A couple of weeks ago, I discussed using the concept of project milestones in unpredictable creative project like starting a business. This post is a quick follow-up and shout-out to our mentors at TenX in Portland, who have cleverly built a whole program that helps...
How Project Management is Like a Grocery List
Do you use a list when you shop for groceries? If so, you are already a project manager. There’s a reason countless productivity, task, and to-do applications highlight grocery lists among their use cases. As simplistic as it may seem, shopping for food has all the...
Walk Into 2016 Like You Own the Place
“Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365 page book. Write a good one.” –Brad Paisley I love New Year’s. What I don’t love, however, are the loud, crowded bars, clubs, and restaurants where I’m getting gouged on food and drinks. Nor do I love the fact that, if I’m...
Agile Project Milestones for Creative Endeavors (Part 2)
In the first part of this series, I explored using agile project milestones for creative endeavors. In this case, we're using that term to broadly describe projects that need to be planned and tracked, but perhaps aren’t as concrete or knowable as projects that we’ve...
Agile Project Milestones for Creative Endeavors (Part 1)
At Cardsmith, we spend a lot of time thinking about project management. I’m not just referring to making project management faster, more responsive, and more rewarding. We also reflect on what it means to “manage” a project and, beyond that, how we define and...
5 Holiday Planning Ideas
Cardsmith is great for visual collaboration at work, but it can also be a fun and useful tool for staying sane during the Holidays. Here are 5 Holiday board ideas from our team and customers: 1. Remember all you have to be grateful for. Terra Soma sent in this idea...
Create a Visual Project Board Everyone Will Use
Have you ever worked hard to design the ideal work process and then been disappointed when your team just doesn’t see things the way that you do? Perhaps they pretend to follow along when you describe how the process should work, but then you realize a few weeks later...
A Whiteboard And Sticky Notes Could Save Your Job
The other day, I had lunch with a friend of mine, Kevin. Kevin had some bad news and some not-so-bad news to share. His tale demonstrates the value of visual tools -- and yet another example of how sticky notes make people productivity rockstars. The bad news was that...
There’s No Manual for a Startup
How are people using Cardsmith? We sat down with one particular user this week to find out her story. Ann Sanderson is a planning machine. As a small business owner and political activist, she needs to be able to keep all her projects organized and track their...
One simple tool for a more collaborative team meeting
I’m a fan of a weekly meeting when working with a small team on a creative project that goes for many weeks or months. In a well-functioning team, a well-executed collaborative meeting of no more than one hour sets a kind of cadence that energizes and aligns the...
How to Build a Pizza Oven – Making Project Management Work At Home
When my husband and I got married two years ago, we registered for a wood-burning pizza oven. What that really meant was money to purchase bricks and whatever supplies we needed in order to construct an oven. My husband did piles of research and decided that he wanted...
What We Learned From TechFestNW
Our team attended TechFestNW2015 and was inspired by the amazing speakers this year. Sarah Joy, developer for Cardsmith, shares her perspective of the event. Memories of morning locker routines and Taco Salad Tuesdays filled my mind when I walked up the stairs of...