Filip Mishevski

Circles

Back

Work smarter.

Years
2020–21
Client
Personal project
The Circles landing page: Work smarter. Define and track MVPs, sprints and releases in a visual, simple and fun way.
Work smarter.
The empty state, a single blank circle headed Blank slate, with an empty backlog beneath it.
A blank slate, and nothing to migrate.
A release circle holding five stories, each with a point value.
A release is one circle. Stories go in.
A second, empty release circle beside the first, inviting a story to be dragged into it.
The next release, waiting to be filled.
Two releases, MVP 1.0 and MVP 1.1, side by side on a horizontal timeline.
Releases sit on a line, in the order they ship.
The backlog expanded over the circles, showing thirty-three stories as chips.
The backlog stays underneath, not in the way.
A story opened: points, owner, description, comments, subtasks with a progress bar, its epic and related stories.
A story, with everything attached to it.
A release circle showing a 90% completion badge.
The circle fills as the work gets done.
The same circle fully green, reading All done, with a Release button.
Full circle. Ship it.
The search overlay, listing completed stories, stories in progress or backlog, and matching subtasks.
One search across everything.
Plan mode: four months across the top, feature rows down the side, and every release circle placed on the grid between them.
Every sprint, every feature, one screen.
The same plan with two circles checked off in green, showing completed work in place on the timeline.
Progress, in place, without a second report.

A planning tool for small teams, built on circles instead of lists. A release is one circle you can take in at a glance: stories go in, the circle fills as they are finished, and when it is full the work ships. Designed and prototyped with friends across the lockdowns, and never taken to market.

The pitch

We ALL love working on projects that inspire us and give us energy. We put in a lot of time and energy and we want to get multiples in return. Unfortunately, most of the projects we work on don’t fit this description.

I notice a difference in my wellbeing when I work on one project vs. another. One keeps me awake at night with anxiety, another keeps me in flow state and I feel invincible.

Reminder: we all got into this to build cool technology. Money came as a bonus. The thing that attracted us was this flow state of working with and manipulating technology. Converting an idea into a product that solves a problem (your problem, somebody else’s) or it’s just something fun to do and see what happens. If nothing happens — at least you had fun right? That’s a feeling I am chasing all the time.

But I, (we) got lost along the way. Things got more complicated. Smooth lines of code became spaghetti. Other people came into the picture. Colleagues that inspired and lifted us to a new level, stakeholders that pushed for more and more and drained us and took us away from our purpose.

We evolved. We go from waterfall to agile. From scrum to kanban. From kanban to something new. The agile manifesto changed everything. But we need to evolve it and put it into practice constantly.

Let’s take a closer look. Waterfail, Fragile. Doesn’t matter. It’s all good, it’s all bad. So it’s not the methodologies…

It’s not the tools either. There are thousands out there. But they don’t help. They are just archiving your “to do lists of shame”. All the features you can imagine can be found. But all those features won’t help you actually do the work. Sprint goals are not met. Everybody is in meetings all the time.

The problem is a human one. We need an update, not our tools. We need:

  • mindset
  • energy
  • focus
  • simplicity
  • guidance
  • flexibility

What we set out to do is to fix some of these problems with a tool that’s simple, fun and efficient. We know what you think. The solution is another tool??? Developers! To that we say yes. The solution is another tool. Hopefully a better tool, a right tool for the job at hand.

This is (was) circles.

More work