How about something like this? The screenshot below is taked from a real early-adoptor project running Eidos. You can probably tell how real it is by look at the release burndown chart.

Are you like hundreds of Eidos beta users who have tried Pivotal Tracker, GreenHopper, Rally, VersionOne and many other Agile tools but still cannot find the right one?

On one end there are feature-rich enterprisey tool like Rally, VersionOne and even GreenHopper to a certain degree which many find bloated and more of a tracking tool rather than collaborating tool. On the other end, many love the simplicity and collaborative-nature of Trello but find it too generic without enough Agile context.

“Individuals and interactions over process and tools” was often thrown in my face when my fellow agilests asked me why was I founded a startup to build an Agile tool. I do value the items on left more, I really do, but I also see the significant value of items on the right, especially the tool. That is why.

I know a few Agile gurus who strongly opposed the use of electronic board and advocate that physical board is the only answer and I respect them. If you are a brand-new small co-located agile team, I would strongly suggest you start with physical board too but once you are scaling to more teams or more locations, it is a big challenge to scale with post-it on the wall.

The problem with most Agile tools is not that it is not physical but it is because most Agile tools out there was embedded with inhumane bureaucrat feeling and bloated with too many enterprisey features. A group of Agile evangelist at Proteus Agility feel strongly about this and we have gotten together to build Eidos to be the simple collaboration tool with just-enough Agile context. We live and breath Agile. We use Eidos to build Edios and we want Eidos to be the humane software for human.

If you would like to build something like this yourself but do not have time, come help us build the Agile tool of your dream by joining Eidos as Early Adopters. 

Use Eidos for (at least) 3 iterations with 3 users on a real project now, and we will give you a premium direct support and unlimited free access to the same amount of users and time once Eidos launches around Q2 2013.

 Find out more about Eidos at theeidos.com and if you are interested to be the Early Adoptors, email us at team@theeidos.com!

The worst part is they hardly leave any feedback on why they do not like the service. We emailed them on-line survey. We begged users to give us feedback by asking theme explicitly during the signup process. We tried to set up direct Skype communication with users. We even renamed our UserVoice Feedback button to “What The Heck?”.  None of these approaches resulted in valuable feedback.

With the little data that we had, we assumed that the major issues of Eidos were (1) service reliability and (2) too-small MVP. We also thought that users may find Eidos not intuitive to use but we did not seriously believe it was a big problem. After all, we had really nice clean and minimal user interfaces which led hundreds of the users to sign up.

The service reliability was the obvious one and we had fixed it. The too-small MVP one was much harder to prove. How do we even know which features they want when they do not leave us any feedback? Will they find the product useful once we have a workable burndown chart? It will definitely set us apart from generic board tool like Trello. But then we would run into another problem since users have to keep using the system for a few iterations before the value of burndown chart can be realized. This means having a workable burndown chart may not really change anything!

Craving for tangible feedback, we turned to usability test hoping it would the approach which could effectively extract feedback from user. We though usability was done by giving testers some tasks, letting them try, and then asking them for feedback e.g. users are forced to give feedback. There is even a bunch of online usability test services which allows you to reach out testers virtually anywhere in the world.

Eventually, we ended up with a very simple approach from Rocket Surgery Made Easy book by Steve Krug called D.I.Y. Usability Test. Instead of doing usability test online with fancy tools with a bunch of remote users, we conducted in-person usability test with the real users who were actually working in the same building. The test tasks were guided by a facilitator helping the tester to “think out loud” while the rest of the team was observing the action live via GotoMeeting on projector from the other meeting room enjoying Loacker and Pokka tea. As a return of favor for their feedback, we did give each tester a bar of Classic Magnum! The real value of this test was actually the whole team discussion while observing that each user use the site differently and defintely not the same was way as how the team had thought.

The results are pretty clear; our problem is users are having a hard time going through the flow. Some could not find the way to add iteration. Some was having a hard time adding team members. Some was even just struggling to add a project.  As it turned out, Eidos was not that easy to navigate. There are too many annoying things here and there which cause friction along the funnel. We finally have some real tangible feedback and we cannot wait for the next round of our D.I.Y. in-person usability test! We still strongly believe Eidos can help our customers with their pains and once we smooth out this flow issue, we shall see if we can prove it to them.

During the Private Beta users will be able to add unlimited number of team members, unlimited numbers of releases and iterations within a context of a single project.

Each iteration is equipped with its own real-time updating Storyboard where team can collaborate and visualize their work in the iteration.

Story Card can be added to the Storyboard one by one or use the Iteration Planning page to visualize story prioritization and selection between the release backlog and the iteration backlogs.

Story Card comes with the popular As-a/I-Want/So-That User Story template ,  Story Point estimation and attachment with fine-looking thumbnail.

These fundamental capabilities allow all Barracudas to use current Eidos to craft a real Agile project and provide valuable feedback to help us build Eidos to be their Agile tool of the future.  Lots of other cool things e.g. Release Burndown Chart, Epic & Story Split , Theme and many more will be gradually implemented along with the feedback from our beloved Barracudas.

Let's Roll!

We started the early adopter beta almost 3 months ago with just Storyboard and Story Card. Since then, we have been incrementally released on weekly basis to early adopters and here is the highlight of the features included in this private beta:

• Storyboard
• Story Card
• Attachment
• Comment
• Release Summary
• Iteration Planning
• Project Home
• Real-Time Update in Storyboard
• User Home

Comparing this Minimal Viable Product (MVP) list to the original one that we had many months ago,  this is much leaner as it does not have those fancy release burndown chart, epic & story split, or any of the third-party integration. This may not be rich enough to effectively compete with other big boys in the market but it is definitely good-enough to use in real project and to collect real feedback.

The next big feature is to allow anyone to self-register and use beta so we can kick off the public beta to much wider audience. Then once we have competitive features like release burndown and epic/story-split, we will be ready for public launch.

Yes, I do still think this is the best way to visualize a large product backlog. Treemaps have stood the test of time for things like visualizing the stock market so I don’t expect them to be replaced as a good technique for us any time soon [Mike Cohn, May 11, 2012].

A few prospect customers have asked us about our pricing plan so I think it is good to blog about what we are thinking now. Our freemium offer is simple. It is totally free access to all features for up to 3 users. After that it is USD 25 per user per month. This pricing will put Eidos a bit above few SME vendors but it is still quite much lower than Enterprise vendors as shown below. Pricing war is not our approach any way.

The diagram below shows price comparison of major Agile tools inlcluding Rally, Version One, Target Process, Lean Kit Kanban, OnTime, GreenHopper, Yodiz, ScrumDo, Pivotal Tracker and Eidos.

Many major Agile tool vendors offer free plan for limited numbers of users and limited features. You have to go on the paid plan to use all the fancy features that you might never have tried. Eidos takes the different approach by offering full features to the first 3 users. So if you start with a very small team, you can enjoy all benefit of free Eidos for your real projects.

Startup with a team of 7 members will have average monthly subscription cost per user at only around USD 15. For SME with a team of 8 – 20, it will be less than USD 20 while for enterprise with more than 20 users, it will be around 25 USD. At the first glance, this may look a bit strange from consumer point of view which might expect to pay less when they buy more. However, the collaboration tool will actually benefit the user more, when there are more users. It will also cost the operator more as well since the resource usages (storage, servers, support & maintenance) can grow exponentially when the user base grows. Nevertheless, the price will eventually stay around USD 25.

The consumer benefit of buying in bulk would come in the large purchase (more than 50) but we do not include it here since it is not our initial focus. Though we have a plan to charge extra for 3^rd party SaaS integration, some basic SaaS integrations will be offered without charge.

“Small team starts small and once you grow, we grow with you.” That is basically our pricing model.

Currently, we are iterating with the Early Adopter Beta which we can let you know about it in the next update and we aim to get the Private Beta out by the end of September.


If you have further feedback, feel free to reply this email or leave us a message in our FB Page (https://www.facebook.com/proteus.agility).


Regards,


Kulawat Wongaroj

CEO & Agile Coach

Proteus Agility

Just the information from the registration alone has given us some good knowledge which we like to share. Let’s look at some of the data here.

Majority of the registrants are from friends and community. We also recently learn is that LinkedIn Group can be a good place to reach out to our potential customers as there are tons of active and open Agile communities there. We will definitely pay more attention to LinkedIn Groups in the upcoming private beta.

When we look at the agile tools currently used by the beta registrants, it is no surprised that Jira, Excel, Google Spreadsheet, Trello, GreenHopper and Pivotal Tracker are quite popular. This may either mean they are really useful or they are some shortcomings which drive users to seek out other tool like Eidos. We hope it is the latter and to confirm this we had recently started to ask these questions recently and we began to learn more and more about. It is good to learn that many of the weakness we have learned e.g. sluggish UX, no epic/story implementation, no what-if planning scenarios, or no real-time burndown chart updating are features we have already planned to put in our roadmap.

Almost half of the registrants just start implementing Agile but the other half has more 5 years of experience! Seem like we have a good mix here. Percentage of co-located team vs distributed team is also about the same. Majority of the registrants are working in a small team though we still have good portion of users who are working in medium and large team.

Currently, we are iterating with the Early Adopter Beta and we aim to get the Private Beta out by the end of September. If you have not signed up for Eidos Private Beta yet, fill up the sign up form at http://www.proteus-agility.com/ now!