Running a tech company cannot be easier and managing the tech within that company must be a major challenge. From building the product, maintenance, innovating and then troubleshooting, it can be a challenge to stay ahead of the workload.
With the challenges of managing decentralised dev teams and more, the need to utilise productivity tools has never been more important. To find out how he manages his team, we speak to Mayank Agarwal, Co-Founder and CTO at virtual and hybrid event company Hubilo.
Mayank ensures that the technology strategy for every Hubilo client is customized based on their specific requirements, aligned with their objectives, and is simple to comprehend, operate, and derive the results. Alongside his Co-founder Vaibhav, Mayank has built a platform that is helping to reimagine the interpretation of the technology landscape in the virtual and hybrid events industry.
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Hubilo is the virtual and hybrid event platform built for engagement and event excellence. They have built the industry’s largest suite of engagement and gamification features, and robust branding capabilities. In less than a year, Hubilo has raised a Seed round of $4.5 million, a Series ‘A’ round of $23.5 million, and Series ‘B’ round of $125 million from leading Venture Capital firms like Alkeon Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital, and Lightspeed India Partners, and several strategic angel investors.
Hubilo Events to onboard staff (Paid)
We use the Hubilo events platform to welcome our new hires, explain company policies, introduce them to their teams, and facilitate 1:1s with peers. The platform lets us create a content repository with videos and pdfs for the employees to go through later. With Hubilo’s engagement features, there is never a dull moment in any of our events. We use features like polls, chat, comments to make it easier for the employees to engage and ask questions. We also integrate with tools like Kahoot! and Slido to host interesting contests and polls during the sessions.
All our sales training happens on the Hubilo platform. The platform lets us add multi-day, multi-session training. We also add a bunch of speakers who share product updates and materials with the sales team. We generally don’t take much effort to engage our sales team because they are already GIF champions. They blow up the comments section with GIFs and emojis during these training sessions. Hubilo also lets us create certificates and distribute them to attendees, so we give our sales team certificates once they complete the training.
Make organisation of dev project easier with Jira (Paid)
I use Jira to organize and manage our development projects. Jira helps create our workflows, input critical information required to determine the release cycles, get visibility into existing projects, and identify blockers that get in the way. We follow agile methodology, so Jira’s Kanban view is convenient, and it helps us visualize different workstreams and quickly spot blockers in the workflow. Jira’s highlight is it integrates with our code repository service and helps us track real-time deployment information. We also have the product roadmap inside Jira to prioritize feature development and manage release cycles better.
Jira makes it easier for us to identify bugs and fix them. For instance, we let users flag bugs from different streams like the product, support channel, email, etc., and push the information to Jira. Automating this process has helped us tremendously increase productivity. Also, this makes us keep the process transparent. Be it operability issues or stability problems—the entire team is aware of critical issues so they can deploy bug fixes and deliver faster results.
Host meetings with Hubilo Broadcasting Studio (Paid)
Hubilo Broadcasting Studio (HBS) is our live streaming service. With HBS, hosts and co-hosts can stream truly branded and customized sessions on their own with a simple setup.
We use HBS to host company all-hands meetings and other internal events. With HBS, we can completely customize sessions and make our events look more professional. HBS allows us to add logos, themes, banners, overlays, and background images to our sessions to reinforce our brand and its values to our employees.
We regularly bring in thought leaders from across industries to talk to our employees, and HBS is our go-to platform. The best thing about HBS is it comes with live captioning. That means people can get value from the sessions irrespective of the language they speak. From HR and marketing to sales and customer success, every department in Hubilo hosts career development sessions for team members. For example, the marketing team brings marketing leaders worldwide to give talks to budding marketers. Similarly, the HR team uses Hubilo events and HBS to host their wellness program initiatives.
Manage product downtime with New Relic (Paid)
For an event platform like ours, stability is key! We can’t afford to have frequent downtimes as it will cost us customers and reflect poorly on our reputation. New Relic is a game-changer for us as it helps us monitor our application’s performance across different environments.
With New Relic, we get alerted about application downtime even before users experience it and fix the problems before they know it. New Relic integrates with email and Slack channels, making it easier to get alerts and notifications when something goes off. The tool gives us metrics, events, traces, and logs so we not only fix problems but also identify the root causes. We also use the tool to detect anomalies, trace dependencies, and squash errors before they become show-stopping bugs. With New Relic, we are able to offer our customers a seamless experience with our platform.
Productboard to visualise your product roadmap (Paid)
Productboard is like our vision board. We create and share our product roadmap with all the stakeholders using this tool. Productboard helps us get a sense of where our product is headed and lets us make data-driven prioritization decisions. Prioritization and buy-ins are an integral part of product management. Productboard lets us do both. It allows us to add prioritization scores to feature requests, plan the release cycle weeks ahead, and earn buy-in from all the stakeholders. We also have Jira integration in place so we can see the status of each project from inside Productboard.
In addition to that, we consolidate our user research, customer feedback, and our employees’ suggestions in Productboard. We almost never run out of ideas because Productboard is our central repository of product ideas, findings, and insights. Overall, this tool lets us build our customers’ favorite features and evolve into a customer-driven company.