Start guide

Kitemaker help teams build better products. We're specifically helping integrated product teams collaborate closely to build products and features their users want. If you want to know what being an integrated product team means, Marty Cagan made this detailed article and John Cutler made this infographic.

What Kitemaker is

• A tool that will engage your designers, product managers, and engineers to discuss and collaborate (this is the #1 reason teams ❤️ us).

• A modern take on product development based on best-practices that replaces your issue trackers and project management tools.

• A tool that is fast and straightforward to use, letting you do everything with the keyboard (although the mouse works perfectly too). We take performance very seriously, so if you ever experience hiccups or slow response times, contact us ASAP.

• A community. As a user, you will have direct access to the product team and help us shape the roadmap and priorities. Join us on Slack, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

What Kitemaker isn't

• An issue tracker where you assign work. We replace your issue tracker, but Kitemaker is built on a different concept.

• A tool to manage teams and measure productivity. While we love useful metrics, the primary use-case for Kitemaker is for teams to focus on building the right thing.

• Another bloated product management tool/issue tracker/task manager. If setting up Kitemaker takes you more than 10 minutes, contact us, and we'll get you up in no time.

How it works

Kitemaker's basic building block is the work item. You can think of work items as an initiative, feature, or bug. Internally, we use work items for things we deliver to our users, and keep individual tasks as todos in the description. That way, the board becomes an overview of your team's process.

Each work item consists mainly of a collaborative document and an activity feed. Use the document part to write down what you plan to build, why it is essential, and break it down into todos. The activity feed allows you to discuss the initiative with your team and see activities and discussions happening in Kitemaker and any tool you have set up an integration with.

We also have initiatives, roadmaps, labels, user feedback, and more that you will find useful. And there is a lot more coming that will make your product development a breeze.

Take the time to learn hotkeys. The users who invest a bit of time in teaching hotkeys can work very quickly and efficiently. We strive to ensure that the most commonly used actions have hotkeys that are easily accessible. You can find all of them by pressing ?, and if you see something that is missing, ping us any time.