Work items
Work items make Kitemaker unique and will improve how your team collaborates together. The right way to think of a work item is to represent a deliverable to your customers. That can be an experiment, a customer problem, a feature, a bug fix, or something else. It all depends on how you think about your deliverables.
The work item will then be a collaborative space for the team members to understand the context, figure out what to build, and work together to get things shipped.
Most other tools are centered around the idea of a task or issue, which is the work of a single individual. For many years, it has been known that the most impactful way of building a product is to collaborate on shipping quality work, and such tools incentivize a less optimal way of building products.
If you want to learn more about this, you can read Marty Cagan’s book “Empowered”
The work item has three main parts; the description, the activity feed, and the metadata.
The description is a document to share why this work item is essential (we encourage you to share the background and maybe links to customer feedback and user research). The rich description functionality lets you share what you plan to build, like the spec, and share resources like Figma designs, images, and other files and assets.
The description is also the place to break the work item into smaller tasks using todos. Be sure to @-mention people on the tasks. The number of tasks and the number of completed tasks will be visible on the board.
The activity feed is a chronological list of activities and discussions related to the work item. It are a great place to have product discussions - what you plan to deliver, questions about how things are supposed to work, and updates on progress.
If you enable our integrations, you will also see activities from other tools in Kitemaker. They offer a great way to help everyone working on the delivery keep track of relevant discussions and activities across design, engineering, and chat tools.
The most common feedback we get from teams that switch from a tool to Kitemaker is that the work items increase team engagement. Team members use Kitemaker for collaboration, leading to almost all team member use Kitemaker every day, resulting in that Kitemaker being up-to-date and reflecting the work's actual state.
In addition, there are several ways to organize and manage your workflow using metadata. There are labels, roadmaps, statuses, impact, effort, and more.
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