
Show HN: Standup Jack – A Slack Bot for Your Standups - matthewmueller
https://standupjack.com/
======
wpietri
Oh god. This shows a complete misunderstanding of what daily stand-ups are
for. This is just a bot for daily status reports.

The point of a daily stand-up meeting is to get everybody physically together,
re-make human connections, quickly surface issues, get people talking, and get
everybody charged up to go tackle the day as a team. Having a bot help you put
the right cover sheet on your TPS report is in no way a daily stand-up
meeting. One way you can tell is that it does not involve people actually
standing together.

If people want to do daily status reports, that is totally fine by me, but
please just call it that. Then when somebody asks me for help and I suggest
they try a daily stand-up meeting, we don't have to spend 15 minutes while
they un-learn the wrong thing.

~~~
sadkingbilly
I was thinking the same thing. Who is really going to read these updates? If I
was forced to do this at a company, I'd probably automate responses with a bot
of my own. I'd call it the schitt-bot.

~~~
wpietri
That's exactly it. The stand-up meeting was created because typical status
meetings were a waste of time. Much was said, but most people were bored out
of their minds.

The solution was to get everybody together to have a quick, real conversation
about the upcoming day's work. And to keep it quick and dynamic, everybody had
to literally stand up. Done right, this is great.

Merely renaming a lame status meeting to a stand-up meeting doesn't fix the
problem. If people find so little value in doing an on-line stand-up that you
need a machine to force them to do it, that's a sign that nobody sees it as
worthwhile.

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mmattax
Disclaimer: I've been working on a similar product
([https://jell.com](https://jell.com)) We don't have a bot (we do support
slash commands).

One thing that sticks out to me (and a lot of the other standup bots) are that
the screenshots/demo often only include the simple case of a user inputting a
single answer to a question.

Does your bot handle multiple answers? Seems like that could be a
differentiator for bots (and the reason why we've stuck with Slash commands).

Good Luck!

~~~
matthewmueller
Thanks! Jell looks great :-)

Yah, so the bot's questions are context aware, so answering "yes" does
different things depending on the question asked.

I'll be going wayyy deeper on that soon and open sourcing some neat tools :-)

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gregshap
Nifty idea. Key question missing for my team: "Is any of your work blocked by
someone else?"

~~~
matthewmueller
Thanks for the feedback!

The last question is actually: "Is there anything blocking you". I originally
cut it out of the picture for simplicity, but I'll add it back in :-)

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deedubaya
The team updates seem odd with everyone's response clobbered together. I'd
much rather see the answers grouped by user rather than question.

~~~
matthewmueller
thanks for the feedback! I'd be curious to know if other people feel this way
too. Maybe it can be an option :-)

~~~
gsharma
Small teams will do good with the current grouping. Larger teams will get
complicated.

Feature idea: DM @Jack "What did @john @mike @gsharma say for their standup
today?"

~~~
matthewmueller
Large organization support will definitely need some work. I think the
solution will be multiple standup channels for different teams inside the
company.

I love your idea. It could also work for aggregation: "What did @john say this
week?" or when there is multiple standup channels, querying for people who
aren't in your team's standup.

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WesleyJohnson
History/Back is broken. If I navigate to /faq and then use my back button, my
url updates but the content doesn't. Most recent chrome stable on OSX.

Cool product. I'm going to see if my team would be interested in something
like this. I like the design and branding as well. Kudos.

~~~
matthewmueller
oops, you're right. thanks for the bug report :-)

thanks for the kind words!

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joslin01
I really like the overall branding / design of this tool. Nice work. Going to
give it a shot.

~~~
matthewmueller
Thanks! Let me know what you think :-)

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sic1
$1 per user, per month? Ouch.

That's a lot to bite off honestly. We have 80+ people in our slack account,
but i'd maybe wanna use this for ~20 of them. Doesn't seem to support that
type of deal though.

~~~
zachlatta
Also, on this note, we're in a similar situation. We have ~250 people in our
Slack, but would only want this for 3-4 of them (the full time staff).

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doseofreality
My guess is that no one would really read these standup summaries.

~~~
matthewmueller
I think that's highly dependent on your team. We've been using it heavily to
help stay connected without nagging each other. It's also especially useful
for remote workers :-)

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mooreds
Reminds of [https://home.idonethis.com/](https://home.idonethis.com/) except
Slackified!

(edit: typos)

~~~
matthewmueller
haha, yep. It's quite similar. I Done This offers way more though. Standup
Jack is just focused on running great standups :-)

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dksidana
Seems very similar to [https://geekbot.io/](https://geekbot.io/)

~~~
matthewmueller
Oh cool, yes it looks like we are trying to solve the same issue :-). One
difference I can spot right away is that Geekbot will post the status update
immediately, while Jack will collect everyone's responses and post them at one
time. It's hard to say which one is more effective. I'm definitely bookmarking
this service, thanks for sharing :-)

~~~
saiko-chriskun
geekbot also allows custom questions, multiple standups, and is free.

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benwerd
How does this compare to Howdy?

~~~
matthewmueller
It looks like Howdy offers quite a bit more than just standups. But if we
compare Standup Jack to their standup product, it looks like someone chooses
when to start standup (the "run check in" command). Standup Jack is slightly
more automated, where you pick a time that works well for you and Jack will
message you each weekday at that time for an update.

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NDizzle
I was hoping the mascot would be a bottle jack with googly eyes.

~~~
matthewmueller
Haha, nice idea :-)

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matt_morgan
Can I ask Jack to talk to only 4 of 6 members of my team? I don't see a way to
do that.

~~~
matthewmueller
not yet! but i'm planning on adding admin options soon :-)

